ple national rather than federative. It would prevent the large States from consolidating their votes to the disadvantage and oppression of the small ones. It would protect the rights of minorities in every State. It would reduce the premium on fraud and accident. It would make the electoral power of splinter parties and pressure groups more nearly proportional to their numbers. It would prevent slight changes in the political sentiments of a State from producing sudden and entire revolutions in its political character. It would promote political activity in the so-called safe States the states of homogeneous sentiment. It would affect the choice of candidates by the national conventions of the major parties, causing them to seek out the man of the Nation rather than the man of the great doubtful States. It would inspire sentiments of nationality among the whole body of people:

What

Asked one of the earliest advocates of the national plebiscite system

could make us so much one people, as to give all the people this general equal privilege? It would produce in the national habits, manners, and love of country, more harmony than any other political measure which could be possibly adopted.

In the second place, the nationwide popular election has the advantage of being perfectly understood by the people, who use it in the election of Governors and mayors. That is more than can be said of the present system or of any of the other substitutes that have been proposed for it.

In the third place, it is the system wanted by the people, that is to say, if the polls taken on the subject are any indication of their desires. Now, against this impressive list of merits what can be said on the other side? Only that the members of the Federal Convention considered the mode of popular election and rejected it. But this reply is, I submit, based on a false reading of the debates and proceedings of the Convention. The system of electoral voting was devised not with the idea of committing the choice of the President to a small body of wise men, but as an equivalent for the system of popular electionnecessary if States with large numbers of slaves and restrictive suffrage laws were to be allowed a weight in the election of the President proportional to their weight in the House of Representatives.

It is simply not true that the members of the Convention distrusted the people and would not commit to them so important a trust as the election of a President. This allegation is supported by scarcely more than a single quotation—a remark of George Mason of Virginia lifted from its context. He said upon one occasion that—

It would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for chief Magistrate to the people as it would to refer a trial of colors to a blind man. But no one ever notices the sentence that immediately followed this statement:

The extent of the country renders it impossible that the people can have the requisite capacity to judge of the respective pretensions of the candidates.

When the passage is read as a whole, it will not bear the construction placed upon it. And indeed Mason himself on an earlier day had declared that he favored the idea of an appointment of the President by the people but thought it impracticable.

I might add that other members of the Federal Convention did not think that the people were so separated that they would not even know the characters of any national candidate. Mr. Williamson from North Carolina was one who said there are now and always will be people with national reputations and there always have been."

Senator BAYH. May I interrupt briefly? The difficulty of transportation and the lack of communication were difficulties that would affect everyone who had to be reached from an equal and sufficient standpoint. Those things certainly have changed. Those things at least were weighed in part at the Convention.

Mr. WILMERDING. Yes. But even George Mason admitted at the time he was talking that people all over the country knew about George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. He just thought that in the future when the notoriety that these people had acquired in the war had died away, the people of the population might never have heard of anybody outside of their own States. But he was unique almost in taking that position and he was wrong as has been proved by experience. The other members did not have those fears.

A careful study of the debates of 1787 will show that the consensus of opinion with respect to the best mode of electing the President changed as the Convention wore on. At the outset a majority of the members favored an election by Congress, but when no satisfactory way could be found to reconcile such an election with the idea that the Executive should be independent of the Legislature, the members began to look with favor on a popular election. There was, however, one practical difficulty; the right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than in the Southern States and the latter contained great number of slaves who of course had no suffrage. Virginia, represented in Congress by a number of persons proportioned to her total populations, including slaves, would count for very little in the election of the President. It was to get over this difficulty, and for no other reason, that the scheme of electoral voting was devised. If each State were to be assigned a number of votes for President proportioned to the number of its inhabitants, their votes to be cast by electors chosen by the people, the difficulty arising from the disproportion of qualified voters in the several States could be obviated.

