ELECTORAL COLLEGE
Below are excerpts from a NY Time Opinion Piece
“Actually, the Electoral College Was a Pro-Slavery Ploy
That fact alone doesn’t mean it ought to be scrapped. But we should be clear about its disreputable origins.”
My claim is that the opinion is leveraged against the Electoral College in order to attempt to eliminate it by rooting it in a false origin story that its creation was to help slave owners and its elimination would be better for the country. Below this piece I will share some sentiments from other teachers I have worked with. Men like Akhil Reed Amar associate the Electoral College with Trump and the Electoral College with slavery so they can assert the popular slanderous narrative that Trump is racist, the Electoral College is racist and we need to do away with them both.
Many Americans are critical of the Electoral College, an attitude that seems to have intensified since Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election despite losing the popular vote. These critics often make two arguments: first, that electing the president by direct popular vote would be preferable in a democracy; and second, that the Electoral College has disreputable origins, having been put into the Constitution to protect the institution of slavery.
Amar asserts that many American’s are fed up with the Electoral College because Trump won the presidency. This claim is correct. Many people want to change the Electoral College because then the populace would win and more importantly, their candidate would win. It’s about wanting to win, not about fairness.
The second claim asserts that the Electoral College was put into the constitution with the intention of protecting slavery. I claim this is false and I will argue my side using this writers words.
“As James Madison made clear at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 in Philadelphia, the big political divide in America was not between big and small states; it was between North and South and was all about slavery. So, too, was the Electoral College at the founding, both in its original incarnation in 1787 and in the version later created by the 12th Amendment, which was adopted in 1804.”

“…if slaves could somehow be counted in an indirect system, maybe at a discount (say, three-fifths), well, that might sell in the South. Thus were planted the early seeds of an Electoral College system.”
The above quote notes how the Electoral College was not a benefit to the South unless there was a way to add more of a population, the 3/5 compromise, so the extremely small states could gain more electors. The Electoral College helps smaller states, but the South had such a small population that the benefits would have been for naught, lest they added slave votes and hence the 3/5 compromise. Many arguments for proportionality control were made.
James Madison argued for district voting in primaries where electors would vote in their respective state districts and also have secondary candidates to vote for. His proposal was a non-starter because of the imminent threat of this leading to a majority one party rule in close elections.
In other words, the lack of diversity woul have been brought upon by Madison’s proposal and ultimately create a single ruling party, one such argument against a direct popular vote for the president (we will discuss Madison’s later suggestions as well).
“Thanks to the three-fifths clause, slave states got extra votes in the House, just as in the Electoral College system that was finally adopted”
Here is the real “devil,” a later remark by Akhil Reed Amar, which purposely disregards the notion that the 3/5 compromise may be more to blame. He calls the Electoral College the “devil” and only mentions the three-fifths compromise as an additive to the devil; “Thanks to the three-fifths clause, slave states got extra votes in the House, just as in the Electoral College system that was finally adopted.” Amar puts the 3/5 compromise and the electoral college on the same footing seemingly claiming that the Electoral College and the compromise were in tandem racist constructions and the “devil.” Amar contradict himself in his next statement.
“The dominant political figure in antebellum America was the pro-slavery Andrew Jackson, who in 1829 proposed eliminating electors while retaining pro-slavery apportionment rules rooted in the three-fifths clause — in effect creating a system of pro-slavery electoral-vote counts without the need for electors themselves.”
The real devil rears his head. Jackson wanted to abolish the Electoral College and keep the 3/5 Compromise so pro-slavery votes would have more weight. The real friend of the America’s slave history was the 3/5 compromise and not the Electoral College. Then why blame the Electoral College and claim it was built to help slave owners?
“Today, of course, slavery no longer skews and stains our system — and maybe the Electoral College system should remain intact. The best argument in its favor is simply inertia: Any reforms might backfire, with unforeseen and adverse consequences. The Electoral College is the devil we know.”
“But we should not kid ourselves: This devil does indeed have devilish origins.”
Well the reason why he calls it the devil is because of his first lines “Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.” This is the real reason we call this method the “devil” built in the fashion to help slave owners and sound the horns of popular vote. Call forth the mode of presidential election that Madison himself knew was a non-starter because many states would become unimportant and the possibility of one party domination.
The calls for eliminating the Electoral College rarely take into account Madison’s later proposals to amend the Electoral College that may create more popularly chosen candidates by instituting runoff elections and narrowing presidential candidates to better fit the voices of the people.
In essence, Madison may have just wanted a popular vote, believing majority voice is best, and unpopular opinion that even Madison himself had trouble with. He knew there were problems with popular vote for president and his proposals to alter the Electoral College seem to point towards the notion that Electoral College is not a pro-slavery draconian system, but a system abused by the 3/5 compromise and a system that works better than the other options thus far.
Calls for the elimination of and the false slave origin story of the Electoral College are rampant on school campuses and being an English and American Politics teacher, I am a minority that no other teachers wish to talk to about this subject. The two other political teachers here have little problem saying their opinion about why they don’t like the Electoral College but they never talk about the slave origins, and I retort, they drop that line of argument.
It seems that they do this because they may believe me to be inflexible, maybe perhaps they see that topic as so racially driven that they do not wish to even try and justify the other side; that is a problem with today’s PC movement.

The problem is that the left media associates such vile things to words that if you believe a topic or say a bad word, the left puts you into this box. The boo box. They put you in the boo box. If you argue for Trump BOOM racist in the boo box. If you claim the US is the best BOOM racist/xenophobe in the boo box. Even if you claim that China right now are just as bad as the Nazis were BOOM in the boo box. But sir, the Chinese are entering Muslims into reeducation programs, forcing abortions, controlling all media, feeding people tainted bat soup, and launching daily cyber-attacks against the US. Boo box.

The Electoral College slavery origin story is just another piece of the constitution that authoritarian fascistic leftist leaders wish to change. If you don’t like it, make it illegal or socially deplorable (Clinton literally called all Trump supporters deplorable). Crying babies of the left want to destroy what America was founded on and they are doing it one piece at a time.











