A Shameful Remnant Of Slavery That Must End
Time for the United States to join the rest of the civilized world.
Few Americans would support the Electoral College system if they knew the whole story of its origins.
The Electoral College is in the spotlight as the nation tumbles towards the 2024 presidential election.
The sting of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's electoral college defeat to Republican Donald Trump (304 to 227) in 2016 still stings, considering the former first lady, US senator, and secretary of state received 48.18% of the popular vote to her opponent's paltry 46.09%.
There have been four other times in history when the popular vote winner lost the Electoral College: Andrew Jackson in 1824, Samuel Tilden in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and Al Gore in 2000.
Perhaps more disturbing than the continued use of the Electoral College to elect presidents is the history behind that system.
Akhil Reed Amar, a Constitutional law professor at Yale University, reports for Time that "Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery."
Amar noted that the visionary Pennsylvania Founding Father and Supreme Court Justice James Wilson proposed the direct election of presidents. However, James Madison (Virginia) claimed that this system would prove unacceptable to the South.
“The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [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, Madison claimed that the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all), of course, could not vote if the Founders adopted a direct election system.
But the Electoral College would let southern states count their slaves (with a two-fifths discount) during presidential elections—as proposed in a prototype described by Madison during the same floor speech.
PBS elaborated on the origin of that discount, known as the "Three-Fifths Compromise,” writing that Madison was a Virginia slave-owner, “the most populous of the 13 states if the count included slaves” (roughly 40% of its population at the time.
Knowing that the North outnumbered the South (considering only free individuals), Madison proposed the creation of the Electoral College and included that compromise under which slaves would 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.
Paul Finkelman, a visiting law professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, wrote a paper on the origins of the Electoral College for a symposium after Al Gore lost.
Finkelman notes that "none of this is about slavery. The debates are in part about political power and also the fundamental immorality of counting slaves to give political power to the master class."
As Time explains: "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."
Time pointed to the example of Thomas Jefferson, who defeated Northerner John Adams in 1800 — a feat that wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the electoral college votes generated by the inclusion of slavery.
The 12th Amendment, proposed in 1803 and passed a year later, modified the Electoral College to its current form.
During floor debate on the measure’s passage, Massachusetts Congressman Samuel Thatcher argued 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 a direct national election.
Amar concludes in his Time article that: "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 we want to maintain this odd—dare I say peculiar?—institution in the 21st century."
Finkelman weighed in with PBS, stating, "It's embarrassing.” He concluded that “if most Americans knew the Electoral College's origins, they would be disgusted."
PBS notes at the end of their report that: "not all academics agree that slavery was the driving force behind the Electoral College, though most agree there’s a connection."