Congressional debate.
House of Representatives.
On its first day, the 8th Congress considered the designation amendment. The first formulation of the amendment had the five highest electoral vote earners on the ballot in the House if no one candidate had a majority of the electoral votes. Democratic–Republican John Clopton of Virginia, the largest state in the Union, argued that having five names on the list for a contingency election took the power from the people, so he proposed that there be only two names on the list. On October 20, the House appointed a seventeen-member committee (one Representative from each state) to fine-tune the amendment.
The original proposal starting in the New York State Legislature would have, along with designation, put forward the idea of the district election of electors that Treasury Secretary Gallatin had supported. Shortly after the committee was formed, Federalist Benjamin Huger attempted to add a provision regarding district elections to the proposed amendment, but the committee ignored him.
The committee then submitted an updated version of the designation amendment to the House on October 23 that changed the number of candidates in a contingency election from five to three and allowed the Senate to choose the vice president if there were a tie in that race. Small Federalist states disliked the change from five to three because it made it far less likely that a small-state candidate would make it to a contingency election. Huger and New York Federalist Gaylord Griswold argued that the Constitution was a compromise between large and small states and the method chosen by the Framers is supposed to check the influence of the larger states. Huger even asserted that the Constitution itself was not a union of people, but a union of large and small states in order to justify the original framework for electing the president. Designation, argued Griswold and Huger, would violate the spirit of the Constitution by taking away a check on the power of the large states.
Next up for the Federalists was Seth Hastings of Massachusetts, who submitted the argument that the designation amendment rendered the vice presidency useless and advocated for the elimination of the three-fifths clause. John C Smith asked the inflammatory question of whether the proposed amendment was to help Jefferson get reelected. Speaker Nathaniel Macon called this inappropriate. After Matthew Lyon of Kentucky denounced any reference to the three-fifths clause as mere provocation, the House easily passed the resolution 88 to 39 on October 28.
Many Northern representatives argued for the elimination of the electoral college, and argued for direct election of the President by all U.S. voters.
