Federalist 68 Read Closely, Hamilton's Defense of How America Picks a President

In March of 1788, a New York lawyer sat down to defend a system for choosing the most powerful officer in the new government, and he opened with a boast. The method of choosing the President, he said, was almost the only part of the Constitution to have escaped severe censure.

That boast has not aged well. No part of the Constitution has been argued over more in the last quarter-century than the way we pick a President. So let us do what the argument rarely does: go back to the document itself. Federalist 68, which appeared over the pen name Publius, is Alexander Hamilton's case for the Electoral College. Read closely, it is more careful, and more interesting, than either its fans or its critics usually admit.

The text the essay defends

Start with Article II, Section 1, because Hamilton is defending words, not a slogan. The second clause provides:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

Three features of that sentence govern the whole essay. The states, not the national government, appoint the electors. The legislature of each state decides the manner of appointment. And the number of electors per state equals its House seats plus its two Senate seats, which builds the federal compromise of 1787 into the count. Federalist 68 is the explanation of why those choices were wise. Hamilton also meant it as a response to critics who feared the new executive would be a monarch in disguise. His answer was that the manner of choosing him proved otherwise.

Passage one, the people have a voice

Hamilton begins with the popular element:

It was desirable, that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.

Mark the opening. Hamilton does not say the people should be excluded. He says their sense should "operate." The question is how. He answers that the right of choosing should be committed "not to any pre-established body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture." That phrase, "for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture," is the key to the design. The electors are not a standing body that could grow into a permanent aristocracy. They are chosen for one job, in one election year, and then they go home. Hamilton's point is that a body convened for a single task has no time to build a power base.

This was a real answer to a real fear. The delegates in Philadelphia had considered several modes of selection. Some had favored selection by Congress, which would have made the President a creature of the legislature. Others had preferred election by the state legislatures, or by the governors, or by direct popular vote. The Committee of Eleven, late in the convention, proposed the electors. For that process, see The Committee of Eleven Invented the Electoral College in the Final Weeks.

Passage two, deliberation

Hamilton's second claim is about the quality of the choice:

It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, 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.

Here is the heart of the elite argument, and I think it deserves a fair reading. Hamilton does not say that ordinary people are fools. He says that choosing a President is a task of judgment about a person's qualities, and that a small group, chosen for the purpose, acting together and deliberating, is better placed to weigh them than a scattered mass reading about candidates through newspapers. He adds that a small number of persons "selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass" will be "most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations."

You can accept the principle without accepting the modern conclusion. A jury of twelve is not an insult to the public. It is a recognition that some decisions are better made by people who hear the evidence together and have to answer for their conclusion. Hamilton wanted the electors to be a jury for the presidency. Whether the system still works that way is a separate question, and I'll come to it.

Passage three, cabal, intrigue and foreign influence

The next passage is the one that deserves the most attention in an age of foreign interference stories:

Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.

Notice what Hamilton is worried about. It is not tyranny from a popular majority. It is corruption of the selection process itself, above all by foreign governments that would love a President in their debt. Hamilton had a long list of reasons to fear this. The American Republic in 1788 was a weak confederation of former colonies surrounded by great powers: Britain to the north, Spain to the south and west, France as an ally with its own ambitions. A presidency chosen by a small and corruptible body, say Congress, would give foreign courts a few dozen people to bribe. A presidency chosen by many electors, scattered across thirteen states, who met on the same day in their own states and then dispersed, would be harder to reach.

That is why Hamilton stresses the dispersal. The electors, he writes, would assemble in their respective states, and the "detached and divided situation" in which they met would expose them "much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people." Hamilton's explanation of why the electors do not gather in a single national capital is a security argument. A body that never meets in one room is a body that a cabal cannot easily lobby.

He then adds the exclusions that appear in Article II: no member of Congress, and no officer of the national government, could be an elector. The point was to keep the President from being chosen by the people who owed their jobs to him or whom he might reward. The system was designed to be independent of both the legislature and the executive.

Passage four, the case against a tumult

Hamilton's next argument is about stability:

The choice of several to form an intermediate body of electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.

A direct national election for a single office, he suggests, concentrates the whole country's passion on one result. One recount, one dispute, one claim of irregularity in a single election, and the entire nation is at the barricades. A system of many separate elections in many states confines the damage. A fire in one state's election does not automatically burn the whole house.

This is Madison's argument from Federalist 10 in miniature: a large republic tames faction by dividing it, and an extended sphere makes it harder for any single passion to sweep the whole. Read Federalist 10 Explains Why a Large Republic Tames Faction Best with Federalist 68 open next to it, and you will see two essays making the same structural point about different institutions.

The argument has a modern echo. Imagine a national popular election that came down to a margin of a few thousand votes among 150 million cast. Every ballot in every precinct in every state would suddenly matter to the national result, and the whole country would be litigating every county's counting procedures at once. The Electoral College divides that fight into fifty smaller ones. Opponents say that is unfair. Hamilton would say it is the point.

Passage five, the qualifications of a President

The last great passage of the essay is a claim about the kind of person the system would produce:

Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.

