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Electoral College Was Created To Maintain Slavery

To The Readers’ Forum:

The Electoral College was a compromise of the Philadelphia constitutional convention.  Direct popular election of the president was the first proposal.  But a delegate from a southern state said that would give an advantage to the northern states because the northern states allowed more people to vote than did the southern states.  That was because of slavery.  The South did not allow 500,000 slaves to vote (and all states did not allow women to vote).  So the South feared that it would never get a candidate for president elected because the North had more votes.  So, the compromise was to count each slave as three/fifths of a person, and add that to the number of representatives in the House.  Then the number of senators for each state plus the number of representatives for each state became the total number of delegates for the Electoral College, whose delegates were chosen by each state and could not be an elected official.

Here is an example of what that did.  Pennsylvania had 10 percent more free persons than Virginia, yet with the compromise, Virginia ended up with 20 percent more Electoral College votes than Pennsylvania.

The Electoral College was not set up to safeguard forty states from being dominated by the ten most populous states, as is the conclusion of The Post-Journal’s “Truth Above All Else” editorial.  That conclusion is without merit due to the following arguments.

If the editor’s objection to “pure democracy” is that the majority can oppress the minority, why then say that the oppression of the majority by the minority is better?  The protection of the minority is done by law, by the constitution, not by making the votes of the majority of people count less than the votes of a minority of people.  That is to make the majority of people less equal in the sight of the law, which is against the values of the Declaration of Independence (“all people are created equal”) and against the Constitution which states that all people are to have due process of the law (14th Amendment).

And why, in a vote for the president of the country, would the state you live in add or detract from the importance of your vote?  One is not voting for one’s state, but for the country, so the votes of all people in the country should count equally, not that a vote in some state gets more weight than if you live in another state.

The Electoral College, with its basis in slavery, should be changed so that the Electoral College votes go to the candidate that gets more votes of the people than the others.

Timothy Hoyer

Jamestown

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