Journal Title
Wisconsin Law Review Online
Volume
2015
Issue
1
First Page
1
Document Type
Article
Publication Information
2015
Abstract
Every four years, the cry goes up to destroy the Electoral College. That cry is especially loud in years when a candidate is elected president who receives a minority of the votes. The election of a "minority president" happened with the election of 2000, but it had happened before. The Electoral College has elected three presidents whom a majority of the voters voted against: Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and George W. Bush in 2000. (A fourth president was also elected with a minority of the popular vote—John Quincy Adams in 1824—through that election was by the House of Representatives, the Electoral College not having produced a majority of electors. Against these recurrent cries are occasional voices of dissent, arguing for one reason or another that majority rule is not the highest value of a republic. So does this essay, arguing to keep the Electoral College, even were the rest of the Constitution subject to wholesale revision.
Recommended Citation
Stephen M. Sheppard, A Case for the Electoral College and for Its Faithless Elector, 2015 Wis. L. Rev. Online 1 (2015).
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Election Law Commons, Supreme Court of the United States Commons