The Committee of Eleven Invented the Electoral College in the Final Weeks

Philadelphia, the last day of August 1787. The delegates have been in session since May. The windows of the State House have been kept shut for secrecy through a summer of heat, and the room has heard the same argument about the presidency come back, be settled, and come back again. The Convention has voted to let Congress choose the president, then voted for electors, then voted for Congress again. They are tired, they are behind schedule, and the one question nobody can solve is how to pick the man who will run the government.

So they do what every exhausted body of lawmakers does. They send it to a committee.

What came back four days later was the Electoral College. It was not an ancient institution, a carefully planned design from the first week, or a conspiracy. It was the solution to a problem the Convention had been failing to solve for three months, produced by eleven men in the last weeks of a long summer. Here is how it happened, and why the solution has outlasted every alternative proposed since.

The problem the delegates could not solve

Choosing a chief executive in a republic of thirteen states, spread along a thousand miles of coastline with poor roads and slow mail, was a genuinely new problem. There was no model. The states chose their own governors in various ways, several through their legislatures. The ancient republics offered cautionary tales, not working templates. And the delegates had to balance demands that pulled in different directions:

1. The president had to be independent of Congress, or the separation of powers would collapse into legislative supremacy.
2. He had to be chosen by a process the people would accept as legitimate.
3. The process had to work across a large country with slow communication, where most voters would know little about candidates from distant states.
4. It had to be acceptable to both large and small states, which had nearly broken up the Convention over representation in Congress before the compromise of July 16.
5. It had to be acceptable to Southern states, whose position in any scheme depended on how their enslaved populations were counted.
6. It had to resist intrigue, the cabals and foreign influence the delegates feared most.

Every option they tried failed at least one of these tests.

Option one: selection by Congress

The Virginia Plan, which Edmund Randolph presented on May 29, provided that the national executive would be chosen by the national legislature. This seemed natural. Many state governors were chosen that way, and Congress under the Articles had chosen its own officers.

In the first days of June the Convention adopted a single seven-year term and selection by the national legislature. It reaffirmed the method several times in July and again in late August, when it voted that the two houses would choose by joint ballot.

But the delegates kept running into the same wall. If Congress chose the president, he would depend on Congress. He would court its members, trade favors for votes, and owe his office to the body he was supposed to check. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania warned that a president chosen by the legislature would be the creature of the legislature, and that the result would be the work of intrigue, of cabal and of faction.

The obvious remedy was to make the president ineligible for reelection, so he would have no reason to curry favor. The Convention did that at several points. But that remedy created a new problem. A president who could never be reelected had no incentive to perform well and no way for the people to reward a good one. The Convention went back and forth on term length and reeligibility, proposing terms of seven years, six years, eleven, fifteen and, from Rufus King, twenty years, which he said was the medium life of princes, a remark Madison's editors have suggested may have been meant as a caricature. The delegates were going in circles, and the circles were getting smaller.

Option two: selection by state legislatures

A second idea was to let the state legislatures choose the president, or to let them choose electors who would. On July 19, the Convention adopted a plan from Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut under which electors chosen by the state legislatures would choose the president. Within a week it reversed itself and returned to selection by Congress, partly because of the difficulty and expense of bringing electors from distant states.

The objection to giving the choice to state legislatures directly was the mirror image of the objection to Congress. A president chosen by the states would depend on them, and would be pressed to favor their interests over the national government's. The delegates who wanted a strong national executive, Madison, Wilson and Morris among them, opposed it for that reason.

Option three: direct popular election

The third option was the one that sounds most natural today. James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued for it from the first days of June and was its most consistent advocate. On July 17 Gouverneur Morris moved that the president be elected by the people at large. The motion was defeated, nine states to one. Only Pennsylvania voted for it.

Why did it fail so badly? Not, as is often claimed, merely because the delegates distrusted ordinary people, though some did. George Mason of Virginia compared referring the choice of a chief magistrate to the people to referring a trial of colors to a blind man, because the size of the country made it impossible for voters to know the candidates. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts worried that the people would be misled by a few designing men organized across the states.

The practical objections were serious. In a country of slow communications, voters in Georgia would know nothing about a candidate from New Hampshire. Each state would likely vote for its own favorite son, and no candidate would win a majority. The largest states would dominate.

There was also the question of slavery, and honesty requires facing it. James Madison said on July 19 that popular election was in his view the fittest method, but that it faced a serious difficulty: the right of suffrage was much more widely held in the Northern than the Southern states, and the South could have no influence in a popular election on account of its enslaved population. Any system built on the allocation of seats in Congress, by contrast, would carry over the three-fifths compromise. That fact is part of the record, and it should be told plainly, along with the larger story of how the three-fifths clause actually worked, told in The Three-Fifths Clause Limited Slaveholder Power and Measured No One's Worth.

The Committee of Eleven

By the end of August the Convention was stuck. On August 31 it created a committee to take up all the questions it had postponed, with one member from each state present. Because New York's remaining delegates had gone home and Rhode Island never came, there were eleven states, and so eleven members. The committee, often called the Committee on Postponed Parts, was chaired by David Brearley of New Jersey.

