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A story on Indiana Public Media about how close the nation came to eliminating the Electoral College after the 1968 presidential election features commentary from IU McKinney Professor Gerard Magliocca. Republican Richard Nixon was elected president that year in a hotly contested three-way race that included Democrat Hubert Humphrey and segregationist former Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

Wallace lost the 1964 Democratic Primary and launched a third party in an effort to win the White House four years later. He won five states in the Deep South in 1968.

“People were very concerned that basically, if he had done a little better or if Nixon had done a little worse, that you would have had an election thrown into the House of Representatives,” Professor Magliocca said in the story. That prompted Senator Bayh to rally support for eliminating the Electoral College. The effort had the support of 80% of Americans at the time, won bipartisan support in the House of Representatives in 1969, and was filibustered in the Senate in 1970 by Southern Democrats and a few senators from some small states.

Professor Magliocca, a well-known constitutional law scholar, is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor of Law at IU McKinney. He is the author of four books, the latest of which, The Heart of the Constitution: How the Bill of Rights Became the Bill of Rights, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He also is the author of over 20 articles on constitutional law and intellectual property. He was named to the 2020-2021 class of fellows for the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.