A Compromise No One Loved

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Electoral College exists because the delegates who wrote the United States Constitution in 1787 could not agree on any more direct way to choose a president. A popular national vote was proposed and rejected, partly because delegates from smaller and slaveholding states worried it would let more populous states dominate every election, and partly because many delegates simply distrusted the judgment of a mass electorate operating without modern communication across a large, disconnected country. Direct election by Congress was proposed and rejected too, on the opposite worry that it would make the presidency dependent on legislative favor rather than a genuinely separate branch of government. What emerged was a compromise that satisfied no faction completely: each state would appoint a number of electors equal to its total representation in Congress, senators plus representatives, who would then cast the actual votes for president in their state capitals. The arrangement folded in the same three fifths compromise used for congressional apportionment, which meant that enslaved populations, who could not vote, still increased the elector counts, and therefore the political power, of the states that held them. Since ratification the system has been amended once in a fundamental way, the Twelfth Amendment of 1804, which separated the ballot for president from the ballot for vice president after the flawed 1800 election exposed a design flaw in the original process. Today's total of 538 electors, requiring 270 to win, is arrived at the same basic way the framers set out, a mechanism built as a hurried compromise between rival visions of democracy that neither side of the debate had fully won.