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Not directly elected by the people
- From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people—instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators. This radically changed in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving the public a direct vote.
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Dec 1, 2014 · How U.S. senators were chosen prior to the Seventeenth Amendment—and the consequences of Constitutional reform. From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people—instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators.
This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution. By the time of the amendment’s adoption, many states had already established mechanisms that effectively allowed voters to choose the senators of their state (e.g., by having the legislature ...
Jan 23, 2023 · By 1912, 29 states elected senators either as nominees of their party's primary or in a general election. As representatives of a direct election process, the new senators supported measures that argued for federal legislation, but to achieve reform, a constitutional amendment was required.
As a result of such developments, the year before the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, at least twenty-nine states were nominating Senators on a popular basis, and, as a consequence, the constitution al discretion of the state legislatures had been reduced to little more than that retained by presidential electors. 1 Footnote
The adoption of the 17th Amendment in 1913 replaced this system with the direct election of senators. In this article, we use an original data set of recorded ballots for U.S. Senate elections in state legislatures from 1871 to 1913 to illustrate the dynamics of indirect elections.
We focus on the years spanning 1871 to 1913 because the balance of power between the federal and state governments began to shift dramati-cally during that time. the power to elect U.S. senators elevated the sig-nificance of state legislatures because they were pivotal in determining the composition of the U.S. Senate.