Its members were Nicholas Gilman of New Hampshire, Rufus King of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Brearley of New Jersey, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, John Dickinson of Delaware, Daniel Carroll of Maryland, James Madison of Virginia, Hugh Williamson of North Carolina, Pierce Butler of South Carolina and Abraham Baldwin of Georgia.

Look at that list. It held large-state nationalists like Madison and Morris and small-state defenders like Sherman and Dickinson, Northerners and Southerners. Whatever came out of it would need to satisfy all of them.

The report of September 4

On September 4, 1787, Brearley presented the committee's report. Its central proposal on the presidency was this:

1. Each state would appoint electors "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct", in a number equal to its senators plus its representatives in Congress. That phrase is the one in Article II today.
2. The electors would meet in their own states, not in a single national gathering, and each would vote for two persons, at least one of whom was not from his own state.
3. The person with the most votes, if a majority of the electors appointed, would be president. The runner-up would be vice president, an office the committee created.
4. If no one had a majority, or if two tied, the Senate would choose from the top five.
5. The term would be four years, with no bar on reelection.

Watch how this solved every problem at once.

The president no longer depended on Congress, so he could be reeligible, and the term could be shortened to four years. Electors meeting in their own states could not be bought or organized into a national cabal; they would gather once, vote and disband. Requiring each elector to vote for someone outside his own state answered the favorite-son problem: each elector's second vote would likely go to a national figure. Allocating electors by the size of each state's congressional delegation carried the Connecticut Compromise of July 16 into presidential elections, giving small states a modest boost through their two senators while letting population count most. Letting each legislature decide how to appoint its electors respected the states, and left room for popular choice where a state wanted it.

The Convention made one important change. Many delegates worried that because no candidate would usually win a majority of electors, the Senate would end up choosing most presidents, which would make the Senate too powerful. On September 6, on a suggestion from Sherman and Williamson, the delegates moved the contingent election from the Senate to the House of Representatives, with each state's delegation casting a single vote. That preserved the small states' equality in the final round while taking the decision away from the Senate, which already shared treaties and appointments with the president.

The Convention adopted the plan. Eleven days later, on September 17, the delegates signed the Constitution.

Hamilton's defense in Federalist 68

Hamilton defended the result in Federalist 68, published in March 1788. He began with a striking observation: the method of choosing the president was almost the only part of the system that had escaped severe criticism from opponents. Then he wrote the line that has followed the Electoral College ever since:

"if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent."

His argument was that the system combined popular judgment with deliberation. He wrote that "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." Electors chosen for the single purpose, meeting in their own states, would be less open to corruption and intrigue than any standing body. He also stressed what the Framers feared most:

"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"

The system was built to reward national appeal over regional appeal. A candidate who could win only in his own region could not win at all. Hamilton's essay is read closely in Federalist 68 Read Closely, Hamilton's Defense of How America Picks a President.

The strongest objection, and the answer

The strongest objection today is not that the Electoral College was designed badly. It is that it was designed for a world that no longer exists. Electors no longer deliberate; they are pledged party loyalists. Communication is instant; voters in Georgia can see every candidate from New Hampshire. Slavery is abolished. So, the argument goes, the reasons for the system have vanished and only its distortions remain, including the possibility that the winner of the national popular vote loses.

Here is the answer.

1. The core purposes remain. The committee's system was built to require broad, cross-regional support and to keep presidential elections federal, run by states, not by a single national authority. Both purposes still matter. A candidate must still build a coalition across many states, not run up margins in a few populous ones.
2. The state-by-state structure is a firewall. Because each state runs its own election, a dispute or failure is contained to one state's count rather than spread across a national tally. That containment is a feature, as the fight over The National Popular Vote Compact Is an End Run Around Article II shows.
3. The system adapted without amendment. The Framers left the manner of appointing electors to the states, and the states moved to popular voting on their own. The flexibility the committee built in is exactly what allowed the system to become more democratic over time.
4. The alternatives have the same problems they had in 1787. Selection by Congress still destroys the separation of powers. A national popular vote still invites regional campaigns and national recounts. The committee's answer won because nothing else worked, and that remains true.

The Electoral College has needed one major repair, after the election of 1800 exposed the flaw in giving each elector two undifferentiated votes. That story is told in The Election of 1800 Broke the Electoral College and the 12th Amendment Fixed It. Myths about the institution are tested in Seven Myths About the Electoral College That Fall Apart Against the Record.

The case in brief

1. For three months the Convention cycled between selection by Congress, by state legislatures and by direct popular vote, and every option failed a key test.
2. Selection by Congress made the president Congress's creature; selection by state legislatures made him the states' creature; direct popular election was rejected nine states to one.
3. The Committee of Eleven, chaired by David Brearley, reported on September 4, 1787 a plan of electors appointed as each state's legislature directs, meeting in their own states.
4. The plan freed the president from Congress, allowed reelection, required national appeal and carried the Connecticut Compromise into presidential elections; Hamilton called it "at least excellent" in Federalist 68.

What you can do: read Article II, Section 1 and the Twelfth Amendment on our Constitution page, then look up how your own state legislature directs the appointment of its electors.