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I've never seen a proper explanation of why states shifted from the majority having their legislatures choose and the majority having their citizenry choose. If I had to guess, it was probably due to public pressure and/or political pressure from politicians who favored expanded suffrage. As I mentioned last night, originally only land-owning white males could vote at all. Perhaps because allowing only those who owned land to vote smacked of aristocracy, there was a push to expand the franchise to those who didn't own a certain amount of property. By the end of the 1820s, property ownership as a prerequisite for voting was in the process of rapid elimination, expanding the franchise to all free white males (though some states were still holdouts; property requirements weren't entirely eliminated until the 1850s). States having their electors chosen by statewide popular vote became increasingly common in roughly the same time frame, and probably for the same reasons. "Jeffersonian" and "Jacksonian" democracy were popular ideas in the first half of the 19th century, after all. Also, the Panic of 1819 may have been a trigger towards the push for abolishing property requirements to vote. But the franchise was expanded to a greaty many more people starting in the 1820s, and that was the first step in a long journey our country made towards universal suffrage.
And in that time there have been several occasions where the EC generated tremendous controversy and resulted in a lot of pressure to have it changed or abolished. It has been a controversial institution almost from the outset. The Founders themselves realized that as original designed it had a major shortcomings that were revealed in the elections of 1796 and 1800, which resulted in the passage of the 12th Amendment. The 1824 election saw a four-way race with no majority EC winner, sending the election to the House, and that resulted in what Andrew Jackson and his supporters called the "Corrupt Bargain." But this time there was no changes to the system at all despite a clear deficiency that generated political turmoil. The 1876 election was a massive clusterfuck that resulted in behind-the-scenes deals that yielded a compromise involving 20 disputed electoral votes; the terms of the compromise included the immediate end to Reconstruction in the South. Yet once again there were no successful attempts to amend the system; had there been a direct national popular vote, none of that would have been an issue.
Fast-forward to 1968. George Wallace's campaign for President operated on the knowledge that Wallace would not win, but they had hoped to win enough states to prevent Nixon and Humphrey from gaining a majority. Because of the distorting effect Wallace had on the election, there was actually increased pressure to abolish the EC. Gallup polls from after the 1968 election indicated that at least 80% of Americans wanted the EC abolished. The Bayh-Cellar Amendment was proposed to do just that, and actually passed the House of Representatives before dying in the Senate. That was the closest we ever came to abolishing the EC. Had it passed the Senate, it likely would have been ratified, as though most proposed amendments fail to pass through Congress, the ones that actually pass through Congress and are submitted to the states are historically very likely to pass.
Then we saw the controversial 2000 election. It came down to Florida, of course. Gore and Bush were separated by less than 600 votes. Not only was the Supreme Court decision to end the recounts controversial, but Ralph Nader proved to be a significant spoiler. Had even 1% of Nader voters in Florida instead switched to Gore on Election Day, we would have had a President Gore. And once again, no changes to the system despite widespread popular outrage. And 16 years later we saw the same thing: a presidential candidate who won the popular vote still lost in large part because her supporters just happened to not have quite the geographical distribution she needed to win the EC vote. And once again the EC generates tremendous controversy not only for giving the loser of the popular vote the win, but also because, despite a handful of rogue electors, it effectively rubber-stamped an imminently unqualified and potentially dangerous authoritarian demagogue because "Hey, that's the system we have."
The one change that this election brought about is that popular support for the EC has taken a highly partisan element. Gallup had been conducting polls on attitudes about the EC since at least 1967. A clear majority supported abolition of the EC and replacing it with a direction national popular vote, with support peaking at 80% after the 1968 election. This continued through to the turn of the century. The 2000 election saw a slight and distinctly partisan dip in support for abolition of the EC; Democrats saw a slight increase in favor of abolishing the EC, while Republican support for abolition dipped several points, and generally Republicans were in favor of the EC (support for a national popular vote after the 2000 election was 41% among Republicans and 71% among Democrats). However, a clear majority overall were in favor of abolition of the EC, beating the "keep the EC" respondents 59% to 37%. But by 2012, support for abolishing the EC grew to its highest point since 2000, and even a slim majority of Republicans (53%) supported replacing the EC with a direct national popular vote.
