Notwithstanding the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment in
1804, and a powerful inclination among the states in favor of the
winner-take-all selection model which culminated in the 1830s, public opinion
concerning the Electoral College continued to be at least somewhat malleable
through at least the 1820s. Though by that time the system had become largely
pro forma, with Electors increasingly expected to vote in line with their
declared party affiliation, not every observer was entirely satisfied with the
advantages that this trend bestowed upon the nation’s dueling political
factions. A particularly significant critique in this vein – though perhaps not
a very surprising one, all things considered – came from the pen of another of
the original architects of the Electoral College itself, James Madison. At that
stage in his career – the summer of 1823 – Madison was a former Secretary of
State and former President who held no public office and had every reason to
look back upon the preceding twenty years with eminent satisfaction. The party
that he had helped create, the Republicans, had controlled the Presidency, the
House of Representatives, and the Senate without interruption since 1800, aided
in no small part by the efforts of its various state organizations to command their
respective Electoral College votes. The opposing Federalist Party had almost
completely disappeared as a result and very little seemed to stand in the way
of the continued Republican dominance of American public life.
In spite of of these outwardly fortuitous circumstances,
however, Madison remained concerned. He had long since expressed his preference
that the several states should adopt the district election model for choosing
presidential Electors – it being, he insisted, the nearest to what the Framers
had had in mind – and showed frustration at the enthusiasm with which either
the winner-take-all or legislation appointment methods had been embraced. And
though, in some respects, a “good party man” who had worked hard to secure and
maintain every advantage for his fellow partisans, Madison maintained what
might now be thought of as a somewhat technocratic streak. At heart a creature
of policy rather than ideology, he tended to take a measured, cautious approach
to issues, to study intensely, reflect at length, and support what he believed
to be the single best possible initiative. This characteristic adherence to
pragmatism is perhaps best exemplified by Madison’s support for the chartering
of a second national bank in 1816. The First Bank of the United States had been
the brainchild of arch-Federalist Hamilton, was bitterly opposed by Jefferson,
Madison, and their fellow Republicans, and had been allowed by the latter to go
fallow once its charter expired in 1811. The financial strains exerted upon the
nation by having to wage the War of 1812 (1812-1815), however, effectively
convinced President Madison and his allies in Congress that national banking
could indeed serve a useful purpose. The resulting Second Bank of the United
States, after first struggling to find its footing, ultimately proved capable
of maintaining the nation’s line of credit and its currency on a stable
footing. Whether or not Madison could foresee this outcome in 1816, he at least
seemed to possess the humility and clarity of vision to attempt to correct a
miscarried policy in the face of ideological opposition.
With this quality in mind, Madison’s specific response to
what he evidently perceived as the failures of the Electoral College are
perhaps not so hard to understand. Said response took the form of a letter,
written to fellow Virginian George Hay (1765-1830) on August 23rd,
1823 and apparently in reply to Hay’s, “Attention to great Constitutional
topics.” Judging by some of the context that the letter provides, Hay had
earlier written to Madison with a number of proposals for reforming the
Electoral College via the mechanism of a constitutional amendment. Madison’s
answer ran through several of these proposals, expressing agreement, or
disagreement, or uncertainty, before finally offering a short passage of draft
text. The 4th President of the United States, Father of the Bill of Rights,
and co-founder of the Republican Party was apparently still of the opinion that
district elections were the best possible method for selecting Electoral
College delegates. “The district mode,” he explained,
Was mostly,
if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted; &
was exchanged for the general ticket & the legislative election, as the
only expedient for baffling the policy of the particular States which had set
the example.
One ought to make note, in this
passage, of at least two significant points. The first is Madison’s continued
affirmation that the district election method had been foremost in the minds of
the Framers when they originally designed the Electoral College. While on one
hand pegging Madison as something of a proto-Originalist – that is, someone who
chooses to interpret the Constitution through the lens of its authors’
intentions – it also implies something about his perspective on the
contemporary state of the system itself. By 1820, as noted in a previous entry
in this series, nine states practiced the winner-take-all method, nine
practiced legislative appointment, and the remaining six held district
elections. If, as he ardently maintained, the Framers really had designed the
Electoral College with the district election method in mind, then Madison
surely would have agreed that by 1823 the system had already ceased to function
as originally intended.
