This exhibit documents the efforts off Indiana Senator Birch Bayh to, first, reform the Electoral College and then, almost immediately despairing of that, to abolish it in favor of direct popular election of the President.

The barriers encountered by Bayh and his staff over a sixteen-year period reveal the complex mix of historical fissures, party politics, congressional alliances, personal relations, political ambitions, and, finally, the coalitions of unlikely bedfellows that can ultimately decide the fate of even a reform supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people.

Documents in the exhibit are from the Birch Bayh Senatorial Papers, which are part of the IU Libraries’ Modern Political Papers collections. Originals of official documents of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments had to be returned to the National Archives, so some of the documents in the exhibit are copies made to preserve the completeness of the collection.