So today well talk about the Electoral College, what it is, how it works and why most scholars kind of hate the Electoral College and its among the Political Science set which homely youve had so far and you get a fullthroated argument against the Electoral College and it is a useful, instructive book because lays out all of the common arguments for it, as well which is helpful for allowing each person to sort of make up their mind about what they think about this institution generally speaking. So this is really i do a whole week on this one because its how we like the president and few americans fully understand the process. At the very least if you take a course in the american presidency you should walk away understanding how this process we use to select our chief executive officer work, but also because it is really important in how it structures how elections turn out. Just how we started our discussion by president ial nominations by discussing the history of the nominations processes and taking a relatively deep dive into the process rules and the rule nominations today, we should start out president ial elections the same way by taking an even deeper dive into the single most important institutional process th to how we select a president. George c. Edwards Electoral College book. Im sure hes made a good amount of money on it, by now, its in its third edition, after all. In it he explains how the Electoral College works and he lays out key problems and lays out the typical arguments in Electoral College, but today what we will focus how the system works and what the Electoral College tended to look like. Next time we turn towards arguments about pros and cons of the Electoral College and sort of consequences for the Electoral College for how Candidates Campaign and how the president ial elections tend to shake out. Today all i want to accomplish is how to fully understand the system where it came from and how it works because it tends to be more invoofrled than people think. Okay. Why do we have the Electoral College in the first place . Well, a lot of that stems from there just being a desire among many of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention to compromise and come to some sort of resolution regarding setting out what the terms would be for their new constitutional government. If you recall we talked about this earlier in the semester, some of the overriding concerns from the delegates is they needed to come to a compromise and produce a new document, a new constitutional document by the time they were done in philadelphia which meant all of them were somewhat inclined toward compromise. There was a real fear at the time that if the convention failed to produce a reformed political system for the United States the country would splinter into multiple regional parts and theyre easily conquered or reconquered by your buyers, and eyeing the United States for political dysfunction. That inclination to compromise led to the acquiescence to the vehement interests of smaller state interests. They wanted to ensure that those smaller states as well as slave states wanted to ensure that their voices were amplified in the new governmental system and pushed pretty hard and pretty consistently on that point all throughout the debates on most things including on the debates over how to select the president. So i told you during the second week of class, most of the debate about the president ial offers at the Constitutional Convention centered on how the president would be selected or elected. They spent 22 combined days debating this specific topic and took more than 30 different votes on 30 competing proposals and amendments to proposals about how they would do this election. And throughout those 22 days there were three options debated for how we would elect the president and essentially there were three main camps without some other various subcamps and compromise vote proposals and there were three main avenues advocated by different delegates at the convention. One option was to have the president selected by congress that is either the house or the senate would actually meet to consider candidates and cast votes to directly select the executive. This would sound a lot like a parliamentary system where the program is or was a member of the legislature and is designated as their leader by the Majority Party or coalition and assumed in executive office. Another option that was laid out there was that the president should not be elected by the congress and by the state legislatures and that each of the state legislatures should take a vote on the preferred candidate and the states that got the support from the most states would become the president. Then a third main option that was considered was from a subset of members of the convention who really wanted a direct popular vote for the president , largely arguing that that was the only way to ensure that the president ial office had any sort of separation in order to be dominated by the state say thes and the congress. Alexander hamiltonon made a proposal i was i would choose a positive for life and pick a new one until the president died and there were ideas thrown out there about who would be the president and how we would get to the president and there were certain concerns that drove the tenor of these debates around these various options. In other words, there were certain things that the founders were concerned about achieving or avoiding through the method of president ial election. Ill run through some of these. One of these concerns was legislative intrigue and making sure there was president ial independence. President ial intrigue was to select certain president s for certain selfinterests or reasons and that is to select a president that would empower those specific members