Two top universities, two different professors of political science, Historical Society representative, and others explain the Electoral College and it's purpose and origins in slavery and racism. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918717270/the-electoral-college (total length - 4:36) https://modelcitizen.simplecast.com/episodes/why-do-we-still-have-the-electoral-college (1:08:12) https://the-youth-vote.simplecast.c...erica-the-history-you-never-learned-in-school (19:54) Consider: The lesson is that the Electoral College was originally intended to appease the white supremacists in their efforts to carry out their racist goal of suppressing the black vote, thus making racism SYSTEMIC. And now we have various national figures adamantly and impatiently declaring that "we do not have systemic racism in America!" . OF COURSE WE DO!!! IT'S CODIFIED IN THE CONSTITUTION AS THE "ELECTORS" !!! Specifically, Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution.
CT Mirror - The ignorance of calling the electoral college racist The Hill (2016) - Liberals who claim Electoral College is ‘racist’ need a history lesson
Gawd Almighty, THERE WAS NO BLACK VOTE TO "SUPPRESS" WHEN THE EC WAS CREATED!!! You can foolishly send your children to a "top" university or give 'em a frontal lobotomy, same damned difference except the lobotomy is significantly cheaper!
"Slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise "But determining exactly how many electors to assign to each state was another sticking point. Here the divide was between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn’t the Founders include slaves in counting a state’s population? "In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were enslaved Black people, who couldn’t vote. James Madison from Virginia—where enslaved people accounted for 60 percent of the population—knew that either a direct presidential election, or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South. “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States,” said Madison, “and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” "The result was the controversial “three-fifths compromise,” in which enslaved Black people would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that Southern states would ratify the Constitution and gave Virginia, home to more than 200,000 slaves, a quarter (12) of the total electoral votes required to win the presidency (46)." https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fathers-constitutional-convention "Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery. "At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count. "If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency. "Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves. "The 1796 contest between Adams and Jefferson had featured an even sharper division between northern states and southern states. Thus, at the time the Twelfth Amendment tinkered with the Electoral College system rather than tossing it, the system’s pro-slavery bias was hardly a secret. Indeed, in the floor debate over the amendment in late 1803, Massachusetts Congressman Samuel Thatcher complained that “The representation of slaves adds thirteen members to this House in the present Congress, and eighteen Electors of President and Vice President at the next election.” But Thatcher’s complaint went unredressed. Once again, the North caved to the South by refusing to insist on direct national election." https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/ Plus: "The Electoral College’s Racist Origins" The Brennan Center for Justice
OO OO OO! Look @HurricaneDitka , @Matthewthf , @joesnagg , and @Spooky ! Not just the above post of THREE reputable sources, but two more!! "The Electoral College’s Racist Origins" The Atlantic "The story of the Electoral College is also one of slavery—an institution central to the founding of American democracy." The Smithsonian
A couple of problems. It was the slave states who wanted to count slaves as people the non-slave states did not want them treated as persons. And as the NYT notes The Electoral College Was Not a Pro-Slavery Ploy There is a lot wrong with how we choose the president. But the framers did not put it into the Constitution to protect the South. By Sean Wilentz Mr. Wilentz is the author, most recently, of “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding.” .....Like many historians, I thought the evidence clearly showed the Electoral College arose from a calculated power play by the slaveholders. By the time the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 debated how the president ought to be chosen, they had already approved the three-fifths clause — the notorious provision that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person to inflate the slave states’ apportionment in the new House of Representatives. The Electoral College, as approved by the convention in its final form, in effect enshrined the three-fifths clause in the selection of the president. Instead of election by direct popular vote, each state would name electors (chosen however each state legislature approved), who would actually do the electing. The number of each state’s electoral votes would be the same as its combined representation in the House and the Senate.... .... Most important, once the possibility of direct popular election of the president was defeated, how much did the slaveholding states rush to support the concept of presidential electors? Not at all. In the initial vote over having electors select the president, the only states voting “nay” were North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia — the three most ardently proslavery states in the convention...... .....Southerners didn’t embrace the idea of electors because it might enlarge slavery’s power; they feared, as the North Carolinian Hugh Williamson, who was not a slaveholder, remarked, that the men chosen as electors would be corruptible “persons not occupied in the high offices of government.” Pro-elite concerns were on their minds — just as, ironically, elite supporters of the Electoral College hoped the body would insulate presidential politics from popular passions. When it first took shape at the convention, the Electoral College would not have significantly helped the slave owning states... ...There are ample grounds for criticizing the Constitution’s provisions for electing the president. That the system enabled the election in 2016 of precisely the kind of demagogic figure the framers designed the system to block suggests the framework may need serious repair. But the myth that the Electoral College began as a slaveholders’ instrument needs debunking — which I hope to help with in my book’s revised paperback. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/the-electoral-college-slavery-myth.html
When I saw this thread the first day and noted we were supposed to click on a link and read it, I put the phone down, went to bed and started composing my own lecture. Among other things I'm struggling with insomnia, but I slept well that night. Now I see it's worse than I thought and you're all missing some key points. In 1787 all 13 states had slaves. The first laws to phase out slavery in the northern states were moving along, but far from ending slavery. It was 10 years before the cotton gin made the plantation system a big money maker. No one knew it was coming, so the best guess was that slavery in the south might become less rather than more popular down south over time. There was no income tax or national property tax, but each state was supposed to pull its weight and that would mean taxing the wealthiest citizens to make their obligations to the national budget. In other words, the tax issue was much more important to concerned parties than the Electoral College. I'm glad someone gave a number. If Virginia had 60% slaves and stated with 15 Electoral Votes counting only 60% of the slaves they would have had 20 Electoral Votes if they counted all the states. New Hampshire might have had 10% slaves and not gain 1. So maybe you can answer a question I've wondered about for decades. If they counted all the slaves in 1860, Would Lincoln have won a majority in the Electoral College?
