ALTHOUGH we all live in the year 2024, America is still Jurassic Park when it comes to electing a president. In any other modern country, most votes count. In America, they don’t. Here, the most electoral college votes apply. There are 538 of them, of which one needs at least 270 to become president. Why? The answer runs through Amsterdam, Leiden and Bergen op Zoom. Through the Staats, Jochems, De Riemer, Reijnders, Grevenraet and Gouverneur families.
When the United States was invented, the world had no elected head of state anywhere. That the new country would have a president was already something highly extraordinary. But that he would be an elected official, that was unique.
THE QUESTION of how to do that, and how to put it into the Constitution, was delegated to a committee of eleven gentlemen, better known as the Committee of Leftover Business. They initially decided that the Congress, the two houses of parliament, would elect the president. But that gradually met with objections. After all, this would make the executive dependent on the legislature, or vice versa, which was undesirable.
Having the citizens elect the president directly, not many were in favor of that. Although America in 1787 consisted of only thirteen states, at the time it was still larger than any other country in the world. A national election would be logistically impracticable, they thought. Hence the idea of a special electoral college, and it was a guy named Gouverneur Morris who was tasked to put it into words. Gouverneur was not his title, but his first name. He had a wooden leg and he was Amsterdam’s Saartje Gouverneur’s son, and her ancestry consisted of all those other Holland and Brabant families.
Gouverneur was by far the best writer of the eleven, everyone agreed. Each state had to count its own votes, he penned, and report the results to an Electoral College. This Electoral College could not become a separate political entity, he said, for that would be begging for intrigue, conspiracies and scheming. No, it was to meet only once every four years, and each state was to send its own delegation to it and report their own results.
HOW BIG was such a delegation? The man with all that Dutch blood had an answer for that as well. As big as each state’s delegation to the Congress. And because each state has two senators plus a number of members in the House of Representatives based on population, Massachusetts, for example, was awarded more electoral votes than tiny Delaware. Today, therefore, there are 538 electoral votes, a reflection of 100 senators and the 438 members of the House.
And so it was decided. Two and a half centuries later, no one is happy with it, but this is what the Constitution prescribes, and amending the Constitution is an almost Herculean and therefore near-impossible challenge in America. Nor did it end well with Mr. Morris himself, for that matter. The man with a golden pen and a wooden leg died of internal injuries at the age of 64 after inserting a fish bone into his penis, in a vain attempt to clear a clogged urinary tract.
