News Vérité

By the early 1900s, the United States Senate had become a national embarrassment. Seats sat vacant for months—sometimes years—because state legislatures couldn’t agree on whom to appoint. Corporate interests, particularly railroad and mining magnates, openly bribed state legislators to install sympathetic senators, earning the chamber its notorious reputation as the “Millionaires’ Club.” And perhaps most perversely, state legislative races—meant to address local concerns—had been completely hijacked by national politics, with voters choosing their representatives based solely on which U.S. senator candidate they promised to support. This wasn’t what the Framers had envisioned when they wrote Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution in 1787, establishing that each state’s two senators would be “chosen by the Legislature thereof.” The system was designed to protect states’ rights and serve as a deliberate check against what the Founders feared as “popular passion.” But by the late 19th century, that elegant constitutional mechanism had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The dysfunction reached its nadir in 1905, when Delaware’s legislature became so hopelessly gridlocked that the state went entirely unrepresented in the U.S. Senate. It wasn’t an isolated incident. Across the country, legislative deadlocks routinely left senate seats empty, depriving states of

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.