News Vérité

Here’s something that might surprise you: for the first few decades of American history, most citizens couldn’t vote for president at all. Their state politicians just picked the president’s electors for them—no public vote required. So how did we get from that system to the one we have today? It wasn’t a single law or dramatic moment. Instead, it was a messy, state-by-state process that took nearly 80 years to complete. What Are Presidential Electors, Anyway? Before we dive into the history, let’s clear up what “electors” actually means. When you vote for president today, you’re not technically voting for the candidate directly. You’re voting for a slate of electors—people who will officially cast your state’s votes in something called the Electoral College. It’s these electors who actually choose the president. The U.S. Constitution left it completely up to each state to decide how to pick these electors. And in the beginning, most states decided their legislatures would just choose them behind closed doors.

It’s doubtful that there’s much celebrating in Venezuela today as the nation marks its 1811 Declaration of Independence from Spain, a break that sadly lasted only a year and was marked by earthquakes in Caracas, eerily predictive of what happened to the the city this year. Here’s the story of that historic event, illustrated above as the Declaration is signed. On July 5, 1811, Venezuela became the first Spanish colony in the Americas to officially break away from Spain. It was a bold move that would inspire independence movements across the continent. But this wasn’t a sudden burst of patriotic fever. The declaration came after years of tension, political maneuvering, and a perfect storm of events happening thousands of miles away in Europe. And as we’ll see, the dream of independence would prove much easier to declare than to actually achieve. When Napoleon Broke Spain (And Accidentally Sparked a Revolution) The story really begins in 1808, not in Venezuela, but in Spain. That year, the French military genius Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain with his armies. He forced Spain’s King Ferdinand VII to give up his throne and installed his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as the new king. Imagine waking up

The creation of the U.S. Constitution wasn’t some noble, unified moment where everyone held hands and sang about freedom. It was a brutal summer of backroom deals, shouting matches, and a propaganda war that would make modern political campaigns look tame. In 1787, the young United States was falling apart. The country’s first attempt at a constitution—the Articles of Confederation—was a disaster. The Founders had been so terrified of creating another king that they’d made the central government basically powerless. It couldn’t collect taxes. It couldn’t regulate trade between states. It couldn’t enforce any laws. When farmers in Massachusetts grabbed their pitchforks and started an armed rebellion (Shays’ Rebellion), the government couldn’t even stop them. Leaders across the country realized: this isn’t working. The Philadelphia Convention: A Secret Meeting in a Sweltering Room (May–September 1787) Fifty-five delegates showed up in Philadelphia with a simple job: fix the Articles of Confederation. Make a few tweaks, patch the holes, send everyone home. Instead, they locked the windows. Yes, in the middle of a Philadelphia summer—imagine the heat, the sweat, the smell—they sealed the room for total secrecy. And then they decided to throw out the entire system and start over from scratch.

When Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a woman reportedly asked him what kind of government the delegates had created. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.” Two hundred and thirty-nine years later, if Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson were suddenly transported to 2026 America for our 250th anniversary, that conditional “if” would hang heavy in the air. Each man would arrive with different eyes, different fears, and radically different prescriptions for what has become of their experiment. Franklin: The Delighted Diagnostician Of the three, Benjamin Franklin would adjust fastest. This shouldn’t surprise us. The man who arrived in Philadelphia as a teenage runaway and left as the most famous American in the world was nothing if not adaptable. A printer who became a scientist, a scientist who became a diplomat, a diplomat who became a founding father—Franklin’s genius was his refusal to be confined by any single identity. Drop him into 2026, and within hours he’d have figured out how to unlock an iPhone.