Elected official

“ It may fall upon the house of representatives to elect a president, and each candidate may promise, and if he is elected, bestow an office upon every elector. The same effects will follow, as if the parliament was to elect a king. ”

“ The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his office during the term of four years, and, together with the Vice-President, chosen for the same term, be elected, as follows:
2. Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; but no senator or representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector. ”

“ Whether the executive is to be elected by the members of a popular assembly or is to be imposed from above as before, and further, whether it shall be responsible to the house or shall absolutely affront it as in the past? ”

“ But whatever be the electorate, it is that electorate which will elect members of the Legislative Councils and the Executive Councils will be either elected or taken from the Legislative Councils and the Executive Councils will be responsible not to any outside authority but to the Legislative Councils from which they will be taken and thus ultimately to the people. ”

“ Executive Power.—The executive power is represented by the President of the Republic, who is elected in a general assembly of the two chambers by nominal voting, being required the absolute majority of suffrages expressed on ballots which are publicly read out by the secretary. ”

“ When the best man is elected President, let him select the best men he can find for his counselors or cabinet; and let all {557} the officers within the province of the Chief Magistrate to appoint, be selected upon the same principle to officiate wisely in different parts of the nation. ”

“ Where the constitution and the statutes are silent as to the qualificaition for a given office, the people may elect whom they will, if the person so elected is competent to discharge the duties of the office. ”

“ Should I be elected next Tuesday, then without any sense of elation, with an appreciation of the great confidence you have resposed in me, I shall accept that high office which I regard as one of the highest upon the face of the earth because it is the highest executive office in the greatest of the American commonwealths, and I shall go forward to the performance of my duties with a sense of responsibility and with a determination to perform those duties to the very utmost of my abilities. ”

“ The administrators of the executive power may be either elective or not; and in the former case all or only some of them may be elective. They are elective in a proper democracy, that is to say, in a democracy which recognizes representation. If all the public officials are directly elected by the whole people, the democracy is a pure democracy; if only some, it is a mixed democracy. The public officials may also fill vacancies themselves; this is the case in a pure aristocracy. ”

“ If the majority of the administrative officials who are now elected were made appointive, responsibility for their conduct in office could be concentrated upon the chief executive officer appointing them. ”

“ At the head of every public office was a man who had been appointed or elected chiefly for partisan reasons; who served only for a short time; who could become familiar with the work of his office, if at all, only slowly ”

“ As for their not being immediately elected by the people at large, the gentleman would please to observe, that, contradictory to their present method of electing delegates to Congress,—a method laid down by that Confederation which he admires,—all the representatives are elected by the people ”

“ GERRY. If the executive is to be elected by the legislature, he certainly ought not to be reëligible. This would make him absolutely dependent. He was against a popular election. The people are uninformed, and would be misled by a few designing men. He urged the expediency of an appointment of the executive by electors to be chosen by the state executives. The people of the states will then choose the first branch, the legislatures of the states the second branch, of the national legislature; and the executives of the states, the national executive. ”

“ The executive is entrusted to the president, who is nominated and elected for four years by popular vote, and is re-eligible for a second but not for a third consecutive term. He is assisted by a council of ministers representing the departments of the interior, war, finance, public works, education and justice. ”

“ Men will be put into office by some fortuitous circumstance, such as a particular advertisement in the newspapers. Thus your Senator, and your governor, might well be elected by the general primary as the result of party selection, but if the people selected judges and subordinate officers they would have to take men without regard to their qualifications. ”

“ The executive is a president who is elected for a term of five years and is ineligible for the next succeeding term. He is chosen by electors, who are elected by departments in the manner prescribed for deputies and in the proportion of three electors for each deputy. ”

“ The last step of all will be, immediately after the ratification of the constitution by the higher powers, to proceed to the elections, under it, of the executive committee, the board of directresses, and the officers and agents of the different departments. All the persons elected, who do not perfectly understand the duties to which they are assigned, will have to qualify themselves for them as thoroughly as possible ”

“ The representatives and the substitutes shall be elected by majority of the votes, and they shall be chosen only from among the active citizens of the department.
3. All active citizens, whatever their condition, profession, or tax, can be elected representatives of the nation. ”

“ In a certain sense, and to a certain extent, he is the representative of the people. He is elected by them, as well as Congress is; but can he, in the nature of things know the wants of the people as well as three hundred other men, coming from all the various localities of the nation? If so, where is the propriety of having a Congress? ”

“ Furthermore, since the President bears the obligation to oversee and manage a fair electoral process as the head of the executive branch, the President is, as a matter of course, a 'public official' within the meaning of Article 9 of the Public Officials Election Act. ”

“ Here, sir, the people govern; here they act by their immediate representatives. You have also a Senate, constituted by your state legislatures, by men in whom you place the highest confidence, and forming another representative branch. Then, again, you have an executive magistrate, created by a form of election which merits universal admiration. In the form of this government, and in the mode of legislation, you find all the checks which the greatest politicians and the best writers have ever conceived. What more can reasonable men desire? ”