Alex Keyssar oped in The Boston Globe:

The framers of the Constitution — assembling in 1787, a time when political parties did not exist — chose to leave it to the state Legislatures to decide how to select presidential electors. Although, as later explained by James Madison, choosing electors through district elections within each state “was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed,” the final document permitted states to experiment and develop their own systems.

In the first presidential elections, some states did indeed hold district elections to choose electors, others preferred statewide general ticket (winner-take-all) elections, and still others chose to dispense with popular elections and let their Legislatures pick the electors — which unsurprisingly resulted in all of a state’s electoral votes being cast for the same candidate. Numerous states changed their method of selection from one election to the next; some developed hybrid systems.

But political parties were taking shape rapidly in the 1790s, and the experiments in electoral design were soon engulfed by partisan interests, both Federalist and Democratic-Republican. Parties that confidently controlled the Legislature in each state increasingly opted for methods of choosing electors that would deliver all of a state’s electoral votes to their candidates.

The triumph of partisanship over principle was vividly played out in the key state of Virginia in the 1800 presidential election. That year’s bitterly contested election pitted Federalist John Adams against the Democratic-Republican, Thomas Jefferson; it was a rematch of the 1796 election, which Adams had won by only three electoral votes. One of those Adams votes had come from a Virginian, who was elected to his post thanks to the commonwealth’s use of a district system.

Virginia’s Republicans, who dominated state politics, had long expressed a preference for district elections as the method that would yield results that best reflected the views of a diverse people. But they were also determined to elect Jefferson, and the Legislature consequently decided to switch to the “general ticket” in the 1800 election — to prevent Adams from picking up any electoral votes in the nation’s largest state. (To no one’s surprise, Massachusetts then retaliated, switching to legislative selection of electors, to bolster the candidacy of Adams, its native son.)

The Virginia Legislature’s decision was controversial, widely denounced as an unprincipled surrender to the ignoble spirit of “faction.” John Marshall, a Virginia native and soon to become chief justice of the United States, found the Legislature’s action to be so distasteful that he vowed to never vote again in a presidential election as long as the general ticket was in place.

Notably, Republicans in the Legislature acknowledged the legitimacy of the criticism: They defended what they had done on the pragmatic grounds that many Federalist states were already utilizing winner-take-all elections and that it would thus be foolish for Virginia to disadvantage its preferred candidate by doing otherwise. In a formal statement, the Legislature declared that such partisan maneuvers were warranted “until some uniform mode for choosing a President … shall be prescribed by an amendment to the Constitution.” Virginia, in effect, would act in a principled manner once all states were doing so….