of Congress Rather than selecting a president who would, you know, do a good job or achieve certain policy aims. And this ties into president ial independence because there was concern if the selection of the president was driven by congressional intrigue then you would have the reality that the president whoever was selected would be entirely dependent on the congress to maintain their time in office, that because you were going to have this language about impeachment in the constitution, congressional selection would ultimately mean that the congress could lure over the presidency and threat tone impeach the president every time it didnt do what congress wanted because it doesnt have the power to put someone in the office or remove him from office which was seen as too dependent on the conference. The president had some separation and independence from the legislature which were two things that worked against direct election by the congress. Another concern was voter parochialism in that the founders were concerned that the country was too large and that people would be too uninformed of their potential leaders from any other states other than their own so essentially that if you did direct election by state which you would get would be if were talking about the 13 states that would choose 13 different president s and youd essentially be deadlocked with 13 candidates coming in with a kwaus i tie. These people wanted the public to have some voice, but they wanted a system that would force the consideration of candidates with a Broader Market character and reputation. So they were concerned you had to do something beyond just direct election in order to get to a place where people would be looking beyond their own state borders. Founders were also concerned about there being a need for intermediaries with the selection of the presidency, while a lot of the delegates wanted direct selection and were advocates of direct democracy over the selection of the president , other founders were less excited about that and were concerned that if the people selected the president directly that they would make unwise choices and that you needed to protect against tumult and disorder as some of them put it and so you needed some sort of system that would have intermediaries between the public and the election and the president. These next two concerns voteser parochialism and the need for intermediaries pushed back against direct selection. Of course, there were fears of president ial power, but there were different beliefs about what would allow for a more empowered or less empowered president. Some delegates thought the direct election of the president would make the president too powerful because then the president would be the only to claim to have the full mantel of the public and they were too powerful if thaey were indirecty selected as well. Small states wanted to be sure that their voices were heard in the new government. Under the art ikss of onfederation, as you may know, small states were able to dominate the process because every state regardless of population side, and most decisions first i thought, well, the articles for anything to be in grate for anything to happen. And and outsided power given that the population lived in four states at the time of the artic else articles of confederation. They gave the small states a bigger voice than they would have under a direct election though they had a smaller voice than you might have from some form of congressional selection and some legislative election. Small states werent happy with the compromise and these well talk about in a bit when the Electoral College fails and the house of representatives selects the president with the state and that was a key carrot given to the small states to get them to sign on to the Electoral College agreement in the first place because many founders thought the Electoral College would never actually produce a majority winner after George Washington and that the highways of raptives were there was the ensure that they werent states in other parts of the contusion, as we know. Upon thereupon is a threefifths compromise that counted each slavement and for the purpose of allocating congress sing fishlly, and they were sent to move that vote. And they were concerned with seeing some sort of system that reflected congressional apportionment back to the president and they would have a larger voice and president ial selection relative to their voting population, as well. Finally, the shortterm concerns there was fatigue, the Convention Del gatds wanted to get out of there with a new system. They were concerned that failure was the worst possible option and that led to a lot of people who wanted a different outcome to acquiesce to the concerns of slave states, small states or other people that had really strong opinions and who were willing to walk away from the convention if they didnt get what they wanted. So those concerns ended up with an Electoral College system which is a messy compromise. The Electoral College did not achieve anyones ideals for what the election of the president would be, but it did reflect those key concerns on the previous slide. It gave each faction something that they wanted, a popular vote punled through the states and that allocated the states some power in giving congress some final stay, but no one was fully happy with it, but it was something that nobody was upset enough about to walk away from the convention over. Plenty of delegates walked away from the convention and they had the final document and went home, but none of them walked away over the Electoral College. They walked away over other broader issues, usually over congressional apportionment or Something Like that. Before we move on to running through how the Electoral College work trs start from