The
second element of the above-quoted passage worth reflecting upon is Madison’s
account of how and why “the general ticket & the legislative election”
became the preferred methods for appointing Electors. Adopting these methods,
he explained, though they were not what the system had been designed to
accommodate, was, “The only expedient for baffling the policy of the particular
States which had set the example.” This sentiment, fittingly enough, aligned
Madison with his friend and partner Jefferson. The latter – as also noted
previously – had written in a letter dated January, 1800 that, “An election by
districts would be best, if it could be general; but while 10 states choose
either by their legislatures or by a general ticket, it is folly & worse
than folly for the other 6 not to do it.” Both of these men – the co-founders
of the Republican Party and perhaps the most significant beneficiaries of its
subsequent success – favored the district election method, understood why it
was not practicable, and lamented the fact of it. So long as a critical mass of
states practiced either the winner-take-all or legislative appointment methods,
thus lending the parties that formed their respective governments a distinct
advantage, there was no profit to be had in standing on principle.
While this perspective might appear
to be an outwardly cynical one – stressing, as it does, the importance of
outcome over method – there is no reason to doubt that either Jefferson’s or
Madison’s lament was anything other than sincere. The Virginia duo may have
been the guiding hands behind the Republican Party, but they were as capable of
being blinded by the promise of victory as any of that faction’s rank and file;
or perhaps even more so, because their respective reputations, energies, and
future prospects were so wholly invested in the success or failure of the party
itself. Continued failure at the ballot box may very well have resulted in a
loss of credibility, a strengthening of the Federalist establishment, and
possibly even charges of treason or disloyalty. That being said, neither Jefferson nor Madison
was oblivious enough to completely lose sight of the sacrifices they were
making. Madison’s Federalist No. 10 speaks powerfully of its author’s distaste
for faction and his desire to construct a system in which consensus was
strongly encouraged. And yet, Madison clearly defied these sentiments by co-founding
an organized political movement, acting as one of its strategic planners,
fostering partisanship, and encouraging the use of electoral systems that favored
majoritarian rule and stymied potentially constructive debate. The result was
doubtless some degree of personal consternation. Encouraging the constitutional
codification of the district election model – as he had done for decades, but
which he could never bring himself to attempt to enact – may thus have served
as a way for James Madison the elder statesman – he was seventy-two in 1823 –
to exorcise some of the frustration or guilt he still harbored over the way he
and his fellow Republicans had so avidly sought after political advantage.
Further evidence of this rather
retrospective, almost penitent line of thought can be found in another of
Madison’s recommendations to Hay in the former’s August, 1823 missive. In
addition to conforming more closely to the original intent of the Framers,
Madison advised that a standardization of the district election method may also
have served to repel some of the more destructive aspects of partisanship and
encourage a much stronger sense of community than the status quo would admit. “The
States when voting for President by general tickets or by their Legislatures,”
he began, “are a string of beads [.]” The likely significance of the metaphor
was to emphasize the separateness and wholeness of the various states. As beads
on an abacus can be added to or subtracted from a resulting sum, so the states
that practised either the winner-take-all or legislative appointment method added
to or subtracted from the vote tallies of the various eligible candidates. The
victor successfully assembled the required number of states, irrespective of
the potentially sizeable number of voters in each state who chose otherwise.
States that failed to select the winner of the contest were likewise portrayed
by the outcomes of winner-take-all and legislative appointment as being
unequivocal in their rejection. There could be no fractions of states awarded
to one candidate or another, just as there are no fractions of beads on an
abacus. The result, among other things, was a method of election that produced
highly adversarial results – states aligned themselves entirely with one
office-seeker or another, and may thereafter have been defined by whether they
picked the winner or not.
