Why does the United States have an Electoral College?

The Electoral College exists because the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention could not agree on a better method. The National Archives describes it as a process, not a place, established in the Constitution in part as a compromise between election of the President by Congress and election by a popular vote of qualified citizens. A Stanford history lecture goes further and argues that it was chosen mostly by default, as the least undesirable option rather than one anyone thought especially good. [1] [2]

Selection by Congress was the initial proposal, and the delegates kept returning to it. According to the Constitution Annotated, the Convention adopted it on four occasions. But it drew serious objections. Gouverneur Morris said the president would be a mere creature of the legislature, and James Madison said it would strip the president of his free agency. Morris also warned that election by the legislature would be the work of intrigue, cabal and faction. [2] [3]

The Convention twice defeated proposals for direct election by the people. The Stanford lecture lists several concerns. Voters might know only their local politicians and so vote for them, and some delegates doubted that ordinary voters would be well informed. There was also slavery. Madison favored a national popular vote but saw a serious difficulty: a vote of eligible voters would reduce the power of large slaveholding states. Virginia was the largest state, but about 40 percent of its population was enslaved and would not vote. [2] [3] [4]

After months of deadlock, the issue went to a subcommittee in the last weeks of the Convention. Each state received a number of electors equal to its representation in Congress, reusing a formula that had already been bitterly debated. The electors would meet once and in their own states, which made coordination and corruption harder. Electors also gave an indirect role to the people while placing a filter between voters and the choice. States would control how electors were chosen, while the House of Representatives would decide if no candidate won a majority. In the Stanford account, nationalists, states' rights supporters, and both supporters and opponents of a popular vote could each find something to like. The lecture adds that the system was complicated and untried, so nobody knew how it would work, which made it easier to accept. [2] [3]

The Stanford lecture says two popular explanations are not true: that the framers wanted to defend states' rights, and that they feared large population centers would overwhelm rural areas. It also calls the claim that the framers thought the Electoral College superior to a national popular vote highly misleading. The framers also assumed that a republican government could not survive formal political parties, and they chose the system partly in the belief that it would prevent parties from forming. Parties emerged anyway. [2]