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Limitations of the Electoral College
by Dr Nicholas Cole (npcole)
Cite as: Dr Nicholas Cole, ‘Limitations of the Electoral College’ in N. P. Cole, Grace Mallon and Kat Howarth, The Creation of the Electoral College, Quill Project at Pembroke College (Oxford, 2016), item 121.
The Creation of the Electoral College
(To read a specific commentary item, please click on its link.)
- The choice of the president in the national legislature
- Election by the people and the merits of election by Congress
- The 'chimerical' nature of election by the people
- The first idea of an electoral college
- A role for state legislatures
- Independence via ineligibility
- An accountable executive
- Concerns of the Committee of the Whole
- An equal voice for all states?
- A democratic magistrate
- The merits of popular election debated
- The problem of forbidding re-election
- A President for life?
- A summary of the difficulties presented by the creation of the executive
- The electoral college proposed for a second time
- The electoral college agreed to
- Election by National Legislature reinstated
- An element of chance
- Alternative modes of election
- The President to be chosen by the State Governors
- Madison's comment on various modes of election
- Committee of detail report
- The idea of an electoral college reintroduced
- The electoral college as a tool for the Separation of Powers
- Limitations of the Electoral College
- Ineligibility and the Electoral College
- Qualifications for Electors
- A role for the House of Representatives instead
- The final iteration of the electoral college
Commentary
The members of the Convention express considerable dissatisfaction with the proposal for the Electoral College as it stood at this point. Much of their objection has to do with the fact that the Senate was, at this point, to be the deciding forum if no majority emerged from the votes of state electors. Many of these objections would be removed by the final form of the Electoral College, but some more general philosophical objections were made at this point. The detail that the Vice-President did not need a majority vote but the President did, is one of the many ways that the proposal strained logical explanation. There was considerable worry expressed about how electors would act, though few at the Convention seem to have anticipated the organized, national campaign. In fact, such national organization meant that a profusion of candidates regularly frustrating any decisive decision within the Electoral College was not one of the problems that emerged in practice.
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