Store Research
America Votes for 221 Years!
November 5, 2010
Some bill research does not include the Governor's file because at the time we researched the bill, the sitting Governor had not released his chaptered bill file. If the Governor's file is not included with this particular research, please contact our office (1-530-666-1917 or quote@legintent.com) and we will be happy to provide this file at no charge if it is available. Please Note: Governor files did not exist prior to 1943.
Your own personal journey with American history continued this week. In 1789, a new nation began its march forward with an important tool: elections. As you considered your vote on Tuesday, it may be inspiring to remember that Americans have been voting as citizens of the United States for 221 years, ever since the first official American election, a Presidential election whose outcome was determined by each state’s “Electors.” These 1789 Electors had the following candidates to consider: George Washington, John Adams, Samuel Huntington, John Jay, John Hancock, Robert Harrison, George Clinton, John Rutledge, John Milton, James Armstrong, Edward Telfair, and Benjamin Lincoln.
While the just-ratified Constitution allowed each of the 13 states to choose their Electors, in 1789 there were only 69 Electors voting in this first Presidential election. The voting ballots of these Electors were then forwarded to Congress and were counted in the presence of the senators and representatives. The counting of these ballots was not completed until the early part of April 1789. However, as explained by the National Archives and Records Administration, “For all intents and purposes, Washington was unopposed for election as President. Under the system then in place, votes for Vice President were not differentiated from votes for President.” George Washington was later inaugurated as President of the United States on April 30, 1789.
Over the next few decades, the term “Electors” gave way to the term “Electoral College,” which had not been used by these early founders nor cited in the U.S. Constitution. In the early 1800’s, the term “electoral college” was the unofficial term for a group of citizens (a body of persons acting as a unit) selected to cast their votes for a president and vice president [3 U.S.C. 4]. Thus the Electoral College became a process that was derived from the original design of the U.S. Constitution [Art. II, Sec. 1] as a compromise between an election by the popular vote and an election by the Congress. Under the Constitution, the people of the U.S. will vote for the electors who then vote for the president.