Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College

by Jesse Wegman

Faced with two incompatible platforms, electors could no longer justify playing the role of neutral arbiter; they had to take sides. Samuel Miles was a Federalist, and the Federalists who voted for him expected him to toe the party line. In their eyes, his high-minded rationale for bucking them and choosing Jefferson was beside the point. He had betrayed the party at a moment when the stakes could not have been higher. Adams ended up winning a bare majority of electors, 71 to Jefferson’s 68. If just two other electors had followed Miles’s path, Jefferson would have won. Federalists were furious. One wrote to his local newspaper, “What, do I choose Samuel Miles to determine for me whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson shall be president? No! I choose him to act, not to think.”2 No one today would blink at that statement; for us, the Electoral College has never operated any other way. It’s not hard to imagine a similar letter to the editor being written by, say, a Democratic voter in 2000 if an elector pledged to Al Gore had instead chosen to vote for George W. Bush, who won by a margin nearly as narrow as Adams’s.3 But in the closing days of the eighteenth century, it was a new sentiment. And it shows that within less than a decade of the Constitution’s ratification, the framers’ main public rationale for the Electoral College—that it would act as a body of learned men who would deliberate and choose the fittest man for the job—was dead in the water.

December 25, 2020. 82.