Now, this electoral plan, it should be observed, was worked out in a committee of 11, six of whose members had declared a preference for the popular election of the President as against all other modes. In fact, there was only one member, Roger Sherman, that can be proved, I think, did not particularly want a popular election for President. He would have preferred to have the President elected by the Gorernors of the States or the State legislatures. But he went along with the plan when the plan was proposed.

When the plan was adopted by the Convention, Madison had no hesitancy in saying that "the President is now to be elected by the people." In the Virginia ratifying convention, he explained over and over again that the President was to be "the choice of the people at large." In the First Congress he spoke of the President as being "appointed at present by the suffrages of 3 million people." Other statements not only among those who framed the Constitution, but among those who ratified it and first put it into execution, expressed themselves in the same way.

These multiple quotations, I would notice in passing, cast doubt on the assumption that the electors were ever intended to act as independent agents. They indicate that they were expected to act merely as a medium for acertaining the public will. The Founding Fathers were practical statesmen. They were well aware that no constituency would elect a man to perform a single act without first taking out security that he would perform it in the manner which they pointed out to him.

The reasons which led to the adoption of the electoral voting system still exist, but with the extension of the franchise in the Southern States and the abolition of slavery, they have lost most of their force. In the circumstances it can fairly be said that if the people were to abolish the electoral voting system and substitute an immediate election by the people they would be completing rather than changing the design of those who framed our Constitution, ratified it, and first put it into execution.

That completes my testimony. In concluding, I can only hope that, by adopting some amendment along the line of Senate Joint Resolution 2, the Congress and the States will at long last place the Executive Magistracy where it has always belonged-squarely on the great foundation of the people.

Senator BAYH. Thank you very much, Mr. Wilmerding. You made a significant contribution by giving us an insight into the Philadelphia Convention and by your discussion on this subject of presidential election reform.

I must admit, if I may, that your reasoning and doubt concerning the practical possibility of the popular election of the President was shared early in this discussion by the chairman of the subcommittee. I just accepted more or less at face value the arguments proposedsome of those were pointed out in the course of the statement by the Senator from Florida, including the one that 32 States would lose weight in a popular vote.

Mr. WILMERDING. I was encouraged by listening to Senator Holland, because he seemed to be willing to sacrifice, on behalf of his State, the getting of its true proper weight. But there may be others in the other States that have too much weight, that they may be willing to sacrifice it also in the public good. I think he is sacrificing something he should not be sacrificing. He is sacrificing what he is rightfully entitled to.

Senator BAYH. After further study of this, I came to the conclusion that when you had supporters of direct election such as Senator Mansfield, from Montana, two Senators from West Virginia, Senator Bible, from Nevada, and Senators from Oregon, Missouri, Washington, Iowa, Kansas, and New Mexico, this did not present an insurmountable obstacle if we could arouse the people. Your efforts and the efforts of the American Bar Association and other associations I think have had a practical effect on this.

Mr. WILMERDING. I have no way of knowing on my own whether the Senate would pass the public election. When the thing came up in 1948, Senator Lodge introduced his proposal for the plan. I asked him why he did not come out for a nationwide popular election. He told me in a letter and he permitted me to quote the letter, he was in favor of the nationwide popular election, but he knew it had not made any

headway in the past and he did not think it would make any headway in the future; so he was trying to work out a system that was just as good but would bring out the same results. I did not like his system. so I opposed the district system as being also on the principle it would bring about the same results. So I feel that the advocates of the rival amendments, the proportional voting system and the district system, might both of them be willing to support the nationwide elections since the principal merits which they claim for their systems are that it will bring about the identical same results.

Senator BAYH. Thank you very much. We certainly appreciate your taking time in exploring this with us. You have been very helpful. Mr. WILMERDING. Thank you, sir.

Senator BAYH. The last witness is Dr. Paul David. Professor David was to appear before the committee tomorrow, but because we ran into a scheduling problem, Professor David has been kind enough to consent to change his schedule.

Dr. Paul David is professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia.

