The 17th Amendment: Direct Election of Senators Explained

Introduction to the 17th Amendment

The 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1913. It altered the way in which senators of Congress were elected. Previously, under Article I of the Constitution, it was the state legislature's responsibility to elect senators to Congress. With the 17th Amendment, however, the voting power was placed directly into the hands of the public. The Amendment also provided a way for states to allow governors to fill vacancies in their state's appointed seats in Congress by temporarily appointing a senator until a special election could be conducted.

The text of the Amendment states specifically that "two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years" shall be the manner in which senators are voted into office. This effectively made the process of electing senators more democratic and less representational, in the sense that the voting public had the power to choose its congressional representative directly, as opposed to having the state legislature act as an intermediary between the voting public and its representatives in Congress.

The Original System: State Legislature Elections

To understand the effect of this Amendment on American politics, it is first necessary to understand how the political scene was established prior to its passage. Under the original draft of the Constitution, the state legislature was empowered with the ability to determine the state's elected senators for a six-year term. One advantage of this arrangement was that it gave anti-federalists — a strong and vocal group of citizens opposed to a central government — some reassurance. With the states recognizing a central government to which each was bound (rather than acting as a loose federation, as was the case prior to the adoption of the Constitution), anti-federalists could take comfort in believing that the states retained some degree of protection against any central power that tried to assert too much authority over smaller states.

The state legislature thus retained a degree of autonomy from both the populist form of government (represented by the House of Representatives, the other wing of the bicameral Congress) and from the encroachment of federal authorities. The original method of electing senators was, in short, an exercise that afforded state legislatures more authority than they otherwise would have had — and at a time when anti-federalist sentiment was strong, this arrangement was viewed positively as a means of ensuring that individual states retained meaningful power.

Corruption and Electoral Deadlocks

As time wore on, however, objections arose that state legislatures were susceptible to corruption and could not be trusted to pick senators — that the election process should be placed directly into the hands of citizens. A second problem was the issue of electoral deadlocks (Bybee 538). These two problems reinforced each other and created an atmosphere of public distrust. Citizens began to believe that rather than helping states maintain autonomy in the face of the central government, the Constitution as written on this matter was actually undermining the authority of the people, who felt they were being manipulated and controlled by corrupt officials within state legislatures.

Evidence of this suspicion was apparent in the fact that in the latter half of the 19th century, there were three Senate investigations into corruption-related charges over elections. In the very first year of the 20th century, William Clark's election to the Senate by his state legislature was overturned and ruled null because the investigatory committee found that his election had been the result of purchased votes within his state's legislature. However, such judgments were not necessarily indicative of an entirely rotten system. Zwicki points out that in one hundred years of state-legislature Senate elections, there were only 10 incidents in which corruption charges were actually brought up as part of contested elections (Zwicki 1022). This shows that, by and large, the method used to elect senators was one that functioned and that maintained states' autonomy from the federal government.