Electoral College is vestige of slavery, say some Constitutional scholars

[groundloop]

Here's an article I just found on PBS, originally posted on Nov. 6. I haven't seen it referenced here on DU yet.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/electoral-college-slavery-constitution/


When the founders of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 considered whether America should let the people elect their president through a popular vote, James Madison said that “Negroes” in the South presented a “difficulty … of a serious nature.”

During that same speech on Thursday, July 19, Madison instead proposed a prototype for the same Electoral College system the country uses today. Each state has a number of electoral votes roughly proportioned to population and the candidate who wins the majority of votes wins the election.

<snip>

Madison, now known as the “Father of the Constitution,” was a slave-owner in Virginia, which at the time was the most populous of the 13 states if the count included slaves, who comprised about 40 percent of its population.

Madison knew that the North would outnumber the South, despite there being more than half a million slaves in the South who were their economic vitality, but could not vote. His proposition for the Electoral College included the “three-fifths compromise,” where black people could be counted as three-fifths of a person, instead of a whole. This clause garnered the state 12 out of 91 electoral votes, more than a quarter of what a president needed to win.


NOTE that they weren't interested in slaves being able to vote, only in increasing the power of states where slavery was legal.

[whitefordmd]

1. Actually I thought it was the other way

The North wanted to 3/5th rule to diminish the power of the South. Also free blacks were able to vote in some Northern states if memory serves me correctly.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. That's it-- the argument was over defining "population"...

for to get the number of House members. Women, children, slaves and others couldn't vote anyway, but the slaves added up to huge "population" numbers.

[awoke_in_2003]

13. Thus compromise

The north didn't want them counted, the south did, because the house reps are based on population count. So they settled on a slave equalling 3/5 a person.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. I thought it had little to do with slavery, since...

slaves couldn't vote anyway. Neither could women or even that many free, white males.

For the same reason the Senate originally wasn't directly elected by the voters-- Madison and Hamilton thought the hoi polloi were too stupid to be trusted with electing the President. (there is actual evidence of that this year, but I digress...)

Remember that back then this whole democracy thing was still very experimental.

[groundloop]

5. Of course slaves couldn't vote, but counting them increased slave states population

It wasn't about whether or not slaves could vote, the slave states wanted to use them to gain more electoral votes as well as more representation in the House.

[awoke_in_2003]

14. A states elector count

equals the number of representatives and senators. A larger population equals larger number of reps, and thus electors.

[niyad]

4. no. ten of the federalist papers says it explicitly.

[progree]

6. Here's another article, and yes it benefited the slave states, and that was intentional

Last edited Sun Nov 27, 2016, 08:22 PM - Edit history (4)

The real reason we have an Electoral College: to protect slave states, Vox.com, 11/12/16

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/12/13598316/donald-trump-electoral-college-slavery-akhil-reed-amar

As for this 3/5 of a person thing that seems to be confusing so many people. The slave states wanted to count slaves as full 100% people (for purposes of determining the number of reps and number of electors a state was allotted). The north wanted to counted them as 0 people (since they couldn't vote). The compromise was 3/5.

Say we have 2 states... and let's compare direct popular vote to the electoral college

[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#CEF6FE;"]Nationwide popular vote used to elect presidents

a northern state with a population of 600,000, of which 1/2 are adults of voting age, for a total of 300,000 eligible adults, all eligible to vote.
Say turnout of eligible adults is 70%. Number of votes cast: 300,000 * 70% = 210,000.

a southern state with a population of 1 million, of which 1/2 are adults of voting age, but only 60% of those are non-slave (40% are slaves).
Say turnout of eligible adults is 70%. Number of votes cast: 500,000 * 60% * 70% = 210,000.

So in a system that elected presidents by popular vote, the two states have equal clout.

[div class="excerpt" style="background-color: #ffa !important;"]Electoral College (E.C.), with slaves counting 3/5

But with the electoral college, the math is this (suppose there is 1 House of Representatives representative "rep" per 100,000 "population"):

a northern state with a population of 600,000, will have 6 reps. And 8 electors in the E.C. (because one adds 2 senators to the number of reps to get the number of electors)

a southern state with a population of 1,000,000, of which 400,000 are slaves and only count for 3/5 will have a "population" of 400,000 * 3/5 + 600,000 free = 840,000. It will have 8 reps and 10 electors in the E.C. -- 10/8 or 1.25 the clout of the northern state.

