The Electoral College in Short

So, that being said, why do we have an Electoral College?  The answer is clear from the debates at the Constitutional Convention.  The Founders did not anticipate political parties; indeed, they regarded parties at best as corrupt, and at worst as sinister conspiracies.  Without political parties, there was really no way of establishing a national candidate.  Granted, everyone at the time agreed that George Washington would be the first President, but only because he was commanding general in the War of Independence.  In the absence of so eminent a figure, it was assumed that there would not be any national candidates, but instead that the people of each state would choose the most eminent leader in their own state, and that there would be thirteen candidates.  (More as more states were added).

The alternative was general seen as election by Congress.  This had the disadvantage of election by a standing body and opened the door to corruption and intrigue.  It also destroyed the independence of the executive and made him subordinate to the legislature.*

The Electoral College allowed each state to make its choice clear -- clearer than an attempt to aggregate all the votes from all the states.  By having the Electors chosen solely to choose a President and meet separately each in their own state, the system reduced the likelihood of conspiracy or corruption.  Requiring each Elector to choose a second candidate from outside of the state, they gave an opportunity for a candidate of national prominence to win.  Having Congress choose from among the top five candidates rested on the assumption that each state would have a different winner.  Congress would choose the winner from the five largest states.

And, it should be noted, this system was not controversial at the time.  Indeed, in Federalist Paper No. 68, Hamilton commented:

THE mode of appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents. The most plausible of these, who has appeared in print, has even deigned to admit that the election of the President is pretty well guarded.

 Yet it became apparent as soon as the very first election that the Electoral College was seriously flawed.  As originally written, whoever each elector was required to vote for two candidates, at least one of whom was not from his own state.  Whoever won the most votes would be the President and the runner-up would become Vice President.  It became clear with the very first election,even though everyone knew that George Washington would be unanimously elected, that if the Electors all voted for the same candidate for Vice-President, there would be no legal distinction as to which was which. By the time John Adams ran for President, candidates were beginning to run in pairs, with one as candidate for President and one for Vice President.  But electors often split their tickets, with the result that Adams was elected President and his rival, Jefferson, became Vice President. Adams' administration was continually hampered by having his leading rival as embedded in his government and impossible to remove.

In turn, when Jefferson was elected, there was no ticket splitting, and the team of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.  But there was no official rule as to which of them was President and which was Vice President.  Even though everyone knew Jefferson was supposed to be President and Burr Vice President, officially they were declared a tie and the House went until February, with 36 ballots and all manner of intrigue before finally voting in favor of Jefferson.  After this the Twelfth Amendment  was enacted, arranging for the President and Vice President to run as a pair, with clear rules as to which was which.  The rule as to how the House would vote in case of tie remained.

This procedure has been used only once since, in the 1824 election, when the Electoral College split among four candidates.  Although Andrew Jackson won the most electoral and popular votes, Henry Clay (then Speaker of the House) swung the House in favor of John Quincy Adams in exchange for being appointed his Secretary of State.  Jackson and his followers were understandably outraged and went on to win the following election.  On the whole, though, the system of breaking Electoral College deadlocks by the House of Representatives, voting by states, has proven a very bad one in the few cases that it has been used.  Many believe that the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore was intended to avoid the crisis associated with a repeat performance.

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*Later governments would develop a parliamentary system that would, in fact, make subordinate of the executive to the legislature work perfectly well.  But it required strong, well-disciplined political parties, a thing no one anticipated at the time, and a flexible election system that allowed calling new elections in case of an insurmountable political crisis.