Here is a site (and written by /by William C. Kimberling, Deputy
Director FEC National Clearinghouse on Election Administration)
/providing background about the electoral college:
http://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/INFORMATION/electcollege_history.php
specifically,
*One idea was to have the Congress choose the president. This idea was
rejected, however, because some felt that making such a choice would be
too divisive an issue and leave too many hard feelings in the Congress.
Others felt that such a procedure would invite unseemly political
bargaining, corruption, and perhaps even interference from foreign
powers. Still others felt that such an arrangement would upset the
balance of power between the legislative and executive branches of the
federal government. **
****
**A second idea was to have the State legislatures select the president.
This idea, too, was rejected out of fears that a president so beholden
to the State legislatures might permit them to erode federal authority
and thus undermine the whole idea of a federation. **
****
**A third idea was to have the president elected by a direct popular
vote. Direct election was rejected not because the Framers of the
Constitution doubted public intelligence but rather because they feared
that without sufficient information about candidates from outside their
State, people would naturally vote for a "favorite son" from their own
State or region. At worst, no president would emerge with a popular
majority sufficient to govern the whole country. At best, the choice of
president would always be decided by the largest, most populous States
with little regard for the smaller ones. **
****
**Finally, a so-called "Committee of Eleven" in the Constitutional
Convention proposed an indirect election of the president through a
College of Electors. **
****
**The function of the College of Electors in choosing the president can
be likened to that in the Roman Catholic Church of the College of
Cardinals selecting the Pope. The original idea was for the most
knowledgeable and informed individuals from each State to select the
president based solely on merit and without regard to State of origin or
political party. **
****
**The structure of the Electoral College can be traced to the Centurial
Assembly system of the Roman Republic. Under that system, the adult male
citizens of Rome were divided, according to their wealth, into groups of
100 (called Centuries). Each group of 100 was entitled to cast only one
vote either in favor or against proposals submitted to them by the Roman
Senate. In the Electoral College system, the States serve as the
Centurial groups (though they are not, of course, based on wealth), and
the number of votes per State is determined by the size of each State's
Congressional delegation. Still, the two systems are similar in design
and share many of the same advantages and disadvantages. **
****
**The similarities between the Electoral College and classical
institutions are not accidental. Many of the Founding Fathers were well
schooled in ancient history and its lessons. **
*Here is a U.S. government provided PDF file on the electoral college:
https://www.eac.gov/assets/1/Documents/The%20Electoral%20College%20(Jan.%202011).pdf
Note especially the conclusion:
*The Electoral College has worked well for 56 elections with the
exception of a few historical *
*anomalies. Even in close elections, it gives one candidate a majority
of electoral votes with *
*which to claim a mandate to govern. While it is not a direct election
of the president, the public *
*has significant influence in the outcome and much more than in
parliamentary systems in which *
* the executive is chosen by the ruling political party.*
*ty. *
*Aside from modest statutory changes, the Electoral College has not been
structurally changed *
*by Constitutional amendment since 1804. There have been attempts to
change or abolish the *
*Electoral College through the years. Still, while the Electoral College
may be a system that *
* some people today and the founding fathers at the Constitutional
Convention regarded as**
** imperfect, it remains likely the way Americans will continue to
elect their president. *
Note also this Washington Post (a liberal publication as far as I know)
in a November 9th article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/09/getting-rid-of-the-electoral-college-dream-on-democrats/
specifically,
*But the electoral vote may be a landslide in the other direction. If
Trump wins every state left -- Alaska, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan and
New Hampshire -- he could even win by more than 100 electoral votes,
320-218. Take Minnesota away, and it's still 310-228 -- a very big margin.*
**
*So you can bet that there are a whole bunch of Democrats right now that
would like to put an end to this whole electoral college thing.*
**
*The bad news: They have virtually no power to make that happen -- and
even if they did have any power, it'd be immensely difficult.*
**
*The electoral college, after all, is enshrined in our Constitution,
which means getting rid of it requires a constitutional amendment.
That's a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate and the
ratification of three-fourths (38) of the 50 states.*
**
*Democrats not only lost the presidency on Tuesday; they failed to win a
majority in the Senate and didn't gain as much ground in the House as
they had hoped. The idea that this would even be brought up in a
GOP-controlled Congress -- much less approved with a two-thirds majority
in both chambers -- just isn't in the cards. And even if it passed that
congressional threshold, 38 states aren't going to ratify it. Red states
won't like the idea because it's been a perceived boon to Republicans,
and swing states won't like it because it means they lose their prized
status in the presidential campaign.*
**
*Such efforts have also been tried -- unsuccessfully, of course
-- several times before.*
**
*Back in 1934, **a vote to abolish the electoral college failed in the
Senate by just two votes
<https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwip77CgrZvQAhVC6yYKHcYfBZkQFgghMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usnews.com%2Fopinion%2Farticles%2F2013%2F02%2F06%2Fabolish-the-electoral-college&usg=AFQjCNE26tHGB-Z6mDO_WoBaPEiTO_l_KA&sig2=lARhtQ4bPwn1gT31zDtuvg&bvm=bv.138169073,d.eWE>**.
At the time, then-Sen. Alben Barkley (D-Ky.), who would later become
vice president, labeled the system "useless." "The American people are
qualified to elect their president by a direct vote, and I hope to see
the day when they will," **he said
<http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1940071000>**.*
**
*By 1966, Sen. Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) led hearings on the prospect of
repealing the electoral college. He was a passionate advocate for the
change for years. In 1979, the Senate debated a direct-election
alternative, but **it failed 51-48
<http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1226&context=jleg>** --
shy of the two-thirds it needed.*
**
*More recent efforts have focused on workarounds, rather than repeal.