This result, Madison avowed in his letter to Hay, was neither beneficial
nor unavoidable. If all of the states were to practice the district election
method, he wrote,
Some of
these [districts] differing in sentiment from others, and sympathizing with
that of districts in other States, they are so knit together as to break the
force of those geographical and other noxious parties which might render the
repulsive too strong for the cohesive tendencies within the Political System.
While it may have represented a
somewhat idealistic perspective on factional politics – particularly as the
nation hurtled headlong into the hyper-partisan Jacksonian era – the basic
contours of Madison’s argument are fairly straightforward. Because the district
election method would allow different regions within a single state to support
different candidates for President, Madison felt it was likely that economic,
or religious, or cultural communities would begin to reach beyond the borders
of their respective states in an effort to assemble the votes to elect their
desired nominee. Thus, instead of an outcome in which states were outwardly
united, inwardly divided, and set in opposition to one another based on party
identification, the bonds between communities and across states would be
strengthened, founded upon their shared consensus as to who would best fill the
office of chief executive. No longer would parties be compelled to do battle
over Massachusetts, Virginia, or Pennsylvania, with the victor claiming the sum
total of their respective Electoral votes. Rather, parties would be forced to
appeal to broader interests – the agrarian vote, the Evangelical vote, the
urban vote, etc. – and attempt to construct coalitions of voters across
multiple states.
Whether
it was realistic for the era or not, Madison’s belief in the ability of
political institutions to foster community and consensus was very much in
keeping with his own stated principles. Returning once more to Federalist No.
10, his interest in using large scale debate, wide spectrums of opinion, and
majority rule to decrease the traction enjoyed by divisive topics and increase
the odds of compromise are clearly and insightfully expressed. The greater the
breadth of opinion represented within a discussion, he asserted, the more likely
its participants were to find common ground, or risk failing to come to any
decision at all. In time, finding consensus would become second nature, all but
the most extreme parties would grow confident that their voices were being
heard, and a strong communal bond would coalesce around values like mutual
respect, compromise, and open deliberation. Granting, once again, that Madison
had spent the better part of his professional career after putting forth these
principles in print helping to erect a highly adversarial party system whose
existence ran counter to just about every one of them, his late-in-life
advocacy for the “cohesive tendencies within the Political System” are no less
significant. When one also considered the context of his newfound support for
the district election method – and the many marvelous benefits ascribed to it–
the fact of it becomes more remarkable still.
Madison
and Hay were, after all, both Virginians. Not only had their shared home state
contributed three of the first five Presidents, but its population – inflated,
it bears remembering, by a very large number on non-voting, politically
unrepresented slaves – consistently entitled it to either the largest or second
largest number of presidential Electors in every vote between 1788 and 1820. Under
the terms of either the winner-take-all or legislative appointment methods,
therefore, Virginia often represented one of the single greatest prizes to the
various competing parties, and often asserted itself as the crucial lynchpin of
victory – alongside New York – in the Electoral College. The Old Dominion was
also, as it happened, a bastion of the support for Madison’s Republicans, and
had voted for the winning candidate in every presidential election between 1800
and 1820. In consequence of these various advantages, there would seem to have
been little reason for two Virginians in 1823 to favor reducing either the
influence that their home state possessed or the electoral support that the
Republican Party enjoyed. A nation-wide, constitutionally-mandated adoption of
the district election method would have potentially brought an end to this
status quo by allowing Virginia’s vote to be split among however many
candidates its voters favored, and by dividing the attention and the resources of
the Republicans across a multitude of districts instead of a handful of states.
Consider, for a moment, contemporary Congressional
representation as a potential measure of how a state’s Electoral College
support would have been fractured by the adoption of the district method.
