Why Does America Have the Electoral College? Peter Sagal Explains

**Peter Sagal** (0:00)
As long as you have democracy, there's nothing that you can't fix. There's no other problem that you can't fix. If the government has gone really wrong in a direction A, democracy, if required, will provide the corrective.
If the government is doing something that the majority of these people dislike, then the majority of people will fix it. And that's the only hope. And as long as that's possible, hope remains.

**Bob Crawford** (0:32)
You've reached American History Hotline. You ask the questions, we get the answers. Leave a message.
Hey there, American History Hotliners. It's great to have you back. I'm actually on tour with the band, so I wanted to share one of my favorite conversations from the past year. It was with Peter Sagal, host of NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. He's also hosted a PBS show called Constitution USA.
I called him up to answer a listener's question about the Electoral College. Why do we have it? Why can't we get rid of it? It was a great conversation, and I started by asking Peter to explain what the Electoral College is.

**Peter Sagal** (1:13)
Okay. The Electoral College is, as I said, a unique system that our framers back in Philadelphia, when they created the Constitution in 1787, decided they would use exclusively to elect the president. In the rest of the document, they allowed, called for popular election of, say, representatives.
The senators in the upper house were supposed to be elected by legislators. That was later changed by constitutional amendment. So they didn't have a problem with popular elections for other offices, but they decided that for the role of the president, they wanted to do something unique and special for a variety of reasons. And the way it works is every state gets a number of electors, officers, equal to the number of representatives they have in Congress. That means one for every member of the House of Representatives plus two, one for each senator. So for example, if a state happens to have five congressmen or representatives, congressmen back then, only men did it, and two senators, that state would have seven electoral votes. And then as the system was designed, the way it works is each state can elect however they wanted their electors. They could choose them any way they wanted. They could appoint them by legislature, which I think one state did, but most of them from the very beginning did popular elections. They could elect these electors, and then these electors would in their wisdom, cast the votes for president.
And the initial idea was that these electors would be wise men, worldly men, knowledgeable men, chosen by the people of a state to represent their interests, right? So if that hypothetical state had seven electors, those seven electors would stroke their chins, probably their beards, depending on the time, and they would decide which of the candidates for president was best. Now, very quickly, that's not how it worked at all. Instead, what happened is the system we now have, where there's one slate of electors for each presidential candidate, right? So if, again, our hypothetical state, the popular vote goes for candidate X as opposed to candidate Y, then the candidate X's electors get to cast their votes, and of course, all of them go for candidate X. They were elected. They said, vote for me, I will vote for candidate X. And that's the way it's pretty much played out. They changed, they fiddled with the system a little bit with the 12th Amendment, but basically, that's how it's been playing out pretty much since our founding in the very first presidential election.

**Bob Crawford** (4:00)
So getting back to the founders, you know, at the time, you got big states and small states, free states and slave states. Who was pushing the most for the Electoral College?

**Peter Sagal** (4:13)
The Electoral College was pushed for primarily by small states and slave states.
And the reasons make a little sense if you consider it from their perspective. The first thing you need to do is you need to remember, this is something that was impressed upon me by Akhil Reed Amar, Professor of Yale, world-renowned expert in the US Constitution, who was our in-house expert on our TV show, Constitution USA, for PBS. It's impossible for us now to comprehend how big America was, even just the 13 coastal colonies. It was a continent, the Continental Congress. This was a time, of course, when there was no electronic communication. Messages went as fast as a horse or a ship could take them. If you lived in, say, Massachusetts, Virginia was an impossible distance away. It would take months to get there. You would probably never, ever go, or even meet somebody from there. And the states were very, very different. They had different populations, different kinds of industry, different kinds of agriculture. The agriculture in Massachusetts, for example, very different than in Virginia. They had different, I don't know, sort of ethos, for example. Everybody knows Massachusetts was founded by Puritans. Well, Rhode Island, next door, was founded by people who couldn't stand the goddamn Puritans and wanted to get away from them. And Philadelphia was founded by, rather, excuse me, Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn as a kind of free-thinking, you know, utopia where everybody could live in peace. And the southern states, Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas, were agrarian and, of course, slave colonies. So they had very, very different perspectives. So the Electoral College had three purposes.