As I said in response to this prompt one year ago today and also on this date in 2024:
Among the many thorny questions debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, one of the hardest to resolve was how to elect the president. The Founding Fathers debated for months, with some arguing that Congress should pick the president and others insisting on a more democratic direct popular vote, as is done for every other elected office in the land except for the POTUS.
Out of those drawn-out debates came a compromise based on the idea of electoral intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn’t be picked by Congress nor elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent “electors” who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency. Their compromise is known as the Electoral College.
The Electoral College calls for the creation, every four years, of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. Technically, it is these electors, and not the American people, who vote for the president. In modern elections, the first candidate to get 270 of the 538 total electoral votes wins the White House.
One important aspect of the Electoral College compromise was that it served as a political workaround for the persistence of slavery in the United States. In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were slaves who couldn’t vote. This created a divide between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn’t the Founding Fathers include slaves in counting a state’s population?
James Madison from Virginia, where slaves accounted for 60 percent of the population, knew that either a direct presidential election or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South.
The result was the controversial “three-fifths compromise,” in which three-fifths of the enslaved black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that the Southern slave states would ratify the Constitution.
Due to the Electoral College, two “modern times” candidates who received fewer popular votes but won the Electoral College votes, became president: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Fucking Trump in 2016.
Incidentally, the three-fifths compromise was explicitly repealed in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which provided that “representatives shall be apportioned…counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians.”
It’s time to “un-invent” (repeal) the Electoral College.
Facts, Fictions & Fantasies 