Free Presidential Lottery by James A. Michener Page A

pitfalls, but corrections had been made toaccommodate his sharpest criticisms and he did not publicly repeat his attack. Hamilton confidently assured the public, “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.”
    I am surprised that this group of keen politicians and social philosophers should have failed to anticipate the two rocks on which their plan would founder. First, they did not foresee the rise of political parties or the way in which they would destroy the effectiveness of the electors. Second, they did not guess that election by the House would work so poorly. This blindness on the part of the best leadership this nation has ever produced should give one pause if he thinks that in the next few years our current leadership will be able to come up with corrections that will end past abuses without introducing new. There could well be unforeseen weaknesses in our plans that would produce results just as unexpected as those which overtook the first great plan.

    DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYSTEM
    If one looks at our first three Presidential elections, one might conclude that the electoral plan had worked as proposed. In 1789 the electors did meet in their own states, they did consider the great men of our nation, and they did settle uponGeorge Washington, by a vote of 69 to 0. In 1792 they did the same, by a vote of 132 to 0. In 1796, when for the first time there was a real contest, the system still proved effective, for the electors met, studied the credentials of the grand figures still among them, and chose John Adams over Thomas Jefferson, by a vote of 71 to 68. It is true that factionalism and not philosophy dictated the choice between the two men, and it is also true that the debacle of 1800 was ominously presaged when certain leaders in Adams’ party entered into a cabal to give Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina the same number of votes as Adams, with the idea of making Pinckney President when the election went to the House. This was forestalled by the fact that Jefferson slipped into second position, thus eliminating Pinckney, but this produced its own unacceptable result: President Adams and Vice-President Jefferson were of different factions and not personally congenial.
    The 1800 election magnified these weaknesses and proved certain aspects of the system were not only ineffective but also corrupting. Whereas Pinckney supporters in 1796 had lost in their gamble of forcing a tie vote which could have been used to deny Adams the Presidency, in 1800 Burr had engineered just such a vote and had nearly succeeded in this disreputable stratagem. Furthermore, when the brutal battle was over, Jefferson wound up with Burr as his Vice-President, a pairing that must have been intolerable to both men.
    The principal reason the original electoral plan was producing so many unexpected results was that early in the life of our republic political parties emerged with an importance no one had foreseen, and electors quickly saw that if theyconsolidated their vote behind their party’s choice, they would gain a considerable advantage, and this they did. The splendid original concept of men of high principle convening to pass upon the credentials of those who might lead the nation had swiftly degenerated into the practical maneuver of party hacks meeting to confirm the choice their party had already made. As early as 1800 every elector but one cast a straight party vote.
    The fact that a noble concept should have failed was not exceptional; the fact that the failure was not corrected was. The Twelfth Amendment did eliminate the chance of another Adams-Pinckney or Jefferson-Burr misunderstanding as to who was running for what, but it continued the office of elector—already discredited—and made no significant changes in the procedure