Article II — Section 1

When the framers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787, one of their central anxieties about the new executive was the danger of faction, intrigue, and foreign influence corrupting the selection of a president. The Electoral College mechanism they devised was intended to filter popular sentiment through deliberate bodies of chosen electors, but that design raised an immediate practical problem: if different states chose their electors and cast their electoral votes on different days, there was a real risk that later-voting states could be influenced by knowledge of earlier results, allowing strategic manipulation of the outcome. The framers wanted the act of choosing a president to be, as nearly as possible, a simultaneous national deliberation rather than a cascading series of strategic moves.