In a very real sense, the Electoral College doesn't exist. The term is not used in the Constitution, and did not enter the American vocabulary until around 1810. Many Americans imagine a room full of the nation's presidential electors, each casting his or her ballot for president. The more politically savvy know that while each state's electors meet and cast their ballots within their state, there is no meeting of the nation's electors. To the modern ear the word "college" seems like an odd one to use, but an archaic definition of the word is, an association of persons who have specified powers and duties. Thus the college of cardinals chooses the Pope, and the electoral college chooses the American president and vice-president.
The Constitution originally directed that the second-place finisher in the Electoral College balloting should be declared the vice-president. In the first presidential election some electors cast their second vote for John Adams, while others voted for Clinton, Jefferson, or Burr. Since Adams came in second in the electoral vote, he became our first vice-president.
If we ignore the "second votes" cast for Adams, Clinton, Jefferson, and Burr, we can focus on who the electors intended to choose as the first president. While conventional wisdom says Washington was unopposed for his first term, actually the second-place finisher (when we ignore the vice-presidential picks) was "Abstain."
Three of the thirteen states didn't participate in this first presidential election at all. North Carolina wasn't entitled to participate, since it had not yet ratified the Constitution. Rhode Island could not participate, for the same reason. New York failed to choose electors because the two houses of the state legislature could not agree on the method of selection that should be used. The N.Y. House of Representatives wanted a joint session to choose the electors, but the state Senate saw its votes and its influence would be diluted in a joint session. Because of the impasse, New York chose no electors at all.
As if this record were not inauspicious enough, certain electors from several other states also failed to vote. Two Virginia electors did not vote, and two Maryland electors likewise failed to cast ballots. Thus of the 91 electoral votes envisioned by the Constitution as the maximum any candidate could receive in this first election, 22 were not cast.
The Constitution leaves it up to each state to decide how that state's presidential electors shall be chosen. So, throughout the nation's history a number of methods were used. In many states, of course, the people voted directly for the electors. In other states the legislature chose the electors. The people of South Carolina didn't get a chance to vote in a presidential election until 1860—and one month later the state left the union. Some states declared that two electors would be state at-large, but each of the others would be elected by congressional district. Thus in the 1828 election Maryland gave six electoral votes to John Quincy Adams and five to Andrew Jackson.
In perhaps the oddest system, Tennessee in its early days as a state had the legislature choose three persons in each county to meet and choose the presidential electors. Today electors are chosen by the people of each state, in a winner take all system...except in Maine. Maine in the late 1960s adopted its present system of having two electors state at-large, and each of the two congressional districts choosing one elector. Many observers believed Ross Perot might win one of Maine's electoral votes in the 1992 election, but while Perot ran ahead of Bush in the state, he did not carry either congressional district.
In addition to the major party nominees, other Americans have won electoral votes for president, including James B. Weaver, Robert LaFollette, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace. But what about Thomas Hendricks (who won 44 electoral votes for president) and B. Gratz Brown (who won 18)? These men won their electoral votes in 1872, after the death of Horace Greeley between election day and the meetings of the electors. (Greeley was the Liberal Republican and Democratic nominee.) Three electors loyally tried to vote for the dead man. Congress refused to count votes for Greeley, however.
Many political collectors know that on three occasions in our nation's history, the loser in the popular vote won the presidency in the electoral college. What we may not always recognize, however, is that the three cases were entirely different from each other:
[And since this article was written, a fourth case, in 2000. The 2000 election involved the popular vote loser being inaugurated president; the electoral vote result was debated and litigated.]
For many years in many states, voters had full choice among the various elector candidates. Thus if a state had twelve electoral votes, an individual voter might choose to vote for six Democratic electors, five Republicans, and one Prohibition nominee. Some voters did "scratch" the name of one of his party's unpalatable nominees, either casting one blank vote or else substituting some other elector nominee. Sometimes voters made mistakes, and accidentally voted for one of the opposition's electors. Sometimes one particular elector was so popular, or so unpopular, that he ran ahead or behind his ticket.