[div style="background-color:#CEFEEE;"]Electoral College (E.C.), with slaves counting as full people -- what the slave states wanted

a northern state with a population of 600,000, will have 6 reps. And 8 electors in the E.C.

a southern state with a population of 1,000,000, of which everyone counts fully and equally. It will have 10 reps and 12 electors in the E.C. -- 12/8 or 1.5 times the clout of the northern state.

[Initech]

7. The Electoral College: how is this still a thing?

[awoke_in_2003]

15. Because there hasnt been an amendment

passed by congress and ratified by a majority (3/5th of states, I believe) of states to overturn it.

[brooklynite]

8. After the GWB Election, did Democrats make any effort to eliminate the EC?

No.

[Ohioblue22]

9. Above all, the electoral college had nothing to do with slavery. Some historians have branded the el

Above all, the electoral college had nothing to do with slavery. Some historians have branded the electoral college this way because each state’s electoral votes are based on that “whole Number of Senators and Representatives” from each State, and in 1787 the number of those representatives was calculated on the basis of the infamous 3/5ths clause. But the electoral college merely reflected the numbers, not any bias about slavery (and in any case, the 3/5ths clause was not quite as proslavery a compromise as it seems, since Southern slaveholders wanted their slaves counted as 5/5ths for determining representation in Congress, and had to settle for a whittled-down fraction). As much as the abolitionists before the Civil War liked to talk about the “proslavery Constitution,” this was more of a rhetorical posture than a serious historical argument. And the simple fact remains, from the record of the Constitutional Convention’s proceedings (James Madison’s famous Notes), that the discussions of the electoral college and the method of electing a president never occur in the context of any of the convention’s two climactic debates over slavery.


If anything, it was the electoral college that made it possible to end slavery, since Abraham Lincoln earned only 39 percent of the popular vote in the election of 1860, but won a crushing victory in the electoral college. This, in large measure, was why Southern slaveholders stampeded to secession in 1860-61. They could do the numbers as well as anyone, and realized that the electoral college would only produce more anti-slavery Northern presidents.

Yet, even on those terms, it is hard for Americans to escape the uncomfortable sense that, by inserting an extra layer of “electors” between the people and the president, the electoral college is something less than democratic. But even if we are a democratic nation, that is not all we are. The Constitution also makes us a federal union, and the electoral college is pre-eminently both the symbol and a practical implementation of that federalism.

The states of the union existed before the Constitution, and in a practical sense, existed long before the revolution. Nothing guaranteed that, in 1776, the states would all act together, and nothing that guaranteed that after the Revolution they might not go their separate and quarrelsome ways, much like the German states of the 18th century or the South American republics in the 19th century. The genius of the Constitutional Convention was its ability to entice the American states into a “more perfect union.” But it was still a union of states, and we probably wouldn’t have had a constitution or a country at all unless the route we took was federalism.



Source Washington post

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/posteverything/wp/2016/11/15/in-defense-of-the-electoral-college/

[rpannier]

10. Nice

Thanks for sharing
I still think it has to go
But your post is interesting

[Ohioblue22]

11. I agree it needs to go especially if it can't do it's job

The reason that the Constitution calls for this extra layer, rather than just providing for the direct election of the president, is that most of the nation’s founders were actually rather afraid of democracy. James Madison worried about what he called “factions,” which he defined as groups of citizens who have a common interest in some proposal that would either violate the rights of other citizens or would harm the nation as a whole. Madison’s fear – which Alexis de Tocqueville later dubbed “the tyranny of the majority” – was that a faction could grow to encompass more than 50 percent of the population, at which point it could “sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens.” Madison has a solution for tyranny of the majority: “A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”
As Alexander Hamilton writes in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The point of the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their ch....."

[UTUSN]

12. We desperately need a re-vamp of The Constitution, but won't happen, so FALL of us