The impression I get from Federalist 68 is that the idea was the electors would gather without prior commitments to any candidate, but, rather, discuss among themselves who should be president, the way Congress discusses legislation.
Well, just for laughs, I looking into the early cases of “faithless” Electors (i.e. ones who vote in ways other than expected) and it looks like the first case was a mass revolt in 1836 by Virginia’s slate. I gather from this that Electors had previously been expected to vote in a certain predictable way, and had they been independently discussing their choices, there would be earlier examples of surprise outcomes, i.e. they were never intended to be independent (though the penalties for “breaking faith” were tepid), regardless of how their role is constitutionally defined.
Any deliberation would be specific to each state, as electors meet in their own state. But the system [DEL]is[/DEL] was designed to work without the general population becoming involved in electing the president and vice president, without political parties, and without national campaigns.
It was written for a Republic, not a Democracy.
~Max
They originally were intended to be independent, but like so many of the Founding Fathers’ plans, that plan didn’t survive even first contact with reality. Remember, the Founders never even conceived of the notion of political parties, even though they themselves were members of them.
On reflection, the electors were probably intended to be independent in the same sense that the election of the president and vice-president were intended to be separate. It’s true on paper and in theory, rather less so in practice.
Let’s drop that canard. The USA is a democratic republic – as opposed to, say, an aristocratic republic like the old Venetian Republic, where only the nobility of the Golden Book could vote. (Granted, in the early USA there were sometimes property or even religious qualifications for voting – but the seeds of democracy were there, and universal white manhood suffrage was thoroughly established by the time of the Jackson Administration.)
IME, anyone who says “America is a republic, not a democracy,” is not arguing but ranting. When he actually means anything by it, what he means is that America is a federal state, not a unitary state – which is true, and important, but has nothing to do with any supposed antithesis between a democracy and a republic.
I would really like to know why you think that a republic is a bad thing.
It is not a bad thing, and is not in any way incompatible with democracy. Granted, there are such things as aristocratic republics, but even those are probably preferable to hereditary monarchies.
So… is North Korea preferable to Canada? Maybe I should move.
Canada is a monarchy like NK is a democracy.
Legally, Canada IS a monarchy and North Korea is a republic with some arguable form of aristocracy (i.e. privelege to those born to certain families), but no matter.
Given who its’ last three rulers were, one could call North Korea a hereditary monarchy without torturing the term very much.
Is a completely farcical monarchy actually relevant though?
Well, you wouldn’t have to torture the term. Sending the term and its children and grandchildren to a re-education camp should suffice.
My understanding is that, instead of a single deliberative body, the individual state electors were more akin to a number of independent nominating groups, and the expectation was that in most cases there would not be an immediate winner of a majority of votes, so the members of the House of Representatives, voting as individual states, would make the final decision from a slate of candidates. Remember that the original provision in the Constitution specified that the top five electoral vote-getters were the ones that the House members would choose from, if no one received a majority of electoral votes.
That was Farrand’s understanding. In the “Framing of the Constitution”, one of the first detailed studies of the documents from the Constitutional convention, he concludes that the drafters thought most elections would be decided in the House.
Bear in mind, the US at that time wasn’t a nation in the modern sense of of a unified political culture. Communications were poor, and someone who might be a political heavyweight in Georgia could be a complete unknown in Massachusetts, and vice-versa. The Electors would nominate local political figures, and the House, made up of individuals who had greater familiarity with politicians from other states,would decide.
One of the unexpected successes of the US experiment was the rapid development of a national political culture, aided by political parties. That political culture quickly eliminated much of the regional uncertainties that the drafters were familiar with, and enabled the emergence of national political figureres. Politicians in Massachusetts began to know political figures in Georgia and so on. The Electors didn’t ever really fulfill that role of nominators.
Not a canard. I said “was” and I meant it, too. Andrew Jackson does not count among the founding fathers of this nation; most of the actual founding fathers were decidedly aristocratic by modern standards, the social elite of their own day.
~Max
True, but, I should hope, no longer relevant.
It would be relevant to adherents of originalism, eg: Justice Ginsberg, Justice Gorusch, or most famously the late Justice Scalia.
~Max
The Dred Scott decision was predicated on the assumption that, in the time of the FFs, the consensus was that a black man had no rights a white man was bound to respect. But I doubt any originalist would be so bold as to rule that the Constitution requires property qualifications to vote because that’s how it was back then, or anything else that would be an element of an aristocratic republic.