287 Elections in Early America: Presidential Elections & the Electoral College

Ben Franklin's World

Liz Covart

History, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2020

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For four months during the summer of 1787, delegates from the thirteen states met in Philadelphia to craft a revised Constitution that would define the government of the United States. It took them nearly the entire time to settle on the method for selecting the President, the Chief Executive. What they came up with is a system of indirect election where the states would select electors who would then cast votes for President and Vice President. Today we call these electors the Electoral College. In this final episode of our series on Elections in Early America, we explore the origins and early development of the Electoral College and how it shaped presidential elections in the first decades of the United States with Alexander Keyssar and Frank Cogliano. Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/287 Complementary Episodes 🎧 Episode 040: Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, For Fear of an Elective King 🎧 Episode 107: Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention 🎧 Episode 131: Frank Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson's Empire of Liberty 🎧 Episode 143: Michael Klarman, The Making of the United States Constitution 🎧 Episode 179: George Van Cleve, After the Revolution: Governance During the Critical Period 🎧 Episode 193: Partisans: The Friendship & Rivalry of Adams & Jefferson 🎧 Episode 279: Lindsay Chervinsky, The Cabinet: Creation of an American Institution REQUEST A TOPIC 📨 Topic Request Form 📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.com WHEN YOU'RE READY 🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community LISTEN 🎧 🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music 🛜 Pandora CONNECT 🦋 Liz on Bluesky 👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn 🛜 Liz’s Website SAY THANKS 💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts 💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ben Franklin's World is a production of the
0:02.4	Omaha Institute and production of this episode was made possible by a
0:06.7	grant from the Roller Baltimore Foundation of Richmond, Virginia.
0:17.0	Hello and welcome to episode 287 of Ben Franklin's world.
0:24.6	The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our
0:29.3	early American past have shaped the present day world we live in.
0:33.0	And I'm your host, Liz Kovart.
0:36.0	How did elections in the United States develop?
0:39.0	Who is American Democracy 4 and who gets to participate in that democracy by voting.
0:45.3	These are the questions that we've been investigating since the start of our 4 episode
0:49.6	series about elections in early America. And episode by episode,
0:54.0	we've come to know a fair bit about how elections in the United States developed.
0:59.0	In our first episode, episode 284,
1:02.0	Holly White helped to see the British North Americans thinking about democracy
1:06.4	and the ways they held elections came directly from the thoughts and traditions of early modern
1:11.0	England.
1:12.0	In our second episode, we discovered what the Articles of
1:15.3	Confederation and the Constitution of 1787 had to say about elections and how
1:20.6	early Americans took what those constitutions had to say to hold the first federal
1:24.8	elections in the United States.
1:27.6	And throughout our second and third episodes, we've investigated who early American democracy was for,
1:33.6	and a bit about how that definition has changed over time.
	...

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