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the direct election of senators, changed this system when
it was ratified in 1913. Originally, only the members of
the House of Representatives were chosen by popular
vote. Representatives were to represent the interests
of the people and senators were to represent the interests
of state governments; however, with popular voting
for both senators and representatives, the two groups
now represent the same constituencies. The House of
Representatives was the only part of the government
designed to respond to the will of the people, however,
and as half of one of the three branches, the Founders
thus originally designed our government to be one-sixth
democratic.
The electoral college chooses the president, and the
Constitution has never specified how electors are chosen.
The most common method in 1800 was for the state
legislature to choose a state’s electors. 1 The idea was
that the electors would be better informed about the
candidates than members of the general public would
be, so the electors would nominate two candidates, at
least one of whom had to be from a state other than the
elector’s. The Founders thought that, in general, this
method of election would result in no candidate receiving
an electoral majority, in which case the five top votegetters
would have their names forwarded to the House
of Representatives, and the House would choose the president.
2 In other words, the electoral college would serve
as a search committee to forward names to the House of
Representatives, where the president would be selected.
This process would insulate presidential selection from
democratic pressures and insulate the president from the
pressures of popular opinion. The system did not work as
62 LIBERALISM AND CRONYISM