Federalist No. 68, et al, Part III: Time and Space

To pull back for a moment, let us return to the second paragraph of Federalist No. 68. Two points were extracted from that specific passage quite early in the previous entry of this series, both of which were claimed to recur across the length of Hamilton’s essay. The first was drawn from the assertion that the choice of President should reflect “the sense of the People” and yet be committed “to men chosen by the People [.]” Taking this and later corresponding statements in hand, it seemed a reasonable conclusion that the architects of the Electoral College desired that the general population of the United States should have a strong bond with their chief executive while remaining functionally isolated from the process of election. Hopefully the content of last week’s post bore that contention out without reducing anyone to a state of unconsciousness. The second point to be drawn for the aforementioned passage of Federalist No. 68 – that Hamilton’s use of the phrase “for the special purpose, and at that particular conjuncture” to describe the existence of the Electoral College suggested that speed and decisiveness were important factors to its design – was discussed in brief, but then put aside for later discussion.

     Well…

     Of particular note amidst Hamilton’s opening statement within paragraph two of No. 68 was his use of the phrase “pre-established body” to describe what the Electoral College was not. Under the Constitution, and within the context of a Presidential election, the Supreme Court, and the houses of Congress, and the various state legislatures would all constitute pre-established bodies, each with their own responsibilities, traditions, assumptions, and schedules. So constituted, none of these institutions could be depended upon to consistently put aside their interests and choose the best individual from among a field of candidates to become the President of the United States. Each would doubtless be inclined to choose a chief executive favorable to its own agenda, and the American people would lose a potentially invaluable counterweight to the power and influence of the federal legislature, or the judiciary, or the states. This fixation on the inappropriateness of assigning the selection of the chief executive to any permanent institution recurred in the sixth paragraph of No. 68 – the Framers, Hamilton explained, “Have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any pre-existing bodies of men” – to the point that it appears the architects of the Electoral College were particularly concerned with the power of bias, and partisanship, and separating the highest office in the land from either.

Perhaps this speaks to some latent fear on their part of the looming threat of factionalism and its effect on the nation’s nascent political institutions. While at no point did No. 68 claim that Congress or the state legislatures were incompetent or unfit to serve their respective constituencies, the collective experiences of the Framers in national and state politics doubtless made it clear to them that entrenched disagreements and powerful interests were likely an unavoidable element of parliamentary-style government. Accepting this – albeit in some cases grudgingly – the men who designed the Electoral College may have understandably wished to prevent the less-desirable aspects of deliberative government from influencing the process by which the nation chose its chief executive. After all, the President was supposed to represent the American people, and not whatever political compromise managed to limp its way through a special session of Congress. However, because the Framers also did not believe that the general population was well-suited to such a task on its own, and nor did they seem to trust a purely popular vote to produce a truly representative result, a contingent body like the Electoral College likely seemed the only reasonable alternative. While the Electors, within their various state delegations, would operate in a similar fashion to a legislative assembly – electing officers, holding debates, casting votes, etc. – they would theoretically be shielded from the worst aspects of similar representative bodies by the simple fact that they would never be convened long enough for disagreements to become intractable or factions to form. Also, because the final vote of each state delegation would reflect the will of every Elector – that is to say, every vote cast would count towards the various candidates’ totals – and there would only ever be one item on the agenda, there would be no need for Electors to consider anything other than the task immediately before them.    

     Aside from their unfortunate tendency towards factionalism, Hamilton and his cohorts also seemed to believe that the membership of Congress and the state legislatures were made susceptible by their public status and lengthy terms in office to what he described in the fifth paragraph of No. 68 as “Cabal, intrigue, and corruption.” The same passage further identified the foulest form of these noxious influences upon the election of the “Chief Magistracy of the Union” as the, “Desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our Councils.” In short, it seemed, the Framers feared that foreign powers would attempt to influence the election of the American President. The logic behind this conjecture would seem fairly straightforward in theory. Legislators were public figures, known to their neighbors and the world at large to personally wield some portion of the power of the state. They were also many of them bound to serve in their public posts for a period of months or years. These two factors – their public possession of power and their continuance in office – made them valuable servants of the public good, and yet also marked them as potential targets for bribery, graft, or the general peddling of influence. As public officials they could be easily located, and the extent of their institutional influence was a matter of record. And as semi-permanent fixtures of government, prospective influencers would have months or years in which to establish quid pro quo relationships with them. It therefore stood to reason that any public servant in the United States was potentially vulnerable to becoming the tool of a particular foreign interest, or body, or individual intent on exerting control over the public affairs of the American republic. Give these same public servants the responsibility for selecting the nation’s chief executive, and the consequence may well have been a President chosen by British, or French, or Spanish intrigue rather than by the American people.

