The first US presidential election was held on January 7, 1789, and George Washington was elected president. But hardly anyone voted for him in that election, even Washington himself. He could not vote for himself. He didn't have the option. Let me show you what I mean. Here is Washington's diary entry for that day. Thermometer at 32 in the morning, 39 at noon, and 39 at night. Call them all day, but raw and chilly. Went up to the election of an elector for this district of president and vice president, when the candidates pulled for being Dr. Stewart and Colonel Blackburn. The first received 216 votes from the freeholders of this county, and the second 16 votes. Dined with a large company on Venice and at Pages Tavern and came home in the evening. So notice who Washington is voting for here. He has the choice between Stewart and Blackburn. The president is elected by electors, not by the voters, not by the citizenry of the country, but by a small group of people called electors, who we refer to in the collective as the Electoral College. According to the Constitution, each state is assigned a certain number of electors, and then it's up to that state how they choose their electors. And in these early elections for president back in the 1718 hundreds, it was common for states to have a variety of ways of choosing their electors. The state legislature itself could choose electors, they could leave it up to the governor. Now in Virginia, in the 1789 election, it so happens that they left it up to a popular vote. But the way they did it was Virginia was assigned 12 electors, and the legislature divided Virginia up into 12 districts. And in each district, the eligible voters in that district would choose one elector. Here it is in the privacy of this curtain space, at the American voters every four years, on the first Tuesday, up to the first Monday in November, choose their national government. And nowadays in modern American elections, we actually kind of do the same thing, although we kind of hide it from ourselves. We play this game with ourselves and pretend that we're directly electing the president, because nowadays when you go and you vote on the ballot, it'll list the nominees from the different parties as if you were selecting the nominee directly. But in actuality what you're doing is you're voting for a slate of electors that you don't see on the ballot, and they are the ones who will vote for the president five weeks later in December of the election year. The point I'm getting at is this diary entry of Washington is a little glimpse into a very different electoral culture in America, the way it was back in the 1700s. Because back then they didn't try to hide the existence of the electoral college, they didn't try to pretend it wasn't there, and imagine that they were voting for the president directly. They were quite frank with themselves that we are electing electors, and then the electors are going to choose the president. That's how the Constitution envisioned it, and everyone just accepted that. It's only been this evolution in American political life over the past two centuries where we've gotten this attitude that, oh no, the voters should be choosing the president, but that's not what the Constitution says. Now we have to go through this kind of smoke and mirrors where we're going to pretend it's something else. I'm currently working on a much bigger video on the election of 1789, and in the course of researching that video I came across this diary entry from Washington, which I thought was a great little glimpse into the way the election was run in Virginia that year. It's a great illustration, I think, of the fact that people in 1789 took the electoral college seriously and treated it as an actual functioning part of the American political system. But I couldn't find a way to organically fit that into that video, so I just decided to make a separate video about it. I was going to make a short on this actually, but I couldn't figure out how to fit it all into the short length of time over short. So hence this video. But anyway, thanks for dropping by. See you later.