Voting Rights

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 the Ben Franklin’s World 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.

[Read more…] about Elections in Early America: The Electoral College (Podcast)

Independence from Great Britain provided the former British American colonists the opportunity to create a new, more democratic government than they had lived under before the American Revolution.

What did this new American government look like? Who could participate in this new American democracy? And what was it like to participate in this new democracy?

[Read more…] about Elections in Early America: Elections & Voting in the Early Republic

The British North American colonies formed some of the most democratic governments in the world. But that doesn’t mean that all early Americans were treated equally or allowed to participate in representative government.

So who could vote in Early America? Who could participate in representative government?

[Read more…] about Elections in Early America: Democracy & Voting in British North America