Electoral College Decoded

Dr. Sean Beienberg returns to examine the Electoral College through the lens of Federalist Paper 68, explaining the original intentions behind this complex system and how it rapidly evolved from its designed purpose. We explore how Hamilton's vision of a filtering mechanism for selecting "prudent statesmen" quickly transformed with the rise of political parties and changing electoral practices.

• The Electoral College has two key features: the allocation of electors (balancing federal and national interests) and the filtering mechanism for selecting presidents
• Electoral allocation reflects the mixed federal system—combining House (population-based) and Senate (state-based) representation
• Hamilton designed the system to select presidents with strong character who would be efficient administrators and effective international representatives
• States quickly moved from having deliberative electors to holding popular votes for pledged electors
• The 12th Amendment changed the system after the 1800 election tie, formally acknowledging party politics
• The Constitution remains "agnostic" on how states choose electors—state legislatures could legally choose them directly, though norms have changed
• Hamilton was so confident in the Electoral College design that he noted even anti-federalist critics weren't complaining about it

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Chapters

• 1:32 Welcome and Introduction
• 1:57 Two Features of Electoral College
• 3:24 Hamilton's Argument in Federalist 68
• 7:04 Evolution of the Electoral System
• 9:59 Constitutional Ties and Historical Changes
• 11:33 Episode Closing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:46

Welcome everybody. Today we have Dr Sean Beinberg back with us and today we're talking about the Electoral College, because the Electoral College for a lot of people can be very, very confusing, but we're going to tie it in with the Federalist Papers. So, dr Beinberg, when we look at the Electoral College and specifically Federalist 68, what is the argument here for the Electoral College?

Speaker 2: 1:11

Sure, it's worth noting that what we think of as the Electoral College functionally has, I think, two distinctive features, one of which is the focus of Federalist 68, which we'll spend most of the time talking about.

Speaker 2: 1:23

The other one is what people talk about more today, but that's not what Hamilton spends much of 68 talking about. So the two features of the Electoral College are its allocation of electors, and I think we'll do probably another one later, so I'm just going to go over that one lightly but effectively. The allocation of electors is, effectively, who gets? What's the number of electors that's allocated to the difference in this case the states. What's the number of electors that's allocated to the different in this case the states? And in this it borrows from the structure of Federalist 39. Remember we talked about how the United States system is a mix of a federal and a national system. So the House of Representatives is allocated by population, assuming it were national. The Senate is allocated by state, assuming it's federal, and the Electoral College numbers this it's 538 now because of the wrinkle adding DC in the 1960s, but historically it was 535, or the equivalent thereof, and that's just the number of the House plus the Senate. So people get sort of frustrated about that number. But they're actually making a much more fundamental critique of the system than perhaps they think they are, because the allocation is designed to reflect the mixed federal quality of the United States Federal Republic and so how the allocation is determined is just literally House plus the Senate again, plus eventually adding the little DC piece, plus the Senate again plus eventually adding the little DC piece. Hamilton doesn't talk too much about that, but he notes that one of the advantages of the electoral college system as originally designed is to sort of break it up into multiple little elections right. What he's afraid of is the idea that effectively all of the people would gather together to make the one big vote for the president, and that would be like attacked by a mob or pressured right. So he says that by basically disaggregating this into and through the states, this solves that particular problem of significantly aggressive pressure. But we also should again keep Federalist 39 in mind, which is that the allocation of the Electoral College represents the arguably core feature of the American Constitutional Republic as federal. So that's the one that we talk about more today, and I think we'll talk about sort of more of the allocation debates maybe in another one.

Speaker 2: 3:41

So I want to turn to Hamilton's major argument in Federalist 68, which is pretty straightforward and, I think, actually pretty short, okay which is that, again remember, the president is supposed to wield executive power, not just all power, not just presidential. What we think of as presidential power today, not lawmaking power, but fundamentally is supposed to be sort of a cool-headed administrator as well as the preeminent representative of the United States in foreign policy. And so this is supposed to be somebody not necessarily this has a compelling political platform, a compelling set of policies, but somebody who is thought of as a thoughtful, prudent statesman would be the term that they would have used right A leader, effectively, whose character is ultimately what's the most important and basically steady hand and efficiently and fairly administering the law. And the argument is you want a system that will produce, in effect, such a boring, straightforward figure that is going to basically efficiently execute the law and represent the country well on the stage. And so Hamilton suggests and you can see there's actually a part in the beginning of the Federalist 68 where he's almost gloating about this he says even those idiot critics of our Constitution, by which we mean like the anti-federalists, he says even they're not even complaining about this. But let's just take a victory lap anyway to say how great this system is. He actually cites Federal Farmer, one of the anti-federalist critics, by name in the footnote. In the footnote, but he says, effectively, what have we done is we've built a system that creates a filtering mechanism by which prudent people will end up as the president. And so he says nobody's actually doing a direct election, you're not necessarily originally pulling a lever of everybody who comes together and says here's who we want for president.

