The Electoral College and Slavery

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The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

The Electoral College and Slavery

It’s as difficult to disentangle racism from birtherism as it is tough to separate the Three-Fifths Compromise from the Electoral College.

The Three-Fifths Compromise gave a larger share of representation in Congress to slave states. And because the Electoral College reflects the makeup of Congress, one could argue that were it not for slavery, George W. Bush and Donald Trump never would have become president.

Slavery has been the single largest defining factor in the history and arc of American politics. That salient “peculiar institution” is responsible for the Second Amendment and for the Electoral College working the way it does.

When Congress repealed the Three-Fifths Compromise with the 14th Amendment in the wake of the Civil War, it actually increased the federal political power of the former slave states. Instead of Southern black populations being counted at three-fifths, they were counted at 100 percent. This in turn increased the total number of members of the House of Representatives, and thus the number of Electors, from Southern states, even while those states aggressively suppressed the votes of black residents.

But the biggest perversion of democracy due to the Electoral College involves the US Senate.

For every member of Congress, there’s a member of the Electoral College. At the level of the House of Representatives, this basically tracks the populations of the states. With the Senate, though, the result heavily favors the former slave states and small-population states like Wyoming and Vermont.

California, for example, has nearly 40 million citizens but only two senators. Ditto for New York, with 19 million citizens and two senators.

The imbalance is so bad that the 25 smallest states control half of the Senate (50 out of 100 senators) but represent only 16 percent of American voters. They can (and regularly do) overrule the sentiments of the other 84 percent of Americans represented by the senators from the largest 25 states.10

Like the Three-Fifths Compromise, the form of the Senate was the result of slavery as much as it was a conflict between large and small states. After all, several of the slave states, when their black population was excluded, had a similar number of white male voters as the medium-sized Northern states.

Samuel Thatcher of Massachusetts objected bitterly, saying, “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.”11

Nonetheless, America continued to elect slaveholders to the White House all the way through the presidency of Andrew Jackson, in large part because of both the undemocratic nature of the Senate and the Three-Fifths Compromise. The 15th Amendment resolved the three-fifths issue on paper, but the issue of how each state having two senators skewed the Electoral College persisted.

In 1934, the Senate came within two votes of the two-thirds necessary to pass a constitutional amendment to the states to eliminate the Electoral College and go to direct election of the president. Senator Alben Barkley, D-Kentucky (later Harry Truman’s vice president), stated, “The American people are qualified to elect their president by a direct vote, and I hope to see the day when they will.”12

The Senate took up the issue again in 1979, led by Senator Birch Bayh, D-Indiana, but this time it fell even shorter of two- thirds: the vote was 51 for and 49 against.

Given that as many as 80 percent of Americans currently think the Electoral College should be abolished, a number of states have adopted a non-amendment alternative solution, although it’s facing strong headwinds from Republican-controlled states.

From 1790 to 2016, Philip Bump wrote in the Washington Post, “the most populous states making up half of the country’s population have always been represented by only about a fifth of the available Senate seats.”14

And while the Senate has always skewed the politics of America toward the wishes of the small states, it also distorts the Electoral College, since even the smallest states have two US senators who are represented in the Electoral College vote. It’s a small advantage, but it’s enough to swing elections.