every four years it happens again
all trying to convince you that one
candidate above all the rest
i have the experience has got the right
mix of stuff
join me to lead america this is crazy
but no matter what name you're bubbling
in
you're not actually voting for that
person
and that's because of this thing in the
u.s called the electoral college
and like many things in politics you
either love it
or you really hate it
the electoral college is the device
where each of the states
selects a certain number of electors
equal to their representation in
congress
if you ask the people involved did you
do a brilliant job in 1787
the designers themselves would say no it
didn't work it had to be
fixed we'll get back to that point in a
minute
but here's how it works today citizens
of the state
they cast their votes for candidate a
candidate b
candidate c they're not actually voting
directly for
the candidates they're voting for a
slate of electors who gather together
and cast their state's votes right but
why do we have it at all
well if we go back over 200 years
america had 13 states
and less than 4 million people it was
way different
during the revolutionary war you had a
somewhat
informal government there was no supreme
court
the presidency there was none the
congress didn't know uncertain terms it
was dysfunctional
the articles of confederation were not
functioning particularly well
worse there was economic problems
possible unrest barely a decade old
america was pretty much a hot mess they
decided
we need to write a brand new
constitution from scratch
but there were a ton of issues and no
one could agree what a new government
should even look like the election of
the president that was
probably the single most difficult issue
whether you should have
a committee maybe three or four people
serving as the
chiefs of the executive branch or how
they'd be chosen
one plan was to let congress elect the
executive branch
some liked it others didn't and one
person who didn't james wilson
he had an unusual idea of his own a
government
led by a single person the convention
type goes silent
and everybody is looking very worried at
one another
as they say we just had a revolution to
get rid of the king
isn't that just going to be a monarch
under a new name
wilson followed that up with an equally
unpopular idea
let the people choose the president by
popular vote
there were numerous objections and
because national campaigning wasn't
really a thing yet
no one was convinced the public would
even know who to vote for
in the 18th century you had primitive
roads
transportation was by horseback
newspapers were
primitive so the question would be how
could somebody in massachusetts
judge a presidential candidate from
north carolina
and even if they were informed direct
popular election that will just mean the
big states are going to elect the
president
others said let the state legislatures
pick the president
wilson wanted at all costs to keep that
selection
out of the hands of congress out of the
hands of the states
came and said okay if you don't like
direct popular election
why don't we do indirect election and
like that
wilson's plan it gained some light
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so after months of arguing they had a
plan for a brand new government
and the electoral college the
constitution was signed
and everyone went home happy right yeah
uh wrong
there's plenty of private correspondence
where figures like
james madison alexander hamilton are
saying
this whole document is a compromise we
don't really like it
it's probably not gonna last more than
five or ten years we'll be back at the
drawing board
pretty soon and they were right the
first two elections went
okay but some of the early ones were
absolute
chaos
the electoral college it was designed to
balance the powers of the government
and protect the rights of the people but
there were a lot of holes in it they
expected the electors
to come together and to deliberate among
themselves
they were supposed to be exercising
independent political judgment
when you got the growth of political
parties very quickly people began to
pledge saying if you vote for me
i will vote for the federalist or i will
vote for the jeffersonian
republican at that point they had to go
back to the drawing board
and so that electoral college it's been
changed tweaked
amended and now most states they have
the winner take all system
early on they figured out a winner take
all system
is the one you want to adopt if you're
going to maximize your state's
influence if you split your votes then
people aren't going to pay as much
attention to you as if you say
look here here's this great big pile of
electoral votes
they're all going to go to one candidate
for another
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our founders couldn't see the future and
today
the electoral college yeah it's still
controversial
but there are lessons to be learned from
its creation history
tends to outrun the plans of even the
founding
generation what would they think if they
came back and they looked
system today it's anybody's guess the
only one that i can say with any
confidence
that would be james wilson he would say
for heaven's sake
you need a system of direct popular
election in this country
i was right the other delegates were
wrong
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you