The Electoral College is an Artifact of Slavery
Here’s why we should care about it after the election
Every four years, America has the same conversation about the electoral college:
This system is unjust and undemocratic! Why do we still have this antiquated system?
And then we forget it about until the next four years, when the possibility of electing a minority president (a president elected by the minority of voters in the popular vote) rears its head again.
This time, Joseph Biden narrowly won the electoral college despite winning approximately 4.2 million more votes nationwide. The number of electoral college electors Biden will obtain may eventually grow to 305 if Biden wins Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, but the margins of these individual states were extremely narrow.
However, as this article from MSNBC explains, despite record turnout across the nation unparalleled since the presidential election of 1900, the electoral college system still incentivizes swing state voters to come out to vote more than states that we are told “don’t matter.” Thus, while there was a 9 to 11 point increase in turnout in states like North Carolina and Michigan, there was only a 3 to 5 point increase in turnout in Alabama and California.
The problem is, as this article in Time magazine adeptly explains, we have forgotten that the reason for the electoral college’s existence was originally to ensure the power of slave states.
If the presidential election in our country’s early history had been decided by the popular vote, the free states would easily have had a higher population. This necessitated the horrendous 3/5ths clause of the Constitution, which counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person for the census (which determines the number of electors in the electoral college, as well as the number of representatives in the House).
I could go into a digression here about how even the concept of a bicameral legislature is unquestionably rooted in a suspicion of direct democracy, if not arguably rooted in America’s history of institutional slavery and racism. But regardless, it is clear that the electoral college is directly tied to the history of slavery. Thus it is no surprise that for 32 of the…