Don’t demonize the electoral college — or the framers — as racist

The electoral college is a device that balances nationalism with states’ rights and leavens democracy’s passions with deliberation and reason.

LA Times

. . . "If the American people wanted a direct election for president, they could force their states to divide their electors in proportion to the Republican and Democrat tallies, or even assign their electors to align their votes with the nationwide result. The more states that shifted from winner-takes-all, the more the electoral count would match the national popular vote. But instead, the indirect system, as the republic’s framers conceived it, has endured.

"The framers originally deliberated between selecting the president in Congress or by nationwide vote. As it turned out, the delegates to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention overwhelmingly opposed popular national elections because of the size of the new nation and its relatively poor communications. They feared two types of candidates would come too easily to the fore: “local sons” from the voters’ own state, or “pretended patriots” and “active & designing men” — demagogues who would rule through a tyranny of the majority (a la Nicolas Maduro, in Venezuela). The framers also rejected having Congress select the chief executive, as European parliamentary systems do today, because it would make the latter too dependent upon the former.

"The electoral college was proposed to be representative but also mitigate popular passions, and to prevent giving Congress too strong a hand in presidential selection. In most cases, the winning candidate has had to assemble a geographically broad, and usually ideologically moderate coalition throughout the country.

"Today’s “woke” critique, however, focuses on racism. According to some scholars and commentators, the electoral college purposefully protected slavery by allocating electors based on the number of senators (thereby giving states more voice) and representatives (the Constitution infamously allowed slaves, who could not vote, to count as three-fifths of a person, thus inflating the voting power of slave states). During the Philadelphia Convention, James Madison acknowledged that the electoral college provided a necessary compromise between free states and slave-holding states, where the popular vote was diminished because slaves couldn’t vote. But that was the only time a framer actually connected slavery and the electoral college.

"The racism critique ignores the nuances of history. When one looks closer, as Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has pointed out in disavowing his own earlier thinking, the racism charge related to the electoral college “begins to unravel.' ” . . .

Being the LA Times, one can hope ignorant leftist celebrities might possibly be enlightened. TD