F.Y.I. THE US ELECTORAL COLLEGE IS A HOLD OVER FROM SLAVERY.
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.
Since then,
the Electoral College system has cost four candidates the race after
they received the popular vote most recently in 2000, when Al Gore lost
to George W. Bush. Such anomalies and other criticisms have pushed 10
Democratic states to enroll in a popular vote system. And while there
are many grievances about the Electoral College, one that's rarely
addressed is one dug up by an academic of the Constitution: that it was
created to protect slavery, planting the roots of a system that's still
oppressive today.
"It's embarrassing," said Paul Finkelman,
visiting law professor at University of Saskatchewan in Canada. "I think
if most Americans knew what the origins of the Electoral College is,
they would be disgusted."
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.
During that key
speech at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Madison said
that with a popular vote, the Southern states, "could have no influence
in the election on the score of Negroes."
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.
"None of this is about slaves voting,"
said Finkelman, who wrote a paper on the origins of the Electoral
College for a symposium after Gore lost. "The debates are in part about
political power and also the fundamental immorality of counting slaves
for the purpose of giving political power to the master class."
He said the Electoral College's three-fifths clause enabled Thomas
Jefferson, who owned more than a hundred slaves, to beat out in 1800
John Adams, who was opposed to slavery, since the South had a
stronghold.
While slavery was abolished, and the Civil War led to
citizenship and voting rights for black people, the Electoral College
remained intact. Another law professor, who has also written that the
Constitution is pro-slavery, argues that it gave states the autonomy to
introduce discriminatory voting laws, despite the Voting Rights Act of
1965 that was built to prevent it.
In 2013, the Supreme Court
freed nine states, mostly in the South, from the stipulation in the
Voting Rights Act that said they could only change voter laws with the
approval of the federal government.
"A more conservative Supreme
Court has been unwinding what the [other] court did," said Juan Perea, a
law Professor of Loyola University Chicago. "State by state, that lack
of supervision and lack of uniformity operates to preserve a lot of
inequality."
In July, a federal appeals court struck down a voter
ID law in Texas, ruling that it discriminated against black and Latino
voters by making it harder for them to access ballots. Two weeks later,
another federal appeals court ruled that North Carolina, a key swing
state, had imposed voting provisions that "target African Americans with
almost surgical precision."
And for this presidential election,
15 states will have new voting restrictions, such as ones that require
government-issued photo identification at the polls or reduce the number
of hours the polls are open.
"The ability of states to make
voting more difficult is directly tied to the legacy of slavery," Perea
said. "And that ability to make voting more difficult is usually used to
disenfranchise people of color."
The National Popular Vote
Interstate Compact has gained traction, but for reasons more related to
the anomaly of the Gore-Bush election. Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz
championed legislation in New York that brought the state into the
compact and was asked by the NewsHour Weekend why the movement is
important.
"We are the greatest democracy on the planet, and it
seems to me that in the greatest democracy, the person who gets the most
votes should win the election," said Dinowitz. "We're one country,
North, South, East and West. One country. The votes of every single
person in the country should be equal. And right now, the votes are not
equal. Some states your vote is more important than in other states."
New York overwhelmingly agreed on his bill in 2014, joining nine other
states and Washington, D.C. Together, they have 165 electoral votes. If
they gain a total of 270 the majority needed to elect a President the
nation will move to a popular vote.
Not all academics agree that
slavery was the driving force behind the Electoral College, though most
agree there's a connection which both Perea and Finkelman say they know
it is not the most prominent argument for the push toward a popular
vote.
"But it is a vestige that has never been addressed," Perea said.
In light of this more complete (if less flattering) account of the
electoral college in the late 18th and early 19th century, Americans
should ask themselves whether they want to maintain this odd; dare I
say, peculiar Institution in the 21st century?
F.Y.I. POSTED BY RICHARD.