Virginia, though its Electoral vote had gone to the Republicans in every
election between 1796 and 1820, managed to send a not-inconsiderable number of
Federalists to the House of Representatives throughout this same period. In 1800,
six of the state’s nineteen Congressmen (roughly a third of its delegation)
were Federalists. This tally fell to one of twenty-two following the 1808
Mid-Term Elections, rose to seven of twenty-three by the end of 1812, and fell
back down to two of twenty-three in 1820. If Virginia had been using the
district election method throughout this period, and if the districts
established for the purpose of choosing Electors overlapped with the districts
assigned to the state’s Representatives in Congress, it is at least possible
that this small but resilient core of Federalist support could have carved out
a share of the Old Dominion’s Electoral vote for themselves. Granted, stripping
a potential six or seven of twenty-two or twenty-three votes from the Republicans’
total would likely not have represented much of a threat. It also seems likely
that if the state government was responsible for drawing Electoral College
districts, whichever party was in charge – read: the Republicans – would likely
have attempted to create – read: gerrymander – the most favorable electoral map
possible. All that being said, use of the district model would undeniably have
forced both major parties to rethink their strategic calculations and address
different sets of interests and concerns than either winner-take-all or
legislative appointment demanded of them.
Examining the same
statistics from, and applying the same proposal to, New York more clearly
illustrates the potential difference between competing at-large for a state’s
Electoral votes and Madison’s stated preference of competing in a set of
districts therein. In every presidential election between 1800 and 1820, New
York supported a Republican candidate, and beginning in 1812 they possessed the
single largest share – twenty-nine – of the two hundred seventeen Electoral
votes up for grabs. In spite of its seemingly unwavering support for the party
of Jefferson and Madison, however, the Empire State was closely divided between
Federalists and Republicans throughout this two decade span. Four of New York’s
ten Congressmen elected in 1800 were Federalists, putting the two parties one
seat away from a dead heat. This tally increased – though the percentage
decreased – to five of seventeen in 1802, dropped to three of seventeen in 1806,
climbed to eight of seventeen in 1808, soared to nineteen of twenty-seven in
1812, and finished with seven of twenty-seven in 1820. Projecting the same scenario
as with Virginia – Electoral College districts that roughly overlapped with
Congressional districts – the use of the district election method would
seemingly have caused New York’s support for one party or the other to
fluctuate significantly from one presidential election to the next. Bearing in
mind the same caveats as noted with Virginia – the potential effects of
gerrymandering and the generally superior position of the Republican Party –
and factoring in the often ruthless competition that party organizations engaged
in during the lead-up to a presidential election – as previously illustrated by
the furor surrounding the New York legislative elections of 1800 – and the end
result of applying the district election method to the state New York is
admittedly hard to calculate. Nevertheless, there would be a result of some
kind. Strategies would shift, and priorities would alter, and the dynamics of
both state and national elections would change.
This, in spite of the harm it may have visited upon the fortunes
of his own party, was evidently was Madison wanted. As he indicated in his
letter to George Hay, the Electoral College need not only serve as a mechanism
for appointing the nation’s chief executive. Suitably restructured, it could
aid in fostering a greater sense of community than the preceding twenty years
of partisan warfare had wrought. “Cohesive tendencies” were what at least
partially concerned him, and a system that was able to “knit together” the
residents of electoral districts across multiple states was what he evidently
desired. This interest in process as well as outcome – how something is
achieved, as well as exactly what is achieved – was typical of Madison, though
his actions across the two prior decades showed a greater interest in seeking
the latter. The American political establishment manifested a similar fixation
– with state and national parties forever seeking advantage in the shadow of
election after election. Indeed, by 1823 the nation was if anything
transitioning into one of the most partisan eras in its history rather than
shifting towards anything like the more deliberative atmosphere that Madison
seemed to favor. In consequence, the reflections and proposals he put forward
in his correspondence with George Hay are at once highly unusual for the
period, informative of how the Electoral College actually functions, and not a
little bit tragic.
Despite recurrent claims by pundits and party faithful in
the 20th and 21st centuries that the quirks inherent in
the Electoral College are all a part of what the Framers intended, the often
insightful and well-structured objections registered by some of the same quite
clearly indicate that this is not the case. Indeed, it arguably ceased to be
the case within a quarter century of the system’s implementation in 1788. Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison could both fairly claim to have had a hand in
designing the Electoral College. And both also seemed to have a reasonably
clear idea of the specific role that the Electors were supposed to perform.
