To counteract this manifestly great inconvenience and impropriety, the incumbent of the executive office was to be ineligible a second time. This, however, was to encounter one inconvenience by another, since the more faithfully and successfully the duties of the station might be discharged, the stronger would be the reasons for continuing the individual in office. The ineligibility was accordingly stricken out. Hence it was, that a variety of propositions concerning the length of the term of office were attempted, as expedients to counteract the evils of an election by the legislature of a magistrate who was to be re-eligible; and among them was one which contemplated "good behavior" as the sole tenure of the office.[113] This proposition was much considered; it received the votes of four States out of ten;[114] and it is not at all improbable that it would have received a much larger support, if the supposed disadvantages of an election by the people had led a majority of the States finally to retain the mode of an election by the national legislature.[115] But in consequence of the impossibility of agreeing upon a proper length of term for an executive that was to be chosen by the legislature, the majority of the Convention went back to the plan of making the incumbent ineligible a second time, which implied that some definite term was to be adopted. This again compelled them to consider in what other mode the executive could be appointed, so as to avoid the evil of subjecting the office to the unrestrained influence of the legislature, and to remove the restriction upon the eligibility of the officer for a second term.
In an election of the chief executive magistrate by the people, voting directly, the right of suffrage would have to be confined to the free inhabitants of the several States. But even with respect to the free inhabitants, the right of suffrage was differently regulated in the different States; and there must either be a uniform and special rule established as to the qualification of voters for the executive of the United States, or the rule of suffrage of each State must be adopted for this as well as other national elections. In the Northern States, too, the right of suffrage was much more diffused than in the Southern, and the question must arise, as it had arisen in the construction of the representative system, whether the States were to possess an influence in the choice of a chief magistrate for the Union in proportion to the number of their inhabitants, or only in proportion to their qualified voters, or their free inhabitants.