Why the Electoral College Exists | Nat Geo Explores

Every four years it happens again. All trying to convince you that one candidate above all the rest has the experience, has got the right mix of stuff. "Join me to lead America!" This is crazy! But no matter what name you're bubbling in, you're not actually voting for that person. And that's because of this thing in the U.S. called the electoral college. Like many things in politics, you either love it or you really hate it.

The electoral college is the device where each of the states selects a certain number of electors, equal to their representation in Congress. If you ask the people involved, did you do a brilliant job in 1787? The designers themselves would say no, it didn't work. It had to be fixed. We'll get back to that point in a minute, but here's how it works today. Citizens of the state cast their votes for candidate A, candidate B, candidate C. They're not actually voting directly for the candidates; they're voting for a slate of electors who gather together and cast their state's votes.

Right, but why do we have it at all? Well, if we go back over 200 years, America had 13 states and less than 4 million people. It was way different. During the Revolutionary War, you had a somewhat informal government. There was no Supreme Court, the presidency? There was none. The Congress didn't know uncertain terms; it was dysfunctional. The Articles of Confederation were not functioning particularly well. Worse, there were economic problems, possible unrest. Barely a decade old, America was pretty much a hot mess.

They decided we need to write a brand new constitution from scratch. But there were a ton of issues, and no one could agree what a new government should even look like. The election of the president? That was probably the single most difficult issue. Whether you should have a committee, maybe three or four people, serving as the chiefs of the executive branch, or how they'd be chosen. One plan was to let Congress elect the executive branch. Some liked it, others didn't.

And one person who didn't? James Wilson. He had an unusual idea of his own: a government led by a single person. The convention type goes silent, and everybody is looking very worried at one another as they say, "We just had a revolution to get rid of the king! Isn't that just going to be a monarch under a new name?" Wilson followed that up with an equally unpopular idea: let the people choose the president by popular vote.

There were numerous objections, and because national campaigning wasn't really a thing yet, no one was convinced the public would even know who to vote for. In the 18th century, you had primitive roads; transportation was by horseback; newspapers were primitive. So the question would be, how could somebody in Massachusetts judge a presidential candidate from North Carolina? And even if they were informed, direct popular election? That will just mean the big states are going to elect the president.

Others said let the state legislatures pick the president. Wilson wanted, at all costs, to keep that selection out of the hands of Congress. Out of the hands of the states, came and said, "Okay, if you don't like direct popular election, why don't we do indirect election?" And like that, Wilson's plan gained some light.

So after months of arguing, they had a plan for a brand new government and the electoral college. The constitution was signed, and everyone went home happy. Right? Yeah, uh, wrong. There's plenty of private correspondence where figures like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton are saying, "This whole document is a compromise. We don't really like it. It's probably not gonna last more than five or ten years. We'll be back at the drawing board pretty soon." And they were right.

The first two elections went okay, but some of the early ones were absolute chaos. The electoral college was designed to balance the powers of the government and protect the rights of the people, but there were a lot of holes in it. They expected the electors to come together and to deliberate among themselves. They were supposed to be exercising independent political judgment. When you got the growth of political parties, very quickly people began to pledge, saying, "If you vote for me, I will vote for the Federalist," or "I will vote for the Jeffersonian Republican."

At that point, they had to go back to the drawing board. So that electoral college? It's been changed, tweaked, amended, and now most states have the winner-take-all system. Early on, they figured out a winner-take-all system is the one you want to adopt if you're going to maximize your state's influence. If you split your votes, then people aren't going to pay as much attention to you as if you say, "Look here, here's this great big pile of electoral votes; they're all going to go to one candidate or another."

Our founders couldn't see the future, and today the electoral college? Yeah, it's still controversial. But there are lessons to be learned from its creation. History tends to outrun the plans of even the founding generation. What would they think if they came back and they looked at the system today? It's anybody's guess. The only one that I can say with any confidence that would be James Wilson. He would say, "For heaven's sake, you need a system of direct popular election in this country. I was right; the other delegates were wrong."