Presidential Lottery by James A. Michener

delegations—who were not allowed to meet in union—were counted in Congress some months later, the name of the next President would be known.
    It did not take long for a large state to see that if it prevailed upon its electors to vote as a bloc, its leverage wouldbe consolidated and magnified, which would be especially important if one of the candidates happened to be a resident of that state. Once one state made this discovery and acted upon it, all had to follow. By 1800 this principle was widely recognized; in 1804, of the ten states that chose electors by popular vote, seven allotted all their electors to the party that had won the election; in 1824 thirteen out of eighteen did so, and by 1836 it was a nationwide custom with few exceptions.
    By 1836, therefore, the principal features of our haphazard system were determined and no changes have since occurred in the areas we have been discussing. Such amendments as we have had since the major revision provided by the Twelfth Amendment in 1804 have concerned other matters that required attention. The Seventeenth in 1913 stipulated the popular election of United States senators. The Nineteenth in 1920 gave the vote to women. The Twentieth in 1933 related to the terms of President and Vice-President and the convening of the incoming Congress. The Twenty-second in 1951 limited a President to two full terms. The Twenty-third in 1961 gave the District of Columbia electoral votes. The Twenty-fourth in 1964 barred poll taxes in federal elections. And the Twenty-fifth in 1967 clarified the question of Presidential succession and disability. But the fundamental electoral system was not affected by any of these. It is true that from time to time Congressional statute has clarified certain difficult technical points, and to see how this has occurred, let us look briefly at one election which produced reform.

    THE STOLEN ELECTION
    The chief characteristic of our system of electing a President has been pragmatism. When the Constitutional Convention first assembled, not a delegate, so far as we can now ascertain, was in favor of the plan that was finally adopted; it is possible that none had even considered it seriously, but out of pragmatic compromise it was born. Furthermore, most of its basic components were also compromises within the original. To take one example: as drafted, the basic compromise sent deadlocked elections to the Senate, but belatedly it was pointed out that to give this branch of Congress the right not only to confirm Presidential appointments but also to elect in the first place was to make the President a creature of the Senate. Even so, when doughty James Wilson proposed that right of election be moved to the House, he was defeated by a vote of 3 to 7. Next day Wilson was back with the observation that the plan as it then stood meant that “the President will not be the man of the people as he ought to be, but the minion of the Senate.” This time Wilson lost 4 to 6. How was the matter resolved? By a secondary compromise. Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Hugh Williamson of North Carolina proposed that the election go to the House, but that there each state would have but one vote. This pragmatic solution passed 10 to 1.
    I am always refreshed when I read of the common-sense role played by James Wilson; of all the delegates he seems best to have anticipated the temper of the future. A fierceproponent of the rights of the people, an adversary to all that would vest government in the hands of a few, he suffered more defeats of his individual proposals than almost any other delegate, yet in the end his larger ideas prevailed. After his work at the convention, he helped write Pennsylvania’s second constitution, served in Congress and on the federal Supreme Court, where he delivered several pace-setting opinions. He was a Scotsman, a graduate of St. Andrews University, and in the years when I attended that school, the students conducted an annual pageant in