Eric Burin

just started a #SHEAR2025 starter pack! tell me who to add / who’s missing.

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Honored that ‪@gliamericanhistory.bsky.social‬ invited me to write a brief essay on the Electoral College for its online journal, History Now.
www.gilderlehrman.org/history-reso...

Proud and grateful to work with the open-access Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.

Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition is available as a free digital download (thedigitalpress.org/Picking-the-...) & as a low-cost paperback (www.amazon.com/Picking-Pres...).

PICKING THE PRESIDENT: THE DIGITAL PRESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA. Scores of individuals and institutions helped bring the Revised and Expanded Edition to fruition. Another grateful h/t to all who made it possible, especially The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.

Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition Eric Burin, ed. Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition. 2025. Download | PurchaseMedia Kit During the latter half of 2024, with the United States a…

Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition is available as a free digital download (thedigitalpress.org/Picking-the-...) & as a low-cost paperback (www.amazon.com/Picking-Pres...).

PICKING THE PRESIDENT: PART III (“RESOURCES”). Part III features fifty items, including the complete debate on the subject at the Constitutional Convention, which illuminate the creation, ratification, and early evolution of the United States’ presidential election system.

Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition Eric Burin, ed. Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition. 2025. Download | PurchaseMedia Kit During the latter half of 2024, with the United States a…

Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition is available as a free digital download (thedigitalpress.org/Picking-the-...) & as a low-cost paperback (www.amazon.com/Picking-Pres...).

Combined, Section One and Section Two provide an expansive view of the United States’ presidential election system from its inception onward.

PAUL SCHUMAKER holds up for consideration 2 prospective constitutional amendments: one to amend the Constitution’s amendment process and the other to institute a presidential election system which would use approval voting for a preliminary election and ranked-choice voting for the general election.

RANDALL M. MILLER posits that “reformers” and “the people” can constructively live “within” the extant presidential election system by championing the adoption of democracy-enhancing measures which in time may foster “popular support to scrap” the current system altogether.

GEORGE C. EDWARDS III elaborates on this theme, explaining that “states do not embody coherent, unified interests” and that the way the system currently operates, presidential candidates “ignore most small states; in fact, they ignore most of the country.”

JACK N. RAKOVE makes four “big points” about the system, the last one being that to change it, individuals must “grasp” that no one votes based on “the size (meaning populace) of their state,” but rather that the “real interests” which “determine our votes are scattered across all states.”

ROBERT M. ALEXANDER focuses on the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which was enacted “to prevent another January 6th.”

GARY BUGH reviews the 1960s’ and 1970s’ congressional debates on the subject with an eye toward discerning how U.S. lawmakers conceptualized representation.

Section Two features essays which illuminate modern efforts to reform or abolish the United States’ presidential election system.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON provides a wide-ranging history of the nation’s presidential election system from its creation to the eve of the 2024 contest.

KATHLEEN BARTOLONI-TUAZON platforms the person who from the beginning literally and figuratively towered over the entire issue, George Washington.

MICHAEL T. ROGERS assesses additional criticisms which were leveled against the system during the ratification contest.

MARK STEPHEN JENDRYSIK examines Thomas Jefferson’s skeptical response to the Constitution’s presidential election system, a disfavor which partly stemmed from his fear that it would be susceptible to foreign interference.

WILDRED U. CODRINGTON III shifts the attention to contingent elections (i.e., instances in which the electoral vote is inconclusive), observing that the provisions for them are “tragically minoritarian.”

ROSEMARIE ZAGARRI casts the system which the delegates devised as a reflection of “the fundamental tension Americans faced at the time…; that is, the tension between the people as the basis of representative government and the states as the basis of union.”

JANE E. CALVERT showcases another delegate who influenced the formation of the presidential election system, John Dickinson, the prolific “Penman of the Founding” who “may have hoped for a time when electors would be unnecessary.”

MICHAEL H. TAYLOR spotlights a central figure in that story, James Wilson, who at the Constitutional Convention was the first to propose a popular vote to elect the president and (one day later) was the first to propose an elector system for that purpose.

JOHN P. KAMINSKI surveys how the issue went from being “continually rehashed” at the Constitutional Convention, to generating “relatively little sustained discussion” during the ratification contest in 1787-88, and finally to becoming the subject of Amendment XII of the U.S. Constitution in 1804.

Section One features essays which illuminate the creation, ratification, and evolution of the United States’ presidential election system.

PICKING THE PRESIDENT: PART II (“NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE”). The Revised and Expanded Edition of Picking the President unveils fifteen new essays. A summary of them follows.

Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition Eric Burin, ed. Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition. 2025. Download | PurchaseMedia Kit During the latter half of 2024, with the United States a…

Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition is available as a free digital download (thedigitalpress.org/Picking-the-...) & as a low-cost paperback (www.amazon.com/Picking-Pres...).

PICKING THE PRESIDENT: PART II (“THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE IN THE AMERICAN MIND”). In September 2024, I conducted a nationwide study on the Electoral College. The questionnaire is included in book & the study’s aggregate results are posted on the UND Scholarly Commons: commons.und.edu/data/32/.

Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition Eric Burin, ed. Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition. 2025. Download | PurchaseMedia Kit During the latter half of 2024, with the United States a…

Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition is available as a free digital download (thedigitalpress.org/Picking-the-...) & as a low-cost paperback (www.amazon.com/Picking-Pres...).