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

by Jesse Wegman

Then Madison chimed in. A direct popular vote for president “was in his opinion the fittest in itself,” and would be as likely as any method to produce an executive of “distinguished character.”25 This was a coup for Wilson. Madison was by all accounts the most important delegate at the convention. He had also been consistently wary of placing too much power directly in the people’s hands, preferring instead what he called “successive filtrations” of the popular will.26 This was his first public comment on the popular vote. Madison wasn’t finished. There was “one difficulty however of a serious nature” regarding a popular vote. He picked up the point Hugh Williamson had made a couple days earlier and carried it to its logical conclusion. “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States,” Madison said, “and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”27 In other words, Madison was saying, the method of choosing the president, like the design of Congress, would need to accommodate the demands of slaveholders. However the president would be picked, it would not be by the people. But what was this about the substitution of “electors”? It was an idea that had originally been pitched by James Wilson, of all people—back on June 2, one day after he had proposed a direct popular election of the pr...

December 24, 2020. Page 71.