sta finish does anybody have any questions they want answers to in terms of clarification or otherwise . Which Founding Fathers or which group were in favor of direct popular vote . Its hard to categorize them in any way other than to say the ones that were more committed to more of a direct tell democrat see, and they didnt come from any, like, specific parts of the country. They randomly distributed and the leader of that sort of faction and these were the people that were lead satisfied with the constitution in many respects, but the leader of that was george mason who was upset from day one at the convention because he was hoping to go there and legislatively drive tone had a direct public voice and he was sort of throughout the convention appalled and over and over again those ideals were compromised away toward delegates who were concerned about more immediate power concerns for specific constituencies or states. Does that make sense . Yeah. Totally. Thank. Youd have to read James Madisons notes to pull out who those people were individually. Yeah. Yeah. Mason work hard and shaped the system to be more democratic than it otherwise might have been because he was very influential and pushed really hard and refused to seen it in the end, but he made it look a lot better relative to his preferences than it could have because he was dogged in his determination. Other questions . I had a question if thats okay. Yeah. So im pretty familiar with the threefifths com from myself, but i was curious how did it come to 3 5 because thats super specific. Super specific. I know why it is, but i dont know why 3 5. I dont know why specifically 3 5 like so many things in the convention, we have sort of limited note taking on the nature of the debates and it var ed from moment to moment because there were a handful of people who kept a journal or diary during it and most of those are spotty and you might have the intended election today. James madison took about as complete notes as we being, but it was just him scribbling 18 hours a day while things were going on and he didnt have it captured at any one moment and they were debating things like a 3 5 compromise and not going over the different specific fractions thrown out. 3 5 must have sounded good enough to everyone and thats often how things worked at the convention is how things worked is that they would decide that that number sounded satisfactory to everyone and why twoyear terms for the house and someone proposed forward and thats too much and thats not long enough and someone said two and thats good. And it was just a matter of the south and the Southern States being, okay, getting wed rather the south came with the proposal that slaves counted as full individuals for apportionment which increased their power in the congress. And then there were some members who wanted the slaves not to count it all. 3 5 i think was good enough for everyone to say fine or enough people to say fine and why 3 5 remains a mystery unless someones done really good historical work that i dont know about. Other questions . So lets run through how the Electoral College works step by step from 30,000 feet and what the outcomes look like, and 1789 and how does it work right now. So right now you have 538 electoral votes as part of the college and in any given Election Year, and it is very simple. Each state gets two which is the number of senators we have and plus the number of house seats they have. So utah has the members, and so it has six electoral votes and the Electoral College and another state that has ten house members would have 12 in the electoral votes and the Electoral College and this way it is almost roughly proportional to the state by population, and waited a bit, and they get the twoseat boost no matter how small they are and c consequently they ratcheted down a bit and the district of columbia gets three votes no matter what, under the constitutional amendment prior to the i dont remember now, maybe the 1970s the district of columbia didnt get to vote in president ial elections and didnt have any votes in the Electoral College and that was an amendment tacked on that d. C. Would get three which at some point would become awkward because d. C. May be large enough to have the regular apportionment scheme, but it would still be locked into three such as the life of washington, d. C. , of always being under or nonrepresented in the government along with puerto rico and various other parts of the United States. To win, you have to have a majority of the vote which is is 270. You noticed that 538 is the total number of votes so you can have a tie. It is possible to have the Electoral College come out to 269 to 269. Thats a mignightmare for everybody, but you need 270 to become president. It doesnt matter if you have more than your opponent. So if you have three candidates getting electoral votes its split in that someone gets a majority and nobody wins at the Electoral College stage. Exactly how many votes each state gets gets reallocated every 10 years just like we reallocate house seats based on the census every ten years because the formula is simply two plus the number of house seats, so if utah were to pick up a seat in the coming census which it is unlukely to do, but if it were it can go from having six electoral votes to seven and other states can gain or lose seats in the house of representatives. Once all is said and done votes are cast by the 538 electors in order for there to be a win are decided. This is essentially what the outcome of the process can look like. This is what we call a cartograph from the electoral vote from the Electoral College. There are things to notice here. One, i like to show this because it shows the size of the states baseded on the number of votes they have rather than the land area or pop