But Gallup conducted the same poll after this past election, and Republican-leaning voters, obviously seeing how the EC has yielded them victory despite losing the popular vote twice in 16 years, suddenly became massive supporters of the EC. Republican support for a national popular vote amendment dropped from 53% in late 2012 to only 19% in the most recent poll, a far sharper drop than the one seen in 2000. Meanwhile, Democrats, who have historically always been mostly against the EC, saw support for abolishing the EC grow from 69% to 81%, a far smaller rise than than the drop seen with Republican respondents. Whether this sticks in the long run remains to be seen (it didn't after 2000, as we saw Republican support for a national popular vote grow from 41% to 53%), but it's clear that support for the EC has become far more sharply partisan than ever before. You don't go from 53% support for a national popular vote to only 19% in one election because "Oh, we respect the Founder's vision." It's clearly because Republicans see the system as being advantageous to them. Meanwhile, despite pundit rhetoric of a "blue wall" in the Midwest prior to this past election, the vast majority of Democrats have not supported the EC at any point in recent history. I think we may see Republican attitudes shift sharply against the EC when Texas inevitably becomes a swing state and pulls Democratic for the first time in decades. Hell, demographic changes could see the Democrats have a permanent lock on the White House under the current system.
And that's why I think the Constitution needs to be amended. If it's merely a rubber stamp, then why have it? Because of some notion of federalism? State governments should have no part in the process of selecting the president. Small states shouldn't count for more than larger states in terms of voting power, because states as political entities should not figure in the presidential election. Only individual citizens have the right to vote, because only individual citizens can have rights (governments do not have "rights," only powers). The President is not only the final major elected office in the United States who is elected indirectly, it is the only remaining head of state in democracies with a full presidential system to be elected indirectly. Even other federations didn't use federalism as an excuse to retain their electoral colleges.
I'm aware of why we have the EC. At least some founders did support a direct national popular vote, but most didn't (James Madison argued that slave states would never have supported it seeing as the slave population, which was a significant part of their populations, couldn't vote), and the original plan was to have the President be selected by Congress, much like a prime minister is. That obviously didn't end up being the system we got, but it was a popular idea at the start of the Convention. We eventually got the EC because that was the system that most at the Convention could agree upon. The EC exists because of the political and social realities of the 1780s, realities that no longer exist.
The Founders had some great ideas, some bad ideas, and some ideas they just stumbled upon because they were a fractious bunch who couldn't agree on a great many things and thus had to compromise. But I think the most important thing to remember is that they are just men. We are not necessarily beholded to them. We should not deify them. The Constitution should not be treated as some immutable holy document set in stone and handed down from on high, and one of the things I think the Founders did get right was that they didn't treat it like that, either. Sure, the Founders are the ones that gave us the Electoral College, but their reasons for doing so ultimately don't matter anymore. As concepts of democracy evolved and the franchise expanded, many other things the Founders intended fell by the wayside, altered or abolished.
So should the Electoral College be cast aside.
It is unrepresentative, giving people more or less voting power depending on their state's population, and always gives the winner a far larger percentage of the EC vote than of the popular vote. It effectively disenfranchises millions of voters who live in states where the vast majority vote differently from them (why should a California Republican or Nebraska Democrat even bother voting for President?). It has effectively made a dozen or so "swing" states the only ones that really matter in the end. None of the other reasons for retaining it hold any water. It is an institution whose time has long passed. With the EC abolished and a national popular vote in its place, every vote would count, and would count equally. No state, no demographic could be ignored because of an accident in their geographical location or population or how close the Republican-Democratic vote balance is. Indirect elections are an idea that needs to die. They have no place in America anymore.
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