As outlined in the United States Constitution, the Electoral College is the formal institution involved in electing the president, wherein each state legislature selects a number of electors equal to the number of Senators and Representatives. As originally outlined in the Constitution, electors vote for two candidates, and the candidate with the majority of electoral votes wins the presidency.[1] The Electoral College acts as a system of verification for the executive leader of the nation by requiring that the people’s votes be translated into votes of electors chosen by the legislature.[2] As a result of the Electoral College, there is no guarantee that the popular vote will determine the outcome of the presidential election. In this sense, does the Electoral College accurately reflect the will of the people for their chosen elector? Merely a few years prior to the ratification of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers of the United States wrote the significance of democratic power into the Declaration of Independence and the necessity for the voice of the people being the voice in government.[3] Why, then, would they have created the Electoral College, a system that does not guarantee power to the people? At the time of its founding, the Electoral College was a system of power that accurately reflected, if not the desire of the people, the wishes of the ruling class: wealthy white men, for whom direct democracy seemed to be the enemy and republicanism proved to be the winner. The Electoral College enforced the republican ideologies of the Founding Fathers by preventing direct democracy and limiting the power of the people, using the Three-Fifths Compromise to advantage certain states over others, and limiting the states’ ability to select the executive.
[1] U.S. Const. art. II � 1. [2] Steven G. Calabresi, "The President, the Supreme Court, and the Founding Fathers: A Reply to Professor Ackerman," in The University of Chicago Law Review (The University of Chicago Law Review, n.d.), previously published in The University of Chicago Law Review 73, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 469-85, accessed October 25, 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4495559. [3] Declaration of Independence, Doc. (July 4, 1776). Accessed September 19, 2018. https://www.constitution.org/us_doi.pdf.