The matter of how the U.S. President is to be selected
was a tough nut for the delegates in the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to
crack. Mason observed the following in convention, “In every Stage of the
Question relative to the Executive, the difficulty of the subject and the
diversity of the opinions concerning it have appeared.”[1]
The alternative proposals centered around the Congress, State legislatures, the
governors, the people, and electors designated for the specific purpose as the
possible determiners. Although the delegates were men of considerable
experience, their best judgments about how the alternatives would play out were
subject to error as well as the confines of their times. In re-assessing the Electoral
College, we could do worse than adjust those judgments and rid them of
circumstances pertaining to them that no longer apply. For example, the
Southern States no longer have slaves, so the question of whether those States
would be disadvantaged by going with a popular vote no longer applies; the
alternative of going with the popular vote nationwide no longer suffers from
that once-intractable pickle. Yet lest we rush headlong into a popular vote
without respect to the States, we are well advised not to dismiss the points
made by the convention delegates, for we too are constrained by our times, and
we may thus not be fully able to take into account points that have been
forgotten.
The full essay is at "The Electoral College."
1. James Madison, Notes of Debates in the
Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1966): 370.
