Well, the majority of the 538 electors, the members of the antiquated Electoral College, have cast their votes for Donald Trump as the next U.S. President. Of course, the existence of this institution is inconsistent with the current meaning of democratic elections, where the candidate who gets the most votes wins. In recent years, we have seen this fail twice, for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Al Gore in 2000. Each won the most votes in the election but lost because of the structure of the Electoral College. Unfortunately, the attention to this anti-democratic mechanism may soon cease and we will move no closer to its abolishment. While we move on, I will comment on that problematic process. As with many things in the life AND the history of this country, race played a key role in the creation of the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is written into the Constitution, and as the New York Times proclaims, it is more than just a vestige of the founding era of this country, it is a living symbol of America’s original sin, slavery. A big problem arose at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 as delegates sought to develop a representative government. The Southern States would be disadvantaged with the representation based on the free population in each State. Therefore, Southern States wanted to include in the population count black people as well as white; however, that was not plausible because almost all blacks were slaves and slaves did not have rights as citizens. The South would not agree to form a union and have so little relative power if they could not count slaves as people, and the north did not want to count slaves at all. Consequently, they struck a compromise. They agreed to count each slave as three-fifths of a person, thus giving the South more population and more electoral votes.
Slavery is long gone, and African Americans are counted as full persons in population censuses; yet the Electoral College still exists. As a result, a Wyoming resident’s vote counts over three and one-half as much as a person living in California.
The foundations of this country were built on black slavery, and as with most major historical issues, the remnants of slavery are still with us–in more ways than one.