The Electoral College supposedly countered this unpalatable possibility by its aforementioned status as a kind of contingent institution. The Framers, as Hamilton put it in the previously-cited sixth paragraph of No. 68,

Have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any pre-existing bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to an immediate act of the People of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment.

While an admission by one of the Framers of the Constitution that the government he had helped create was perhaps endemically susceptible to foreign corruption would seem a rather alarming prospect, Hamilton showed little concern in Federalist No. 68 for the implications thereof. Whether or not the national legislative process or the state governments were being unduly influenced by malevolent foreign entities was seemingly of no consequence. What mattered, apparently, was that the President of the United States – an official possessed of unrivalled power – was elected via a process wholly free of malign alien influences and wholly dependent upon the will of the American people. For this reason, Hamilton explained, Electors were to be chosen by the people, would meet and submit their votes for President as soon as they could, and would then relinquish their offices and return to their private lives. They would have nothing to do with any permanent institution of the federal or state governments, and would thus be isolated from any corruption those bodies might have suffered.

In fairness to Hamilton, he was almost certainly both personally and professionally concerned by the prospect of foreign intriguers gaining any degree of influence over any level of government in the United States of America. Short-sighted though he could often be, and more enamoured with British institutions than many of his countrymen were particularly comfortable with, the 1^st Secretary of the Treasury was an ardent nationalist. The ability of the nation that he had helped to forge to chart its own path in the world unimpeded by European or other interference was among his paramount concerns as an economist, legislator, military administrator, and public servant. In consequence, one should not take his evident acceptance, presented in Federalist No. 68, of corruption within certain institutions – his seeming desire to quarantine the problem rather than treat it – wholly at face value. It rather seems likely that Hamilton’s apparent willingness to accept the possibility of foreign influence over certain aspects of government in America was a pragmatic response to what may have been a truly intractable problem.

In light of just how many state and federal legislators, and justices, and magistrates served in office in the United States at any given time, even in the late 18

^th century, as well as the practical difficulty of keeping track of who they met with or where their money came from, it was almost certainly impossible to prevent some foreign government or other from gaining a degree of influence over the domestic affairs of the nation. Certainly there were laws that could be put in place, designed to ferret out or neutralize the agents of alien powers, but such measures could only go so far. Global empires like those possessed by the British, the French, and the Spanish were fantastically wealthy, sophisticated, and powerful, and doubtless had a great deal to offer a Senator or state assemblyman willing to aid them in their clandestine efforts. There was only so much any authority or institution in the United States could offer to counter such conspiratorial exertions, and probably the energy spent in pursuit of foreign intrigue was better spent elsewhere. This was perhaps the chief impulse behind Hamilton’s apparent willingness in No. 68 to accept the possibility of foreign taint in some aspects of American government while endeavoring to guard against it in others. A realist as well as a nationalist, he very likely understood that preserving the integrity of the executive branch of the federal government – embodied by the office of President – was actually possible to achieve in a way that attempting to erect the same protections nationwide simply was not. That the Presidency was to wield perhaps the greatest single share of power within the national government doubtless provided further encouragement on the Framers’ part to defend its legitimacy at nearly any cost.       

In addition to avoiding the more problematic aspects of collective decision-making by performing its function as quickly as possible, and also maintaining a distinct separation between itself and potentially compromised pre-existing institutions, Hamilton described in paragraph six of Federalist No. 68 that the Electoral College also served to safeguard the sanctity of the office of President by keeping its membership geographically scattered. The manner by which this situation offered a counter to a potentially malicious manipulation of the election process was quite simple, and if anything required less effort for greater effect than if the Electors were asked to assemble in a single location. “The business of corruption,” Hamilton accordingly declared in the sixth paragraph of no. 68,

When it is to embrace so considerable a number of men, requires time as well as means. Nor would it be found easy suddenly to embark them, dispersed as they would be over thirteen States, in any combinations founded upon motives which, though they could not properly be denominated corrupt, might yet be of a nature to mislead them from their duty.

A cursory glance at a map of the United States, as well as a basic understanding of the amount of time it took to travel even moderate distances in the late 18^th century, would seem to corroborate Hamilton’s core assumption.

