YOU HAVE TO understand, of course, that there was no real precedent for the members of the Continental Congresses in the notion of electing a single individual to the job of running the country, since kings and emperors took over by birth or by capturing territory in a war. It was quite creative and inventive, therefore, when a thing called the Virginia Plan was introduced at the Constitutional Convention on May 29, 1787, by Edmund Jennings Randolph, Virginia’s governor, a document that contained these words: “Resolved, that a National Executive be instituted, to be chosen by the National Legislature . . .” The length of the term was left blank, with some men at the Convention favoring a single term of seven years and others favoring three years, and there were a lot of other arguments and debates on how the members of the National Legislature should go about picking their man. Washington was the president of the Convention, and when five states voted for the seven-year term and four states voted against it, and the remaining state, Massachusetts, split on the subject, Washington decided that the seven-year term had won. But the question of how to decide on the right man was a lot tougher.

It was a fellow from Pennsylvania, James Wilson, who later became one of the original justices of the Supreme Court, who first suggested the idea of an Electoral College, meaning a body of electors to be chosen by the people of each state. But this notion was defeated eight to two, and instead it was determined that Congress, the body of senators and representatives, would do the selecting of the man. Then Randolph spoke up and said that maybe the Virginia Plan wasn’t such a good idea after all, and perhaps there ought to be three executives working together rather than one, because a single leader might start thinking he was really a king and start acting like one. But Wilson argued that that was a lousy idea because the three men would be squabbling all the time and never get anything accomplished, and he pleaded again for his plan for a body of electors chosen by the general population. The first part of his argument made sense to the men at the convention, but not the second, so the Virginia Plan was revised to read as follows: “Resolved, that a National Executive be instituted, to consist of a single person, to be chosen by the National Legislature, for a term of seven years, with power to carry into execution the national laws . . .”

Nothing was really settled at this point. New Jersey came up with a rival plan that again suggested government by a group of men rather than a single individual, but it left blank the number of men in the group and also left blank the number of years the group should serve, but specified that all of the men in the group could be removed by application to the Congress of a majority of the chief executives of the states. Alexander Hamilton came out against both the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan, saying that neither really gave the federal government enough power, and suggested his own plan, which provided for “the supreme Executive authority of the United States to be vested in a Governor, to be elected to serve during good behaviour; the election to be made by Electors chosen by the people . . .” But there were violent arguments against the Hamilton Plan as well, with a Virginian named George Mason pointing out that a term of “good behaviour” could well mean a lifetime and a return to a monarchy.

It all went on for quite a while. James Madison of Virginia, a tiny fellow who was five feet four, weighed less than 100 pounds, and spoke so softly that people complained constantly that they couldn’t hear him, but who later became our fourth president because he had a darn good brain, argued that selection of a president by the National Legislature might tend to bring in men chosen less because they were great leaders than because they had a lot of buddies in Congress. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania said pretty much the same thing, arguing that “if the people should elect, they will never fail to prefer some man of distinguished character, or service . . . If the Legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue, or cabal, and of faction . . .” Then Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut joined the argument in favor of electors and came up with a suggestion with specific numbers: states with population of under 200,000 should have one elector, states between 200,000 and 300,000 should have two electors, and states above 300,000 should have four electors. And Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts came up with even more specific suggestions: that Connecticut have two electors, Delaware three, Georgia one, Maryland two, Massachusetts three, New Hampshire one, New Jersey two, New York two, North Carolina two, Pennsylvania three, Rhode Island one, South Carolina two, and Virginia three. Some of the smaller states objected, of course, but Gerry’s suggestion was accepted by a vote of six to four.

The objections didn’t really matter because Gerry’s proposal didn’t hold up very long. On July 24, William C. Houston of New Jersey began to argue again against the use of electors, saying that the system would be too expensive and that really good men wouldn’t be interested in taking on the job. The delegates immediately reversed themselves and by a vote of seven to four decided again to let Congress pick the presidents. There were also further arguments on the length of presidential terms, on whether a president could serve for only a single term or for a number of terms, and various other things. And, finally, a committee of eleven men was set up to deal with the open questions, and the proposals of these eleven men were at last accepted.

The president and vice president were to be elected for four-year terms and could be reelected for an unlimited number of equal terms. They both had to be natural-born citizens of the United States, residents of the country for at least fourteen years, and thirty-five years of age or older. And they were to be chosen by electors in a system based on the numbers of senators and representatives from each state; each state would have a total of electors equal to the total of senators and representatives from that state.

As for that number of senators and representatives, it was decided that there would be two senators from each state, and that the number of representatives would depend upon population, with each state having at least one representative. That meant each state would have at least three electors.23 Population was defined as the number of “free persons” in each state, plus three-fifths of “all other persons,” meaning slaves, but excluding “Indians not taxed.” During Washington’s first term, there were twenty-six senators, since there were, of course, thirteen states, and a total of sixty-four representatives; in my two terms, there were forty-eight states and ninety-six senators, and the number of members of the House of Representatives had grown to 435. (Incidentally, senators were at first chosen by each state legislature and representatives by popular vote, the votes of the general public, but in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment changed that so that both senators and representatives are elected by general vote.)