Occasionally the scratchings and substitutions were enough to allow one stray elector to win in a given state. For example, the Democrats carried California in 1892—except that one Republican elector won too. In North Dakota that same year, two electors from the Democratic-Populist fusion slate won, and also one Republican. Thus for the only time in U.S. history a state divided its electoral vote evenly among three candidates, as one electoral vote went to Weaver, one to Cleveland, and one to Harrison. The last time a "stray elector" won was in 1916, when in West Virginia voters chose seven Republican electors and one Democrat.
One well-known phenomenon in U.S. history is that of the "faithless elector." Since presidential electors are in effect free agents, they have not always voted for the candidates they were pledged to vote for. What is not so well known is that the country saw no example of a faithless elector between 1820 and 1956.
In the very early days of the nation there were a number of allegedly faithless electors, but they may not have been so faithless after all. The Founding Fathers intended that electors should meet and discuss the candidates, and vote for the candidate they personally admired the most. Thus with the weakness of the early party systems, it is hard to claim that some of the early "faithless electors" really acted in a reprehensible way.
During the Civil Rights movement, faithless electors gave one vote each to Judge Walter B. Jones of Alabama (1956), Senator Harry F. Byrd (1960), and George Wallace (1968).
More recently, the Libertarian presidential candidate won the vote of a faithless Nixon elector in 1972, while four years later a Ford elector from Washington state cast his vote for Ronald Reagan (whom Ford had defeated for the Republican nomination at the national convention). In 1988 a Democratic elector from West Virginia found it more palatable to vote for Lloyd Bentsen for president than the actual head of the ticket Michael Dukakis.
The first proposals in Congress for modifying or eliminating the Electoral College came in 1797. More recently, Presidents Nixon and Carter both gave their vocal support to modification of the system. Yet although such proposals have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, they failed to reach the required 2/3rds vote in the Senate. Who opposed the plan? Some have suggested the chief opposition came from black voters, Jewish voters, and other ethnic blocs. Because so many ethnic voters live in the very largest electoral states, presidential candidates may give them disproportionate attention under the current system.
Clearly, both the largest and smallest states would lose something if the electoral college system were abolished. The smallest states (in population) have disproportional strength in the Electoral College because they get their minimum three votes, no matter how small the population. Thus the smallest ratio of voters to electors is found in states like Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming. The large states would lose some of the luster of being "crucial" to a candidate's campaign. Few can deny that California, New York, and Texas receive enormous attention from the candidates now; this attention might diminish if the key was to win as many voters as possible no matter where they lived.
In the 1836 election, Martin Van Buren had no trouble winning the presidency in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. But Southern electors were outraged at Little Van's vice-presidential nominee. So while Van Buren received 170 electoral votes, his vice-presidential candidate won only 147, one vote short of a majority. The vice-president would therefore have to be chosen by the U.S. Senate.
Vice-presidential nominee Richard M. Johnson was a close personal friend of Andrew Jackson. To the horror of many Southerners, however, Johnson had a mulatto common-law wife, and had raised two daughters with her. Johnson even had the audacity to expect Washington society to receive his wife and daughters socially. Without the support of Southern electors the choice fell to the U.S. Senate, and here 16 U.S. Senators cast votes against Johnson. He was, however, elected by a vote of 33 to 16, and served one term in the nation's most thankless office. Van Buren dumped Johnson four years later.
For two centuries the nation has endured the Electoral College, a system that few people loudly support, but that has proved remarkably durable. Foreigners are often horrified that America does not let the people choose the president--not directly, anyway. As a teacher I find even American students unsure about what the "Electrical College" is, or occasionally even unaware of its existence. Will it continue to be our system for electing the president? Probably, unless another election like the one in 1888 makes the populace angry and ready for change.
[Note inserted after the 2000 election: We did just have an election even more controversial than the one in 1888, but the people do not seem sufficiently "angry and ready for change" to secure passage of a Constitutional amendment.]
| © 1997 by Stephen Cresswell |