Hamilton made it quite plain in Federalist No. 68 that the individual
discretion of the various members of the Electoral College was fully intended
to inform who was chosen to serve as President of the United States. The office
was too powerful and too vulnerable to potential abuse, he wrote in 1788, to be
bestowed unthinkingly, without due deliberation by those who possessed the
requisite “information and discernment,” or as a reward for displays of “low
intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” In spite of these public
assertions of what he and his colleagues had intended, however, the Electoral
College very quickly began to change.
Parties emerged, solidified, and began directing their respective
organizations to seek every advantage possible in the ongoing contest for political
power. The laws which governed how Electors were chosen – left by the
Constitution entirely up to the states to define – became a major theatre in
this ongoing battle. At that point – as early as the mid-1790s – the intentions
nurtured by the Framers took a decided back seat to the needs of the nation’s
increasingly animated partisans. The district election method – the expressed
favorite of Hamilton and Madison, both – began to lose ground to more expedient
voting schemes. Deliberation began to fade as a major quality of the Electoral
College. Party strategy became the core consideration. In spite of their
ideological objections, Hamilton and Madison were themselves ultimately
complicit in advancing this trend. They became tacticians, sought to clear the
way for the success of their respective parties, and actively helped along the
conversion of the system they had lent their hands to create from one that was
intended to benefit the American people to one that first and foremost
benefited specific factions thereof. And yet, they were no longer its masters.
The Electoral College remained in part their creation and they could both
continue to claim special knowledge of how it was originally intended to
function. But by the turn of the 19th century, the system had
effectively taken on a life of its own.
Hamilton’s failed attempt at a Constitutional amendment and
Madison’s letter to George Hay both speak to this fact. If, in 1802, the
Electors were continuing to perform their duties as the Framers had envisioned,
why would one of their number attempt to alter the text that governed their
powers and responsibilities? If the Electoral College was functioning as
designed, why would one of its designers have wished to modify the original
plan? The desires expressed by Madison in his missive to Hay beg similar
questions. If the system by which the American people elected their chief
executive was working as intended in 1823, why would one of its architects have
declared that a major modification was “very proper to be brought forward [?]”
If the modes of choosing Electors then in favor – winner-take-all and
legislative appointment – were in keeping with what he and his colleagues had preferred
from the start, why would Madison have described their adoption as “expedient
[?]” As it happened, neither man seemed entirely satisfied with what the
Electoral College had become over the course of their respective professional
lives. Notwithstanding their personal contributions on that score, the system
had turned into something they had never intended it to be. The degree of their
dissatisfaction, and the importance they attached to a remedy, may fairly be
measured by their shared resort to Constitutional amendment. Only the laws and
regulations considered absolutely paramount to the proper administration of the
American republic were to be contained within that hallowed document. If
modifying the same was the only reasonable method of addressing the flaws they
perceived, then the contemporary Electoral College must have been, from their
perspective, well and truly broken.
That the efforts of both these men ultimately failed is no
less significant that the fact that they felt the need to try. As striking as
the image undoubtedly is of two of the Framers of the United States
Constitution attempting to repair a flaw of their own creation, it may in fact
come second to their respective inability to accomplish the same. Not only had
the Electoral College been so completely transformed by the partisan conflicts
of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that its
creators felt the need to rein it in, but its transformation arguably helped it
to elude their best attempts. Whatever cultural or political authority Hamilton
still possessed in 1802, or Madison held fast to in 1823, the Electoral College
was no longer theirs to command. By the fourth national election under its
auspices, the system belonged to the parties, or to the states, or to the
American people themselves. It obeyed their wishes, channeled their desires,
and elected their President. Hamilton and Madison, with their principles and
their ideals, their belief in deliberation and their faith in the power of
process, had been left behind. In consequence, from at least the turn of the 19th
century until the present, it cannot fairly be said that the Electoral College
is and has been what the Framers endeavored to make it. Rather, it is and has
been what the American people have decided it should be.
Anyhow, you know
the drill. Take a look.
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