Professor David has a long and distinguished record of government service in various capacities. He also was associated with the widely respected Brookings Institute prior to his association with the University of Virginia.

Professor David, we are glad to have you with us and we appreciate your willingness to make a contribution for the committee.

STATEMENT OF PAUL DAVID, PROFESSOR OF GOVERNMENT AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Mr. DAVID. Thank you, Senator. I appreciate the committee's willingness to hear me today. I regret that I did not have an opportunity to get my statement completely into writing and reproduction so it could be before you, but if you would permit me, I would simply talk

from notes.

May I ask how much time we have got, are we adjourning at 12? Senator BAYH. We will adjourn after you have handled your presentation in the appropriate manner.

Mr. DAVID. I will try to be brief.

This is, I think, the fourth time I have testified before this committee by invitation. The first time was in 1955, April 6, 1955, and it arose because of the research I had been doing on the presidential nominating process. And on that occasion I addressed myself primarily to the nominating aspects of the pending proposals. I am happy to see that the ones which we are considering today do not seem to have any nominating aspects. I have regarded that as a separate question which ought to be dealt with separately.

I have always opposed combining any proposal for nationwide presidential primaries and the reform of electoral college, although I suspect you still have pending before the committee some amendments in which that is done. At any rate, I dealt with that as fully as I could in 1955, and will not trouble you with it further today.

I testified again in 1961, at the request of Senator Kefauver, and on that occasion, which was in those long hearings in that committee in 1961, I dealt with three subjects. Again with the presidential primary aspect, with electoral college reform and with the problem of

scheduling of elections in relation to the date the President is inaugurated. I would like to refer to that testimony a little further today, particulary on the scheduling problem.

I was again asked by Senator Kefauver to testify in 1963, as those hearings show, mainly because he was thinking along the lines of the effects of the Baker v. Carr decision. With all the approach to redistricting going on, the context of the governmental system as a whole in which previous attempts at electoral college reforms had been defeated, this context was so much that he thought that the prospect was now opening up for getting something done. In effect, he was trying to get me to say, I guess, that we already had the State legislatures reformed. I was unable to say that at that time and did, in fact, say it seemed to me a little premature to think the whole system had been fixed up except the electoral college, because that was before the further decision by the Supreme Court on the State legislative redistricting and on the congressional apportionment.

In the meantime, much of what the Senator was looking toward at that time has, of course, occurred. And the situation in which you are now considering the matter is quite different. It seems to me to be much more compatible with going ahead with some kind of reform.

At any rate, I think within another 5 years at least we will have virtually fair districting for State legislatures in every State and for Members of Congress in every State. I say 5 years mainly because I am looking forward to the effect of the census in 1970 and the redistricting action that will occur after it. But we already are almost there in terms of the census of 1960. But that census is already pretty well out of date.

In terms of what the subcommittee has been doing recently, I would like to express my appreciation and I hope that of my colleagues in the political science profession for what the committee has done on the subject of Presidential disability and the vacancy problem of the Vice President and bringing about the coming into effect of the 25th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. I think that was a very great contribution and one that shows your own sense of responsibility, Mr. Chairman, and one which the country really is indebted to you for and one which I much admire. Senator BAYH. Thank you very much.

Mr. DAVID. I think the present case is in some way similar. You are dealing with a very tedious problem, one that has been labored on for over 200 years. There has been a great deal of disagreement over the technical features as well as major policy aspects so that we never had any consensus on what to do. Personally, I have been prepared to tolerate the delay on the electoral college problem because I did not think the existing system was so bad. As long as it worked the way it has been working most of the time.

In other words, the unit system is not one that I rebelled against, strongly, as long as the distribution of electoral votes among the States is the way it is. It can be crude mathematically, as a matter of fact, and we have proof referred to at least in my book on the party convention where the same problem arises in the national party conventions. But the effect of the distribution of the vote among the States, the inequities more or less tend to cancel themselves out. I

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