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

by Jesse Wegman

How much did the institution of slavery determine the way we choose our president? Even today, leading scholars of the founding era disagree with one another—and sometimes with themselves—on this question. In a New York Times op-ed in April 2019, Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, wrote that he had been mistaken to claim in a recent book that slavery was the key to the College’s adoption.37 “I’ve decided I was wrong,” Wilentz wrote, arguing that the benefit the College gave slave states through the three-fifths clause was incidental. Two days later, Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional law professor at Yale Law School, wrote his own Times op-ed arguing the other side. Given the various democratic features of the Constitution, like the popularly elected House of Representatives and the absence of federal property qualifications for voting and holding office, why not elect the president by popular vote? Because, Amar wrote, “Direct election would have been a dealbreaker for the South.”38 What no one disputes is that the Constitution’s framers gave speeches connecting slavery to the Electoral College, that the College gave extra electoral votes to the slave states, and that this inequity persisted throughout the years leading up to the Civil War.

December 24, 2020. Page 75.