It’s too easy to cheat with the popular vote, primary reason Democrats want a popular vote.
From Tara Ross:
During this week in 1876, the presidential election of 1876 was supposed to be decided. Except it wasn’t. Instead, disputes over the election outcome would continue all the way through March.
It must have been ugly—but it could have been even worse.
The Electoral College helped the country that year in an unexpected way: It isolated election disputes to only four states. Without the Electoral College, every vote in every state could have been contested. Would things have spun completely out of control?
They truly could have. In those post-Civil War years, the nation was starkly divided between North and South. Many Southerners were still chafing under the restrictions of Reconstruction. Fraud and dishonesty were too pervasive. Black voters were sometimes denied access to the polls. At least one study has concluded that a “fair and free election” would have turned out differently in 1876.
In other words, the scene was set for a hotly contested political contest.
Republicans had nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, the Governor of Ohio. Meanwhile, Democrats had nominated Samuel J. Tilden, the Governor of New York.
The results on Election Day couldn’t have made anyone happy. Hayes appeared to have about 250,000 fewer popular votes, nationwide, than Tilden; however, the all-important electoral vote was still up for grabs. Twenty electors were disputed in four states. In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, state officials couldn’t agree on who had won. Thus, multiple slates of electors were submitted from each of those states. One electoral vote in Oregon was also disputed. Hayes needed all 20 of these electors to win. Tilden needed just one.
Can you imagine what CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC would do with such a situation today?!?
Americans in 1876 didn’t have the benefits of such modern technology, of course. Instead, they waited for weeks to see which candidate would be declared the victor.
The situation prompted plenty of political grandstanding!
The Senate was then controlled by Republicans, while the House was controlled by Democrats. No one knew what to do about the conflicting sets of election returns, but Congress finally created a (constitutionally questionable) Electoral Commission. That committee was supposed to be evenly divided, with seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and one independent Supreme Court Justice. It didn’t turn out that way. Instead, Independent Justice David Davis was unexpectedly elected to the Senate by the Illinois state legislature. His spot on the commission was taken by Justice Joseph Bradley, a Republican appointee.
Unsurprisingly, the Republican-controlled Commission soon decided all 20 disputed electoral votes in favor of Hayes, throwing the election to him.
Naturally, Democrats were upset, and a filibuster nearly sidetracked congressional acceptance of the Commission’s findings. Eventually, though, Congress brokered a compromise: Republicans indicated that they would be willing to bring Reconstruction to an end. In return, southern congressmen began withdrawing their objections.
Hayes was finally declared the winner of the election at about 4:00 a.m. on March 2. Of course, action came about mostly because Congress had its back up against a wall: Only two days then remained in President Ulysses S. Grant’s term.
After all the turmoil, Rutherford B. Hayes was finally sworn in as the country’s 19th President on March 4, 1877.
P.S. At this juncture, you know I must offer a friendly reminder that a more complete discussion of these issues can be found in my book, "Why We Need the Electoral College."
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Wrong again numbnuts.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, state delegates came together to draft what would become the U.S. Constitution, establishing the rule of law for the newly founded United States of America. The country, still in its infancy, had liberated itself from the colonial rule of Great Britain’s King George III in the American Revolution.
With George Washington presiding, the delegates discussed the current state of affairs among the 13 states governed under the Articles of Confederation, which was
proving insufficient in maintaining federal governance among the states. At the urging of Virginia Delegate James Madison and others, they began to draft a new national constitution, which would design the role and power of the new government, including elections of head of state. But steeped in the throws of the slave trade, and a little less than 100 years before the Civil War, there was
already a divide between the interests of northern and southern states.
The idea of a simple popular-vote election
struck fear in delegates from slaveholding states because while their states boasted large populations, much of the populace was comprised of enslaved black people who could not vote. By contrast, northern states had smaller populations with
a greater number of eligible voters (read: white, male, and generally property-owning).
“The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes,”
said Madison, who would later become the nation’s fourth president. “The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.”
Fearful of being outnumbered, Madison pushed for the electoral college, and championed representative government by state as a solution. Seats in the House of Representatives would be based on population size, and delegates from slave-holding states sought to have slaves included in the count for total population. Those opposed recognized this would mean fewer seats from the smaller states.
And so the states made several compromises. The first, known as the
Three-Fifths Compromise, was a racist, manipulative policy that outlined the rules for legislative representation and taxation of the states. It read, “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
Enslaved black people, ordinarily only regarded as property, were declared three fifths of a person in order to strengthen the power of the white men who kept them in bondage. It would remain that way
until the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to slaves in 1868.
The second compromise was the advent of the electoral college in deciding the general election. Instead of popular votes, electors would make selections on behalf of their states.
The way electors were chosen varied by state, but
they were usually elected officials and party leaders, as is true today. The number of electors for each state was set to equal its total number of congressional representatives: two senators and however many representatives it had in the house. (In 1961, the District of Columbia would be awarded three electoral votes as well.)
There is no federal law that governs how electors cast their vote — this, too, is
determined by state law, both now and then. Candidates had to receive a majority of electoral votes to win an election. So in deciding how to elect the leaders of government, slaveholding states were advantaged by the size of their slaveholding populations.
Virginia, which
boasted the largest total population, saw many of its own occupy the White House in the early years of presidency, including Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Madison. The impact of the electoral college and the dominance of southern electors is even clearer when considering how many presidents were slave owners themselves —
12 in all, including eight who owned slaves while in office. Still, many others endorsed “states rights,” coded language that’s still used today with the introduction of
emerging voter suppression laws, designed to alienate and disenfranchise voters.
Since its creation, there have been four elections where the electoral college winner did not receive the popular vote. Two have come this century: the 2000 election
between Al Gore and George W. Bush and the 2016 election
between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
