I always just assumed that the United States has an electoral college (rather than direct election of a president) because the founders were nervous about direct democracy.
That is, they believed in representation of the people, but stopped a little shy of a simple show of hands for anything as important as putting Bush in office.
According to Amar Reed (who has appeared before in these pages), I’m in good company. Lots of people think the same thing. But also according to Reed, we’re wrong.
To refresh the memory (and build the argument a bit):
1. Each state sends a certain number of “electors” to Washington. Each elector then usually (but not necessarily) votes for the candidate who received the most votes in the elector’s state. It’s these votes that count, not the ones that citizens cast in ballot-boxes around the country.
2. Each state gets the same number of electors as it has representatives in Congress. And the number of reps in Congress is two senators, plus a certain number of House reps, based on population.
So the smallest state would have three reps in Congress (two senators, plus one House rep), and therefore three electors for the president.
That’s how it works, in a nutshell.
So why did the big brains of 1789 choose to do it that way? Why not just count every citizen’s vote and pick the winner from the majority?
Reed says that the biggest reason was:
SLAVERY.
Ok, so remember that House reps (and therefore electoral votes) are based on population. And the framers of the Constitution had already decided that slaves would count as part of the population. Remember the 3/5 compromise?
Each five slaves would count as three people. So if you have a state with one million free people and five million slaves, you actually get to claim a population of four million people (even though in every other way, those slaves are considered property, not people).
It was a disgusting and hypocritical compromise that gave the slaveholding states vastly more power than they would have had based on a fair reckoning.
Without being able to vote (or expect free men to vote in their interest), slaves, by their mere presence, gave their oppressors more power in the federal government.
Among other things, this fact was an incentive to keep getting more slaves! The more slaves, the more legislative representation each white person had.
[Some people claim that the three-fifths compromise was necessary for ratifying the Constitution. The slaveholding states would have walked out without it. Maybe that’s true, but it’s another issue that Reed suggests isn’t as clear as we may have been taught.]
Now we come to the election of the president. To agree to a purely democratic election, the slaveholding states would only get one vote per person voting. They didn’t like that at all.
But if they tied the elections to the number of representatives, then the three-fifths compromise could work its magic. Not only would they get to keep the extra boost in the legislative branch, they could also get more voting power for the executive (which appoints the judicial).
Hence the electoral college was born. Not out of fear of pure democracy, but out of fear of the disunion of the states. It was the three-fifths compromise, part two.
And like other historical examples of craven appeasement, it didn’t work for long. Seventy years later, it was all torn to shreds anyway.
Cool! I don’t know whether this is true, but it certainly *rings* true. We were taught so many untrue things, a few more are little surprise. OTOH, the founders *were* leery of democracy, and took steps to limit its dangerous influence, so the traditional explanation also rings true.
Show me how the founders were leery of democracy as a dangerous influence, please.
Some quotes from founding fathers:
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
Thomas Jefferson
“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.”
James Madison (I’d remembered that as also being T.J., but appear to have been mistaken)
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”
Benjamin Franklin (I thought *that* bit came from a discussion between T.J. & J.M., so I’m clearly not remembering attributions well)
Not notice how they set up the upper house of parliament…erm…I mean the Senate. As with the Presidency, the common citizen had no direct vote for their Senators. The Judicial branch, meanwhile, is even more protected from the whims of the people. Also notice how the common people had no voice at all—citizenship was restricted to the fortunate few. The very fact that the government was designed to be run by representatives, only removed through time or great effort, and not through direct vote, shows their fear of the excesses of Democracy. The men who set up this nation showed a fear of democracy’s darker side, with an attraction to its benefits. You can also find many quotes from them complimentary (complementary?) of democracy. They designed a government of Law, with well defined means for adapting that Law.
How’s that?
I think we’re going to disagree on the nature of one of the quotes (Madison), and legitimacy of the other two.
First, The Jefferson quote. It seems to be bogus. I have a large book of Jefferson’s writings, and although it’s difficult to prove a negative, he says that majority rule “is the only sure guardian of the rights of man.” He also says that any errors of MR are “honest, solitary, and short-lived.” But then, Jefferson wasn’t even there in Philadelphia, so maybe it’s all moot.
The Franklin quote also seems to be bogus. Among other things, the word lunch didn’t appear in writing until the 1820’s, according to the OED. There are other sources saying that the quote isn’t in any of his writings.
The Madison quote is legit. Sort of. It comes from the Federalist number 10, but there’s a problem with the word “Democracy,” which you’ve capitalized and put at the beginning of the sentence.
In the actual document, it’s “Hence it is that such democracies….” SUCH Democracies. That is, a democracy in a small society, in which all the people get together to vote. He warns against faction, and the confusion of a multitude, as well as the impracticality of that kind of democracy over a large region.
And he also says that a representative government would be more likely to have wise men in office (who can then be voted out). So that’s there, and he obviously thinks that the best men picked by the people would be less likely to be ruled by passion. But it’s not quite the way that your quote would have it.
Anyway, of course, they knew that there should be laws and restrictions in place to avoid a tyranny of the majority. But those laws and restrictions were to be approved by the most democratic ratification process that the world had ever seen. The Constitution was ratified by people who had never been able to vote on anything before.
Those people ratifying it had to ALLOW restrictions on pure Democracy, or they could have said no. And they can still say no.
As with the presidency, I don’t think that the Senate structure was because they were leery of democracy as such.
I think it was more that was also because of the size of the place, and that communication was limited across great distances. It wasn’t about not trusting The People. It was about infrastructure and practicality.
You also mentioned that only a privileged few could vote. But any person that a state allowed to vote for the lower house of that state (not the upper, which had tighter requirements) could vote federally.
The minute the states allowed everyone to vote locally, then immediately everyone could vote federally. The founders were leery of telling states what to do.
In my opinion, taking that as a sign that they were against Democracy is a badly mistaken view.
The fact that they chose representatives, rather than a hand-vote for every issue again shows a reasonable understanding of the facts on the ground. Government would come to a stand-still if everyone had to be polled for everything. That’s probably even true today, when most people could vote online. Imagine, in the 1700s, if they had to ride around getting everyone’s vote on everything.
They were already defying conventional wisdom, which said that no democracy of any form could operate on such a large scale. (I think it was Locke who claimed that, though I won’t look it up.)
Most of what I’m saying comes from my interpretation of the debates on the Constitution (my two volumes from the Library of America), Reed’s book “America’s Constitution,” and an incredible resource from the Library of Congress called A Century of Lawmaking.