That part of the plan which proposed to elect him by a majority of all the electoral votes, giving to each State as many votes as it was to have in both houses of Congress, might make the individual, when so elected, theoretically the choice of a majority of the people of the United States, although not necessarily the choice of a majority of the States. But there was a peculiar feature of this plan,--afterwards, in the year 1804, changed to a more direct method,--by which the electors were required to return their votes for two persons, without designating which of them was their choice for President, and which for Vice-President, the designation being determined by the numbers of votes found to be given for each person. This method of voting increased the chances of a failure to choose the President by the electoral votes. It is not easy to understand why the framers of the Constitution adhered to it; although it is probable that its original design was to prevent corruption and intrigue. Whatever its purpose may have been, it served to make still more prominent the expediency, not only of removing the ultimate election from the Senate, but of providing some mode of conducting that election by which an appointment by a minority of the States would be prevented, when a majority of the electoral votes had not united upon any one individual, or had united upon two. The plan which had been prepared by the grand committee, and which adjusted the relations between the executive and the Senate respecting appointments and treaties, had left no body in the government so likely to be free from intimate relations with the President, and at the same time so capable of being made the instrument of an election, as the House of Representatives. By the fundamental principle on which that body had been agreed to be organized,--in direct contrast to the basis of the Senate,--its members were the representatives of the people inhabiting the several States, and in the business of legislation a majority of their votes was to express the will of a majority of the people of the United States. But the representatives were to be chosen in the separate States; and nothing was more easy, therefore, than to provide that, in any other function, they should act as the agents of their States, making the States themselves the real parties to the act, without doing any violence to the principle on which they were assembled for the purposes of legislation. Accordingly, as soon as a transfer of the ultimate election from the Senate to the House of Representatives was proposed, the method of voting by States was adopted, with only a single dissent.[327] The establishment of two thirds as a quorum of the States for this purpose, and the provision that a majority of all the States should be necessary to a choice, followed naturally as the proper safeguards against corruption, and were adopted unanimously.