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

by Jesse Wegman

Jefferson eventually came to see the horrors of the French Revolution for what they were, but he never let go of his belief in the people’s will. In an 1816 letter to his friend Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson, by then an ex-president, recalled the immense pressures of the revolutionary period and recounted how they warped his and the other founders’ thinking. This led them to make many mistakes, he said, as did their overall “inexperience of self-government.”38 “In truth, the abuses of monarchy had so much filled all the space of political contemplation, that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy,” Jefferson wrote to Kercheval. “We had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that ‘governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.’”

December 24, 2020. Page 56.