James Madison, delegate of Orange County and soon-to-be candidate for Virginia’s 5th House District, faced criticism of the Constitution’s unique procedures for the election of the President during the debates at Richmond’s June 1788 ratifying convention. He offered one of his clearest and most candid explanations of his own expectations for the workings of the Electoral College, an institution that he had coauthored only a few months before in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention at the end of August and in early September 1787. Article II, Section 1, was discussed by Madison in remarks on the 16th day of Virginia’s ratifying convention in response to criticism from some of the most outspoken opponents of ratification, including Prince Edward County’s delegate Patrick Henry and Stafford County’s delegate George Mason. Rarely referenced remarks by Madison at Richmond’s ratifying convention are well worth considering to appreciate what sometimes is lost in today’s discussions of the Electoral College. Specifically of concern is the disconnect between what Madison and most drafters of the Constitution expected of the Electoral College workings as a legislative-led, parliamentary-like selection of the President in contrast to the actual history of presidential elections with the emergence of political parties.

“I will take the liberty of making a few observations which may place this in such a light as may obviate objections,” Mr. Madison said when he began his Wednesday, June 18, 1788, discussion of the Constitution’s Article II.Footnote ¹ “It is observable, that none of the honorable members objecting to this, have pointed out the right mode of election,” he remarked about this part of the Constitution. The “honorable members” included delegate Patrick Henry; delegate George Mason; James Monroe, delegate of Spotsylvania County; and William Grayson, delegate of Prince William County, who had expressed their doubts about the presidency that Wednesday. Henry, Mason, Monroe, and Grayson all objected to different parts of the Constitution’s Article II, Section 1. What Madison said in his response to these objections was his expectation if not his preference (“I have found no better way”) for, in Madison’s words, “the right mode of the election” in the House, with each state casting one vote for any one of as many as five different candidates for President in January or February. Madison’s remarks spoke to the success of the smaller states that had left the Constitutional Convention satisfied with the compromise they had struck on Article II. They were convinced that they each would cast the same one vote as the larger states in the January or February election in the House of Representatives for any of the three, four, five, or more candidates that they had expected to run for President. That Wednesday in Richmond, Madison expressed his expectation of the “eventual voting by states” in which “the small states will have the advantage” in selecting the President in the House.

“Here is a compromise,” Madison told the Richmond convention in describing this section of the Constitution that he had coauthored months earlier as one of the 11 members of the Committee on Unfinished Parts.Footnote ² “For in the eventual election, the small states will have the advantage,” Madison told his fellow delegates, who had heard speeches earlier that Wednesday by James Monroe and William Grayson objecting to this. “In so extensive a country, it is probable that many persons will be voted for, and the lowest of the five highest on the list may not be so inconsiderable as he supposes.” Madison told the delegates this in response to the objections of George Mason, who had said that he would rather have elections decided in the House of Representatives between only the two candidates with the largest vote—not the five as specified in Article II, Section 1.Footnote ³

“The prevailing expectation,” Stanford University historian and political scientist Jack N. Rakove (Reference Rakove1996) said of the Constitutional Convention, was “a legislative role in selecting the President”—an expectation evident in Madison’s remarks in Richmond. Madison’s assurances “that many persons will be voted for” is his approval of a parliamentary-like role for the House in selecting the President (Rakove Reference Rakove1996, 266).Footnote ⁴ A large country could be expected to deliver an extensive number of candidates for President in November or December, extending elections to the January or February closing session of the lame-duck Congress whose last order of business would include the selection of any one from as many as five candidates by the House.

“As to the eventual voting by states, it has my approbation,” Madison told delegates that Wednesday about the selection of the President by the House, with each state casting one vote.Footnote ⁵ “I have found no better way of selecting the man in whom they place the highest confidence,” Madison stated to his fellow delegates and the audience in Richmond. “The diversity of circumstances, situation, and extent of the different states will render previous combination, with respect to the election of the President, impossible,” Madison told them.Footnote ⁶ Madison’s final word in his defense of Article II, Section 1—“impossible”—could and should have left little doubt in the minds of delegates and the audience in attendance at Richmond’s convention. Instead of ever being “won and done”—the word Madison chose was “impossible”—in November or December, elections could be expected to take place weeks later with the selection of the President by the House of Representatives.

Without the expectation of any organization like today’s national political parties to coax coalitions around only a few national candidates for President, Madison and the Constitution’s other drafters who had signed on to Article II, Section 1, as a late-in-the-convention compromise returned home to their respective states to defend it. This happened in ratifying conventions like the one in Richmond, where they praised it as yet one more split-the-difference solution to stalemate among the states. They agreed that their unique mechanism for the January or February selection of the President would be, in fact, commonplace in elections. Few Founders spoke publicly on these little-questioned assumptions and expectations, making Mr. Madison’s remarks in Richmond all the more worthy of consideration. His remarks that the size of the country and the differences among the states would yield numerous candidates for the nation’s highest office—most certainly more than two candidates and possibly more than the five provided for in Article II, Section 1—are to this day more forthright than almost any of his fellow Founders.Footnote ⁷ Yet, it soon became clear that this unique mechanism in Article II, Section 1, mostly would be unused because elections regularly were won and done in November or December. Therefore, it fell not to the House of Representatives but instead to the political parties to coordinate the casting of electoral votes in the legislatures and the canvassing of votes in states that awarded them either by district or by casting of popular votes in statewide contests. This rendered the President’s selection in the House the rare exception more than the rule.

A final comment in this regard is reserved for the great Elmer Eric Schattschneider, whose 1942 Party Government put Madison and other delegates’ unrealized assumptions of a Constitution without anything like national political parties to coax national coalitions around one or two leading candidates this in plainspoken perspective: “One of the best proofs of the proposition that the authors of the Constitution did not understand party politics is to be found in the Constitution itself in the provisions made for the election of a president by the House of Representatives when no candidate receives a majority in the Electoral College. This machinery has now been unused for more than a century” (Schattschneider Reference Schattschneider1942). “More especially the provision in the original Constitution that the House choose a president from the five candidates receiving the highest electoral vote shows how greatly the authors of the Constitution underestimated the power of the parties to bring about a concentration of votes” (Schattschneider Reference Schattschneider1942, 51; italics in original). These underestimations are understood better by our consideration of Mr. Madison and his statements on that now-mostly-forgotten 16th day of Virginia’s ratifying convention in Richmond.