Us electoral population density map 2016
Their votes ended up being split between three other Democratic candidates, with 19 abstentions, none of which changed the election's outcome-a landslide win by Ulysses S. The 1872 election presented a unique scenario in which the losing candidate, Democrat Horace Greeley, died unexpectedly in the period between the election and the Electoral College vote. Over the first century of the College, faithless electors often abstained or changed their votes so out of political spite, not high-minded idealism, and have never changed the result of an election. The first case of a faithless elector was in 1796, when Samuel Miles of Pennsylvania, for reasons unclear, switched his vote from Federalist John Adams to Democrat-Republican Thomas Jefferson. Over the years, there have been 157 faithless electors, and while some states require that electors stay true to their state's electoral choice, often requiring a formal pledge, 21 don’t require that kind of loyalty at all.Īccording to the Archives, 99 percent of electors have kept their pledge and voted for their chosen candidate. This month, Senator Barbara Boxer of California authored a bill that would abolish the Electoral College in favor of the popular vote.Įven if the Electoral College remains for another 250 years, it will still have to contend with another vestige of its creation-the issue of “ faithless electors” who decide to vote against their party’s chosen candidate. According to the National Archives, the past 200 years have brought more than 700 proposed Constitutional amendments to either “reform or eliminate” the Electoral College. “A relatively small number of people actually had the right to vote,” he says.Īs the voting public has evolved and become more knowledgeable, the outcry against the Electoral College has never abated. Bennett, author of Taming the Electoral College and a law professor at Northwestern University, notes that neither women nor white men without property could vote at the time, either-meaning that slavery was not the only factor that made the allocation of the Electoral College out of sync with reality. The Electoral College, in turn, provided each state with an allotment of electors equivalent to its Congressional delegation (two senators plus its number of representatives). The issue vexed and divided the founders, presenting what James Madison, a slave owner, called a “difficulty…of a serious nature."Īt the time, a full 40 percent of the South’s population was enslaved, and the compromise famously reached by the founding fathers determined that each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person when it came to dividing the nation into equal congressional districts. “One of two biggest divisions at the Philadelphia convention was over how slaves would count in purposes of apportioning the House of Representatives," he explains. In his recently released book, The Framers’ Coup, Klarman discusses how each framer’s interests came into play while creating the document that would one day rule the country. " wanted slaves to count the same as anyone else, and some northerners thought slaves shouldn’t be counted at all because they were treated as property rather than as people," says author Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School. This disparity in the population distribution became a core element of the legislative branch, and in turn, the Electoral College. The bulk of the new nation’s citizenry resided in cities like Philadelphia and Boston in the North, leaving the South sparsely populated by farmers, plantation owners, other landholders, and, of course, enslaved laborers. The story of the Electoral College is also one of slavery-an institution central to the founding of American democracy. Created by the framers of the Constitution during the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the College was put forth as a way to give citizens the opportunity to vote in presidential elections, with the added safeguard of a group of knowledgeable electors with final say on who would ultimately lead the country, another limit on the burgeoning nation’s democratic ideals. The Electoral College polarized Americans from its inception.