NottyImp
Vital Football Legend
Interesting, from The Graun:
If you’ve been watching the US election unfold for days now – especially if you don’t live there – you may have thought on more than one occasion: “But why do they even have the Electoral College?”
The answer, as is often the case with the US constitution, is because of trying to strike a workable compromise between the northern states and the slave-holding southern states in the early days of the US.
If you want to read up on it, there’s a great essay from last year here by Assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, Wilfred Codrington III called “The Electoral College’s racist origins”. He writes:
As we wait some 200+ years later for count numbers to slowly update, I recommend it as a fascinating read in the meanwhile: The Atlantic – The Electoral College’s racist origins
If you’ve been watching the US election unfold for days now – especially if you don’t live there – you may have thought on more than one occasion: “But why do they even have the Electoral College?”
The answer, as is often the case with the US constitution, is because of trying to strike a workable compromise between the northern states and the slave-holding southern states in the early days of the US.
If you want to read up on it, there’s a great essay from last year here by Assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, Wilfred Codrington III called “The Electoral College’s racist origins”. He writes:
"The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned."
The ‘three-fifths compromise’ mentioned there was the 1787 decision that enslaved people would equal ‘three-fifths’ of a person for the purposes of counting the population of states and thus determining their level of representation in Congress.As we wait some 200+ years later for count numbers to slowly update, I recommend it as a fascinating read in the meanwhile: The Atlantic – The Electoral College’s racist origins