This idea of an Electoral College seemed like a sensible one at the time because it was assumed that the man chosen for president would be the same man chosen by the people in the general voting, but the system has come in for a lot of criticism through the years, and frequent attempts have been made to change it or discard it, because it doesn’t always work out that way. The reason for this is that, though electors were originally also selected by each state legislature, so that electors came from different political parties and therefore didn’t necessarily vote in a bloc for the presidential candidate of a particular party, this was also later changed so that today you vote for and elect your electors the same way you pick the men and women, and therefore the political party, running your state. This means that, if your state has a majority of Democratic or Republican electors, the members of the Electoral College from your state vote, of course, for the Democratic or Republican candidate for president. But because of this the Electoral College vote sometimes doesn’t match the popular vote, since individual voters frequently cross political lines and vote for the man they prefer rather than the man given the electoral votes by their state’s electors. But it’s the Electoral College total that elects the president, not the popular vote total, so you can see where there are objections to the system.

The result of all this is that there have been nine instances where the man who got in received fewer popular votes than his chief opponent or fewer votes than his combined opponents, but more electoral votes. James Buchanan was the first; in 1856, he easily beat his two opponents, John C. Frémont and Millard Fillmore in the popular voting by getting 1,838,169 votes to Fremont’s 1,335,264 and Fillmore’s 874,534, but as you can see by doing a little quick arithmetic, Fremont and Fillmore together got 2,209,798 votes or a total of 55 percent of the votes to Buchanan’s 45 percent. In the Electoral College voting, however, he got 174 votes to a total of 122 for the other men (Fremont got 114 and Fillmore 8), and he was the new president. The same thing happened to Abe Lincoln in his first term. Lincoln, the Republican candidate, got 1,866,352, or 40 percent of the votes, while the other men got 60 percent: Stephen A. Douglas, the Democrat, got 1,375,157 votes, 29 percent, John C. Breckinridge, of the National Democrats, the splinter party composed of southerners, got 845,763 votes, and 18 percent, John Bell, of a short-lived party called the Constitutional Union, got 589,581 votes, which is 13 percent. But in the electoral voting, Lincoln got 180 votes to the other candidates’ combined 123. To give you an idea of how Electoral College votes can differ from popular votes, Douglas was second in the popular voting, as you can see, but last in the Electoral College. Breckinridge got 72 from eleven states, mostly in the south - Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas; Bell got 39 votes; and Douglas got only 12. (In his second election, though, Lincoln had only one opponent, General George B. McClellan, Democrat, and beat him both ways, getting 2,216,067 votes, 55 percent of the popular vote, to McClellan’s 1,808,725 votes, 45 percent, and 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21. The Confederate states, of course, didn’t vote in this election.) The first candidate to lose the popular vote but get the presidency because of the Electoral College was Rutherford B. Hayes, who received 4,033,950 votes to Samuel J. Tilden’s 4,284,757 votes, but squeaked past him in the Electoral College 185 to 184. Garfield was practically neck and neck with his opponent, Winfield S. Hancock, in the popular vote, beating Hancock by only 9,464 votes and picking up 48.3 percent of the votes to Hancock’s 48.2 percent, but got 214 electors’ votes to Hancock’s 155. Cleveland got 49 percent of the popular votes in his first election to James G. Blaine’s 48 percent, but beat Blaine 219 to 182 in the Electoral College; and he got only 46 percent in his second election victory against his combined opponents’ 54 percent, but took the Electoral College votes 277 to their combined 167. Cleveland, you’ll remember, was president for the first time in 1884, and then took a break and was elected again in 1892, and the reason he wasn’t president in 1888 is that old Benjamin Harrison beat him in that one. Not in the popular vote, though; Cleveland got 5,540,329 votes, 49 percent, to Harrison’s 5,439,853 votes, 48 percent, but the Electoral College gave Harrison 233 votes to Cleveland’s 168. Woodrow Wilson didn’t attain a majority against his opponents in either election, getting 42 percent the first time and 49 percent the second time, but he got 435 Electoral College votes the first time against his two principal opponents’ combined 96, and 277 electors’ votes the second time against Charles Evans Hughes’ 254. Then there was another fellow about whom I’ll say a word in a minute, and the most recent example is John F. Kennedy.24 Kennedy defeated Nixon in the popular vote only 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent, 34,227,096 votes to 34,108,546, but received 309 Electoral College votes to Nixon’s 219.

How do I personally feel about the Electoral College system? Well, that other fellow I mentioned is me. I received the most votes in both categories when I ran against Dewey, but I didn’t receive the majority of the popular votes. I got 24,105,812 votes, which was 49 percent of the votes cast, while Dewey got 21,970,065 votes, 45 percent, Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat candidate, got 1,169,063 votes, 2 percent, Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive candidate, got 1,157,172, also 2 percent, and the other 2 percent got scattered among other people. But in the Electoral College voting, I got a stronger majority, 303 votes to Dewey’s 189 and Thurmond’s 39. (Wallace didn’t get any electoral votes.) I got the majority of electoral votes in twenty-eight states - Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming; the fellow with the little mustache got the electoral votes in sixteen states - Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Vermont; and Thurmond got Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. So it can certainly be said that I benefited personally, in a way, from the Electoral College system.

Still and all, I don’t think I’ll abstain from this one; I think I’ll come right out and say that, all things considered, I’m in favor of a change to election of our presidents on the simple basis of putting in the man who gets the most votes from the people of our country. And I wouldn’t want to see some silly clause stuck in that says he has to get the largest percentage of votes as compared to the combined percentage of the votes for all the other sixteen people running against him, if you count all the candidates put up by the various little parties. It just seems to be elementary logic that, since every citizen in the country has the right to vote for his or her choice for president, the man who gets more votes than any of the other candidates ought to be told that he’s our next president. That’s simpler, cleaner, and it makes the most sense.