While the Constitution reflects the framers' clear preference for the president to be elected by a constituency independent of the Congress, one of the most palpable limitations created by the stipulation that electors meet in their respective states as opposed to a single venue was that given the constraints of eighteenth-century technology there was no practical means for that constituency to resolve deadlocked elections in a timely manner, thus necessitating the involvement of Congress in resolving deadlocked elections. Obviously, having the electors meet in the national capital or some other single venue could have permitted the electors to choose a president by means of an exhaustive ballot without Congressional involvement, but the framers were dissuaded from such an arrangement by two major considerations. First, it would have been quite burdensome for electors from distant states to travel to the national capital using eighteenth century means for the sole purpose of electing the president – since they were to be barred from simultaneously serving in the federal government in any other capacity, electors would likely have no other reason to go there. But probably even more importantly, many framers genuinely feared that if the electors met in a single venue, especially under the initial assumption that they would act independently as opposed to being bound to vote for particular candidates, they would be vulnerable to the influence of mobs who might try to ensure a particular result by means of threats and intimidation – this had been a fairly common occurrence in European elections for powerful officials by relatively small constituencies (for example, and perhaps in particular, in papal elections) from the Middle Ages up to the Constitution's creation.