The United States has a strange kind of democracy. They are the only democratic country where the chief executive is not directly elected by the people. That is what the electoral college, 535 men and women who appoint a president on behalf of the people. That system is as old as the US itself. The founding fathers of America tried to solve some difficult problems with it.
Each state issues a fixed number of electors (electors) off to the Electoral College (electoral college). The rule is:the more inhabitants, the more electoral votes that state may delegate. For example, 55 of the 535 votes in the electoral college come from California, while in a small state like Maine there are only 4 electoral votes to be won.
Winning electoral votes goes according to the 'winner-take-all principle," the presidential candidate with the most votes wins all of that state's electoral votes. They will elect the new president on December 17. Officially, the electoral votes are free to choose, but of course they choose the presidential candidate they represent in their state. This American electoral system has a number of drawbacks.
Tough problems
Not having the president elected directly by the people but through a sort of "college of wise men" sounds rather old-fashioned, and it is. The idea of an electoral college stems from the first draft of the United States Constitution in 1787 and has remained broadly the same ever since. The Drafters of the Constitution – the Constitution – tried to solve some difficult problems of the young United States with it.
On July 4, 1776, the United States of America declared its independence from the British Empire. Thirteen former East Coast colonies would henceforth continue as one independent, sovereign state. According to the ideals of the Enlightenment, it had to become a democratic state. Immediately practical problems arose in electing a president. For example, the thirteen states within the British Empire had all had their own privileges. Most saw the need for federal cooperation, but were wary of any form of central government.
In addition, the United States was a country of only four million inhabitants, who also lived spread over more than 1500 kilometers of coastline. There were hardly any through roads or lines of communication, so a national election campaign was extremely difficult to organize, if it was deemed desirable at all. Under the influence of some British thinkers such as Henry St. John Bolingbroke, some Americans strongly doubted this.
Constitutional Convention
Yet somehow the president had to have a mandate from the people. When adopting the Constitution, on the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia in 1789, this problem urgently needed to be solved. A simple solution would be to let Congressional delegates elect the president. That was rejected, it would divide Congress too much. Congressmen may also be susceptible to corruption or foreign interference.
The idea of having the president chosen by the legislative institutions of the states also failed – as early as 1789 the intention was to keep federalism limited, the individual states were allowed to decide a lot themselves. On the contrary, the president had to stand above the states and be able to act independently of them.
What about direct elections by the American people? The problem with the constitution's authors was not that they doubted the people's ability to elect their own president. One of the founding principles was that the voice of every American citizen (plantation slaves and women were excluded) should be represented.
Rather, the difficulties lay in the fact that citizens would have insufficient knowledge of candidates from states other than their own. Thus, most voters would choose a candidate from their own state. That way, one could never elect a president with a mandate broad enough to run the entire country. And even if they did, the largest states would have an unfair advantage.
Two votes
To overcome all these problems, the drafters of the constitution came up with an interim solution. Each state was allowed to delegate a number of electoral votes equal to the number of representatives in the House of Representatives (depending on population) plus the number of senators (always two). The electoral votes cast two votes for the presidential candidates of their choice. To avoid the aforementioned problems with the mandate and the predominance of the largest states, at least one vote had to go to a candidate from outside their own state.
Moreover, the electoral votes would not be cast in Washington but in the states themselves in order to avoid nepotism in the capital, corruption and foreign influence as much as possible. The candidate with the most votes in the electoral college became president, the second vice president. The states were allowed to determine themselves how they compile their list of electoral votes.
In the beginning, electoral votes were sometimes indirectly elected by the local legislature, but since the end of the nineteenth century almost all states elect their electoral votes directly by majority vote of the citizens. Currently, only the states of Maine and Nebraska elect some of their electoral votes through a district system. As a result, those states can delegate both Republican and Democratic electoral votes, although this rarely occurs in practice.
Party politics
Mind you, this whole system was conceived with the idea in mind that both political parties and a national election campaign were either impossible or undesirable. But that soon changed.
Disagreements among the Founding Fathers James Madison and Alexander Hamilton on the role of the federal government led to the first political parties. Hamilton founded the Federalist Party in 1790. To counterbalance Madison started the Democratic-Republican Party in 1792.
Things went wrong during the elections of 1796. Federalist John Adams won the most votes in the electoral college and became president. Thomas Jefferson, Democratic-Republican and major competitor to Adams, came in second and would become vice president. That created a difficult, if not unworkable, situation in the White House.
In order to respond to the new reality and to make it possible for the president and vice president to belong to the same party, the electoral votes had to be cast separately for both offices from 1800. For example, the candidate who finished second did not become vice president, but the electors could express a preference for a president and his running mate.
Since this adjustment, only a few minor technical changes have been made to the system. Although it is still a matter of collecting electoral votes, most ballot papers still only have the words 'electors for...' printed somewhere in small print.
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