MYTH: The Founding Fathers designed and favored our nation’s current system of electing the President.
The Founding Fathers never decided how presidential electors should be chosen. Instead, they left the matter to the states.
The Founding Fathers expected that the Electoral College would be a deliberative body. However, presidential electors became a rubber-stamp for the candidates nominated by their parties by the time of the nation’s first competitive presidential election in 1796.
The Electoral College further deviated from the Founders’ vision when state winner-take-all statutes became prevalent (long after the Founders were dead).
The winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes was not debated (much less voted upon or adopted) at the 1787 Constitutional Convention.
The winner-take-all rule is not mentioned in the Federalist Papers.
The winner-take-all method was not the choice of the Founders and was, in fact, used by only three states in the nation’s first presidential election in 1789 (all of which abandoned it by 1800).
The electoral system that we have today was not designed, anticipated, or favored by the Founding Fathers. Instead, it is the result of decades of evolutionary change driven primarily by the emergence of political parties and the desire of each state’s ruling party not to give any of the state’s electoral votes to the minority party.
The winner-take-all rule came into widespread use because of the pressure created by its use in other states.
