Я ни за, ни против коллегии избирателей, но насколько я понимаю, изначально она была введена из-за условий, которые существовали на тот момент, и уже не очень применимы к нашему времени.
How did the Constitution's framers decide on the Electoral College system?
ROSEN
Well, this is a remarkable story. Robert Dahl, one commentator, says that deliberations on selecting the president suggest a group of baffled and confused men who finally settle on a solution more out of desperation than confidence, so, here, in a nutshell, are some considerations. There was a big debate in the Constitutional Convention about the appropriate representation of big and small states. The Virginia Plan would have allotted representation in Congress by population.
The New Jersey Plan would have given equal representation to each state. And, of course, the final compromise, the Connecticut Compromise put population for Congress and equal representation for the Senate. Then it came time to choose the president, and the framers were debating among three different possibilities. One was selection by Congress, which they didn't want 'cause they thought it would violate the separation of powers. Congress would have too much power over the president.
The second was a selection by state legislators, which they thought would give too much power to the state governors and legislators. And the final possibility was direct election, which James Madison and James Wilson and other framers favored. However, there was a fear that direct election would both lead to a kind of kingly figure who would have too much power and also that voters didn't know the national candidates well enough and therefore would only vote for their parochial candidates and not for a single representative.
So here's the compromise that the Constitutional Convention came up with: They created an Electoral College based on the apportionment system on population to a larger degree, and they held that this Electoral College would choose among the top five candidates for president. And, if there was no majority that any candidate got, then the election would be decided ultimately by the House of Representatives with each state receiving one vote.
And what the framers anticipated was that most elections would end up in the House, but because people would favor their parochial candidates and there would be a wide range of candidates in the first run, most of the elections would ultimately be decided by population -- equal population which would favor the small states. But we can talk later about the fact that all of the framers' presumptions about the system would work disappeared and were exploded very quickly with the rise of the party system, and things began to change very quickly.
REHM
But, of course, the name Electoral College does not even appear in the Constitution.
ROSEN
It does not because they really didn't think that the Electoral College would even be the main body for choosing a president. They thought it would be the House of Representatives time and time again.
REHM
So, from your perspective, James Thurber, looking back, did the system that the framers came up with make sense at that time?
THURBER
I think it made sense at that time. They were very worried about the population taking away from thoughtful -- really, intellectuals making this decision about who should be the president of the United States. And they set up a framework with only basic elements, and it sort of evolved over time. And, by the way, it comes from Rome. It comes from the selection of centurions in Rome that made up of a body of a college of centurions that selected people who would be in power, which is an interesting twist to this thing.
They were very worried about political parties. Madison wrote about that. Beware of factions. They'll undermine the public interest. And so they thought this was a way to mitigate the power parties. Some of them thought they were very bad. Well, they couldn't do away with parties. Parties became very important in this thing. And parties right now are very important because, in 34 states, the electors are selected by party convention, and in 10 states, they are selected by the party central committee.
"If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part." Richard Feynman