The **National Popular Vote
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/07/25/the-national-popular-vote-effort-explained/>** interstate
compact has been assembling states who pledge to award all of their
electoral votes to the winner of the national vote if and when they all
combine for a majority of electoral votes (270). The effort has gained
support from **11 states combining for 165 electoral votes
<http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/status>**, but so far only blue
states have jumped on-board -- suggesting the red and swing state
problems described above apply here too.*
**
*Most recently, efforts to undermine it state-by-state have sprung up --
among Republicans, no less. There were movements in the Pennsylvania and
Virginia Republican parties earlier this decade to **award their state's
electoral votes to the winner of each congressional district
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/could-pennsylvania-republicans-end-the-electoral-college-as-we-know-it/2011/09/14/gIQAQUzUSK_blog.html>**--
a change that would have been beneficial to the GOP, assuming they lost
those states. (Trump, of course, won Pennsylvania on Tuesday anyways.)*
*
*
*COMMENTS:*
*1)* Of the elections wherein the candidate winning the electoral
college majority did not win the popular vote, the election of 1828 may
not be pertinent to modern times because both Adams and Jackson were at
the time in the same party. The Hayes-Tilden 1876 election may also not
be pertinent since it involved the deal that gave the presidency to
Republican Hayes in return for the end of reconstruction in the south.
The election of 1888 in which Harrison got 233 electoral votes to
Cleveland's 145 may also not be pertinent to the modern discussions
because Harrison was a Democrat. If you follow my reasoning here we are
left with just two elections which disturb some modern voters, the 2000
election in which Gore got about 500,000 more popular votes than Bush
but lost the electoral college vote by 266 to Bush's 271. And the
current election in which Clinton got 232 electoral votes to Trump's
290; although I can't tell if Michigan's votes are being counted in the
290. They seem to be still counting up there. The current Michigan
count is 2,279,221 for Trump vs 2,267,298 for Clinton with 100%
reporting; so I don't know why the election map at
http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president doesn't show
Michigan as having allocated its 16 electoral college votes for Trump.
*2) *It seems more than coincidence that those arguing most stridently
for the elimination of the electoral college at the president time are
Democrats, the losers of the current election. These Democrats
preponderantly inhabit the big cities which of necessity require greater
bureaucracies to run than the smaller outlying cities and towns. These
smaller cities and towns might understandably view such attempts to get
rid of the electoral college with alarm. It might seem and in fact be
the case that the larger cities wish to tell the smaller cities and
towns how to behave, and this was one of the concerns at the very
beginning. Note Thomas Jefferson's comments on July 30, 31 Aug 1st in
regard to the Articles of Confederations ) page 28 in Library of
America's /Thomas Jefferson, Writings: /This isn't quite the same thing,
but inasmuch as it pertains to article 17 (i.e., how to amend the
constitution) of the constitution it touches not only on the thinking at
the time but something of what would need to be involved to eliminate
the electoral college:
/"//Present 41 members. Mr Chase observed that this articl//e was the
most likely to divide us of any one //proposed//in the draught [//sic//]
then //under //consideration. That the larger colonies had threatened
they would no//t //confederate//at all if their weight in congress
should not be equal to the //numbers//of people they added to the
confederacy; while the //smaller//ones declared against a union if they
did not retain an equal vote for the protection of their //rights. That
it was//of the utmost consequence to bring the parties together, as
should we sever //from//each other, either no foreign power will ally
with us at all, or the //different//states will form
//different////alliances//, and thus increase the //horrors//of those
scenes of civil war and blood//shed which in such a state of separation
& //independence//would render us a miserable people. That our
importance, our interests, our peace required that we should
confederate, and that mutual sacrifices should be made to effect a
compromise of this difficult question. He was of
//opinion////that//smaller colonies would lose their rights, if they
were not in some instances all//owed and equal vote; and therefore that
a discrimination should take place among the questions //which//would
come before //Congress. That the //smaller//states should be secured in
all questions concerning life or liberty & the greater ones in all
respecting //property//. He therefore proposed that in votes relating to
money, the voice of each //colony should be proportioned to the number
of its inhabitants.//"/*
*
*3) *Here is a site that shows how the nations of the world elect their
leaders: *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_by_country *While it
was said someplace that I shouldn't consider Germany in this regard, I
have to consider them this one last time inasmuch as this site lists
Germany's means for selecting its leader as an "*Electoral College."
*
I did a further check to see how European nations voted in their
leaders. I used this site:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_by_country
Belgium Monarchy
Bulgaria Direct vote
Croatia Direct
Czech Direct
Denmark Monarchy
France Direct
Germany Electoral college
Greece Parliament selects leader
Hungary Parliament
Italy Parliament
Liechtenstein Monarchy
Montenegro Direct
Netherlands Monarchy
Norway Monarchy
Poland Direct
Romania Direct
Saint Lucia Monarchy
San Marino Parliament
Slovakia Direct
Spain Monarchy
Switzerland Parliament
UK Monarchy
**
*4) *I have heard the argument that the US electoral college system is
old and obsolete and should therefore be abolished and replaced with the
Direct system of selecting our leader, but look at our European models.
One might reasonably argue that a "Monarchy" is an even older and more
obsolete system then the one we use in the U.S. Are there movements in
each of these monarchies to abolished them and replace them with a
modern system? Possibly. I know there are such movements in Japan, but
the emperor as also the Queen of England, remains. May our electoral
college not like them remain as well?
Lawrence
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