In 1788, a particularly fast mail coach could cover the distance between Edinburgh, Scotland, and London, England – a journey of about four hundred miles – in approximately four days. By comparison, the distance between Exeter, New Hampshire (the state capital as of 1790) and Augusta, Georgia (likewise) was over one thousand miles. When one also considers that the lack of public infrastructure – paved roads, canals, bridges, etc. – made communication between certain regions of the 18^th century United States exceedingly slow and correspondingly unreliable, the possibility of any single entity co-opting either the elections or deliberations of potentially hundreds of Electors across the length and breadth of the American republic would indeed have surely seemed a fairly ludicrous proposal to Hamilton and his cohorts. Possessed of adequate information and resources, a foreign agent stationed in Albany may well have been able to “capture” New York’s parcel of Electoral Votes – twelve as of 1790 – for whichever candidate their masters preferred. Indeed, it must be admitted that covert functionaries located in just about any state capital could potentially have worked the same magic with the same result. And yet, as No. 68 made quite clear, the Electors were independent agents whose discretion was integral to the process of electing the President of the United States. They were not required, by the terms of the Constitution, to vote any way other than how their conscience dictated. Attempting to influence even the twelve Electors chosen to speak for the people of New York thus represented no small effort. Accordingly, the prospect of attempting to herd the majority of New York’s Electors toward a particular conclusion, as well as those of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and however many other states were required to see a particular candidate elected, doubtless appeared to the Framers to be a practical impossibility. From the perspective of 1787, next to nothing could have allowed such efforts to coordinate with one another swiftly enough to facilitate the corruption of the whole endeavor.    

Time, it seemed, was the key to the viability of the Electoral College, and physical space. Because the Electors would only hold their offices for the duration of the election – a few months at the most – they could not be easily bribed, threatened, or otherwise influenced quickly enough or effectively enough to shape the final outcome. The window between their election and the election of the President was too narrow to permit their being targeted by the agents of a foreign power, or even by certain domestic interests. Nor was this interval lengthy enough to allow the kinds of entrenched disagreements that had become common features of both Congress and the various states legislatures to seep into and corrupt the process by which the Electors submitted their votes. Preventing the Electors from ever meeting as a single group likewise ensured the efficacy of the project. Smaller delegations would be more able to fully explore the issues attendant to the election of a chief executive than a single particularly large one. Individual speakers would be permitted more time to make themselves heard, and debates would be given the freedom to delve into whichever areas of policy or philosophy the Electors deemed necessary. Utilizing physical space also benefited the Framer’s anti-corruption agenda by making it that much harder for those wishing to influence the outcome of a presidential election to surmount the logistical hurdles involved. These combined safeguards may not have between them created a perfect system for electing a chief executive, Hamilton was willing to admit in the first paragraph on No. 68, “But if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent.” 

With this prideful sentiment in mind, and taking into account all of the various preferences and anxieties nurtured by the Framers that the previous discussion has hopefully exposed, it at last remains to determine precisely what they intended the Electoral College to be. To that end, several key elements appear most obvious. First and perhaps foremost, its seems quite clear that the Framers created the Electoral College primarily because they felt that neither the general population nor any permanent institution of government could be trusted to elect the nation’s chief executive. The American people were too poorly educated, too uninformed, and too easily led by their passions, while Congress and the state legislatures alike were too prone to partisan squabbling and perhaps inescapably vulnerable to corruption. The Electors represented a comfortable middle ground because they possessed a strong relationship with the voting public and enjoyed a number of the advantages of government by collective while managing to avoid both the credulity of the former and the contentiousness of the latter.

Based on Hamilton’s recurrent refrains within the text of Federalist No. 68 of the importance of guarding the Electoral College from bias, foreign influence, or motives which, “though they could not be denominated corrupt, might yet be of a nature to mislead [,]” it also seems fairly obvious that the Framers were very keen on the Electors being absolutely free to exercise their individual discretion. Nowhere was it mentioned that the members of the Electoral College were bound to vote along the same lines as their constituents, and not once were parties, or primary voters, or state chairs invoked as vital members of the electoral process. Rather, to once more cite a particularly illuminating passage from the third paragraph of No. 68,

The immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station [of President], and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.  

        

If the Elector chosen by the people were simply to vote in mirror of the people, there would be no need for them to analyze anything, engage in any sort of deliberation, or pay any heed to whatever reasons or inducements concerned what would really only appear to be a choice on their part. In fact, the opposite was quite clearly the case. The ideal Electors, as defined by Hamilton in No. 68, were expected to possess the “information and discernment” required to complete what he described as the “complicated investigations” inherent to their sole task of electing the President. In consequence, the Electoral College that the Framers originally envisioned might almost be thought of as a wholly independent fourth branch of the United States government – the Electoral Branch, chosen by the American people every four years and tasked with determining who among their fellow citizens was best suited to wield the power and shoulder the responsibility of the nation’s highest office.