And then the prediction: "It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue." Hamilton's confidence is charming, and the record since 1788 has made it a little ironic. Still, look at the logic. He is arguing that a candidate who needs support across many states, from many kinds of voters, cannot rely on a narrow local base. That claim has real force. A modern candidate who wins the presidency must assemble a majority of electoral votes, which means winning many states with different economies and political cultures. The system rewards breadth.

He closes with the line he is best remembered for among students of government: "the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration." That is a standard worth applying to every institution, including this one.

What the Twelfth Amendment changed

Hamilton wrote about the system as the Constitution first designed it. That original design did not last, and it is only fair to say so.

In the original Article II, each elector cast two votes for President. The candidate with the most votes became President, and the runner-up became Vice President. It worked, after a fashion, for the first elections, when George Washington was the obvious choice. Then political parties arrived. In 1796 the two highest finishers were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, of opposing parties, and they became President and Vice President. In 1800 the Democratic-Republican electors voted for both Jefferson and Aaron Burr, as the party intended, and the two tied. The tie went to the House of Representatives, which took thirty-six ballots to choose Jefferson.

The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, fixed the defect by having electors cast separate votes for President and Vice President. It also provides that if no candidate has a majority of electors, the House chooses from among the top three, voting by state delegation, with each state casting one vote. The story is told in The Election of 1800 Broke the Electoral College and the 12th Amendment Fixed It. The amendment is the first admission that Hamilton's design assumed a world without parties.

Which expectations held and which did not

Here is my honest scorecard.

Held: selection through the states. Federalist 68 predicted that the process would run through the states, and it does. The Constitution leaves each state legislature free to choose how electors are appointed, and the power has been used in different ways: legislative selection in the early years, district elections, and in time the statewide popular vote that nearly every state uses today. Over the nineteenth century the popular vote became the rule in nearly every state.

Held: breadth. The system continues to reward candidates who can win across regions.

Held: containment. Disputes remain local. A close result in one state produces a fight in one state's courts under that state's laws.

Changed: the independent elector. Hamilton imagined electors using their own judgment. Within a generation, electors were pledged party loyalists, chosen because they would vote for the party's nominee. The electors' deliberation moved from the electoral meeting to the party convention. That's a real departure from Federalist 68, and I won't pretend otherwise. In Chiafalo v. Washington (2020), the Supreme Court unanimously held that a state may require its electors to vote for the candidate the state's voters chose, which confirms that the pledge, not the independent judgment, is how the system now operates.

Changed: the direct link to the people. Hamilton expected electors chosen by the people for the special purpose. The people now choose a ticket, not an elector, and most voters never see the electors' names. The mechanism is intact, but the intermediary has become a formality.

Partly held: freedom from faction. The essay hoped to guard against cabal. The two-party system is, in a sense, a standing faction, which the Founders did not intend. But the system has not produced the foreign capture Hamilton feared. A century of intrigue has run through parties and campaigns, not through the electors.

The strongest objection

The best argument against Hamilton comes from his own premise. If the intermediary has become a formality, why keep it? Why not elect the President by national popular vote and be done?

Here is the answer, in the debater's style: three points. First, the formality is doing real work. It is the reason the election is fifty-one contests, not one, and the containment benefit Hamilton described is the reason a close election in one state does not freeze the republic. Second, the federal structure is part of the point. The Constitution is a compact among states that kept their identities, and the President is the only officer elected by a process that reflects both population and statehood. Third, a change this large belongs in the amendment process of Article V, not in a workaround. I take up one such workaround in The National Popular Vote Compact Is an End Run Around Article II. If the people want a national popular vote, the constitutional route exists, and the bar is high on purpose.

That is not the end of the matter. Reasonable people can look at the way modern campaigns concentrate on a handful of states and wonder whether the incentives are healthy. I'd answer that every system has incentives, and that a national vote would simply move the campaigning from swing states to the largest media markets. But the conversation is legitimate, and conservatives should be able to have it in the open. For the facts and the fictions in this debate, see Seven Myths About the Electoral College That Fall Apart Against the Record.

What to take from Hamilton

Federalist 68 is not a perfect prophecy. It is a design argument by a man who understood that institutions have to survive bad weather. His worry was cabal, intrigue and foreign influence, and the system he defended spreads power across states and across time so that those dangers have a harder time finding a handle. He was wrong about parties. He was right about corruption, tumult and the value of dispersal.

Read the essay yourself. It is short, it is vivid, and it contains a better account of why the Constitution is built the way it is than most of the commentary written about it since.

The case in brief

1. Federalist 68 defends an Electoral College in which the states appoint electors "for the special purpose" and the electors meet apart in their own states, so that the choice is both popular and deliberate.
2. Hamilton's main fears were cabal, intrigue and corruption, above all foreign influence, and the system's dispersal across states and time is a security design.
3. The original Article II failed with the rise of parties, as the tie of 1800 showed, and the Twelfth Amendment of 1804 repaired it with separate votes for President and Vice President.
4. Hamilton's hope for independent electors gave way to pledged ones, confirmed by Chiafalo v. Washington (2020), but his arguments about containment, breadth and federalism still hold.
5. A change to a national popular vote is a serious proposal that belongs in the amendment process, not in an interstate workaround.

What you can do: read Article II, Section 1 and the Twelfth Amendment on the Constitution page, then read Federalist 68 in full and write down which of Hamilton's three fears you think is the greatest danger today.