Speaker 2: 5:31

The idea is that the states, by whatever measure they see fit, will choose a set of electors. And Hamilton goes through and what to us probably reads like a weirdly long amount of detail, saying it can't be and this is in the Constitution. But basically you can't have senators serve as electors, you can't have representatives serve as electors, you can't have people who are already participating in this. And again they have in mind sort of the model of the Pennsylvania Constitution, where the legislators pick the executive and basically becomes a tool of them or even one of them themselves. And so he says, effectively, you're going to have this separate body that only exists temporarily, it's not going to have a permanent set of interest, it's not going to have a permanent set of incentives, this temporary body, however the states want to do it. State legislatures can basically sort of pick what their rule will be. They can pick it directly, they can throw it to a vote, whatever. But they will basically create a freestanding temporary body of electors and those electors will come together and basically send on their pool to the national sort of counting mechanism. And then he says assuming that a majority emerges from that, we're done. But in recognizing the fact that there might be weak organization, maybe states in the Northeast are going to have one candidate they really like or who they know really well, but that person's not well known in, say, the South. If there's no majority, then the House of Representatives will choose from among the top set of vote getters. Basically, the idea is that at that point the Electoral College serves as a filtering mechanism. All right, here's the baseline of people that we think are reasonable and competent and the House of Representatives can choose from among them if no majority is secured.

Speaker 2: 7:12

I mentioned that this is a feature that sort of feels alien to us today, because very, very quickly the logic of the electoral college is originally conceived by Hamilton Falls away. Very quickly, states both decide that they should have just the citizens choose, basically the electors, but with a sort of party, with a sort of president like pledge to a presidential candidate, so effectively they turn it into a direct election by the states Again. Some of the state legislatures hang on to this power for decades, but fairly quickly. Most of them basically make this a popular vote within their state. And the other thing that makes the system that work very well is the logic of party politics, where you want to make coalitions of people who are more like-minded than you than not, particularly to block folks whose views you find abhorrent or whose platforms or partisan alignments you find abhorrent.

Speaker 2: 8:10

But stronger parties create an incentive to basically band together up front to sort of pre-select your candidate, rather than how the electoral college was originally conceived, which is the states are all going to pick people who they respect Maybe this is from their own state, maybe this is from a neighboring state and then they're going to send that that list up sort of up the chain. So there are some I mean, technically speaking, they're occasionally state legislators will even run their mouths and say, hey, let's go back to the old system, or something like that. So the Constitution actually is relatively agnostic on how the electors are chosen in this and basically they leave that to the states to determine. But I think at this point pretty much everybody would get mad if the state legislature just suddenly said, yeah, we're doing that again. They legally could under the Constitution, but we have strong enough norms of sort of that, particularly as the president has shifted its sort of obligations and powers that the people should have a stronger say in that rather than sort of this complicated filtering mechanism.

Speaker 1: 9:13

So then this kind of translates to the Constitution, specifically in Article 2, of kind of going through and saying, like here's how the electors are going to be chosen. It goes into a little bit more detail. When you talked about you know, if there's a tie in 1800, there was a tie, correct, did that? Like because it was in 1800, and you said that the kind of system has changed since then, like, was that a turning point? Was that this is how it was designed and hamilton was like this is you know exactly why we have it?

Speaker 2: 9:50

so the original model was effectively that, uh, the, the, the president, the vice president would sort of automatically assume they were not run as a joint ticket, so effectively a secondary candidate, that was effectively the runner up. And the wrinkle was that very quickly, as parties convened, they say, oh, here's who we want for president and here's who we want for vice president. That's what created the scenario that you're describing in 1800. And so very quickly and this is one of the earlier constitutional amendments, they amend the Constitution to basically have the president and the vice president run on a joint ticket rather than effectively the vice president is sort of the runner-upper fallback from the presidential model. So yeah, I guess you could argue whether it's the turning point or whether it's the reflection of the turning point, which is basically the development of parties relatively quickly in American history over the 1790s.

Speaker 1: 10:47

Yes, and we will definitely get into more of that in later episodes. Dr Beinberg, as always, thank you so much.