NEW YORK TIMES' FAKE NEWS THAT ELECTORAL COLLEGE WAS CREATED TO PROTECT SLAVERY
BY STEVE BYAS
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
In its zeal to abolish the Electoral College, the New York Times has chosen to repeat the falsehood that the institution was created to protect the interests of the slave-holding states.
In a December 19 article entitled "Time to End the Electoral
College," the newspaper argues that the Electoral College is an
“antiquated mechanism” for electing the president. And of course in
support of its position, it makes the usual arguments, such as that
Americans would prefer to elect the president by popular vote. “For most
reasonable people, it’s hard to understand why the loser of the popular
vote should wind up running the country,” the Times insists.
Taking that sentence apart, the writer insinuates that anyone who
favors keeping the Electoral College is not a “reasonable” person.
Second, the writer implies that Democrat Hillary Clinton, the
Times' preferred candidate,
won
the popular vote. Considering that candidates — including Clinton — are
not campaigning to win the popular vote, but rather the
Electoral College vote,
the “popular vote” is not necessarily indicative of what it would have
been if the candidates were trying to win it. After all, a football game
plan would be quite different if field goals counted four points
instead of three, or if total yardage were the way a winner was
determined, rather than touchdowns, field goals, and safeties. Besides
all that, it takes a
majority of the electoral vote to win the presidency, not just a plurality. Clinton did run first in the popular vote, but she did
not
win a majority of the popular vote. If the country opted to go to a
popular vote system, one would think that we would want a candidate who
actually won a majority of that vote, that is, if the “will of the
majority” is considered so important to detractors of the Electoral
College, such as the
New York Times.
And what’s this about “running the country?” Certainly, the president
of the United States is a powerful figure, but he or she is not given
the power in the Constitution to “run the country.” The president is the
chief executive of the U.S. government and the commander-in-chief of
the armed forces, but that person has no more power to tell a private
citizen what to do than anyone else. There are fortunately still many
things that happen in our society that neither the president nor any
governmental person, at any level has any authority to decide. However,
the desire for a president chosen by
national popular vote is
quite compatible with the modern drift toward an imperial presidency.
Witness how many civilians routinely refer to the president as “my
commander-in-chief,” even though that term refers only to the
president's role in command of America’s armed forces.
But perhaps the worst argument made by the
Times in its
denunciation of the Electoral College — and really about the founding of
the country itself — is that the Electoral College was created to
perpetuate the institution of slavery. The newspaper calls it a “living
symbol of America’s original sin.”
The
Times argues, “When slavery was the law of the land, a
direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with
their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as
three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did,
gave the slave states more electoral votes.”
The reality is that the creation of the electoral vote system was to
protect states with smaller populations from domination by states with
larger populations. The writer of the
Times’ editorial is
either historically ignorant, or is deliberately deceptive. Virginian
James Madison was among the leaders at the Constitutional Convention in
bringing forth a plan for congressional representation that would give
more votes in Congress to the more populated states, replacing the
system then in use by the Articles of Confederation, in which each state
had one vote in Congress, regardless of its population.
The proposal was, in fact, called the “Virginia Plan.” It would have
created a two-house legislative branch, with both houses chosen
according to a state’s population. At the time, Virginia was by far the
most populous state, with 747,610 persons counted in the first federal
census of 1790. Even if the slave population had been subtracted from
this count, Virginia still had 454,983 persons, far greater than
Massachusetts, the next most heavily populated state with 378,787.
Yet, the
Times falsely asserts that “a direct popular vote
would have disadvantaged the Southern states.” But the two largest
states, Virginia, which had almost 300,000 slaves, and Massachusetts,
which had none, both favored the Virginia Plan in the early days of the
convention. Clearly, slavery had little to do with the Great Compromise,
which created one house (the House of Representatives) wherein a
state's number of representatives would be determined by population.
Another common misunderstanding, repeated by the
Times, is
that the Constitution counted slaves as three-fifths of a “white
person,” and that this provision “gave the slave states more electoral
votes.” The apportionment of representatives in the House of
Representatives was determined by all persons — not just voters — living
in a state, which would include all legal residents, whether man, woman
or child, citizen or non-citizens, white or black, who were living
within the borders of a particular state. The states with large slave
populations wanted
all the slaves counted, so as to give
themselves a greater representation in the House of Representatives. In
contrast, it was the states with smaller numbers of slaves (only two
states had no slaves at the time of the first federal census) that
objected to counting
any of the slaves.
So the Three-Fifths Compromise was not to give the slave states
more
representation, but rather to reduce some of the impact of counting
larger slave populations found in the South. And it is also important to
note that the wording of the Constitution was not “three-fifths of a
white person,” but rather three-fifths of non-slaves. At the time of the
Constitution’s adoption, there were thousands of
free blacks, whose numbers were not fractionalized by that compromise.
What does all this have to do with the Electoral College?
Under the Constitution, no national elections were contemplated — not
for Congress, and not for the president. Because the government created
by the Constitution was to be a federal republic, the states were
expected to elect both the Congress
and the president.
The selection of the president by electors followed the pattern of the
people in the states electing members of the House of Representatives
and the state legislatures of each state choosing the members of the
Senate. Each state would be entitled to two U.S. senators, regardless of
its population, and each state would be allowed to choose a number of
representatives, according to its population determined after each
decennial federal census.
The delegates did not want Congress to choose the president because
this would make him a creature of that body, and would lessen his
ability to check its power. Therefore, the delegates created a system
wherein the states would choose electors who would then choose the
president. How many electors would each state receive? It was
determined, in keeping with the Great Compromise earlier in the
Convention, that each state legislature could choose, by whatever method
they so determined, a number of electors equal to their combined
numbers of representatives and senators. The electors would not meet as a
national body, but rather in their state capitals. The term “Electoral
College” was a later invention. Over the course of time the system has
evolved, and today presidential electors are chosen by
state popular vote, and not by a
national
popular vote. The election of the president is just as democratic as
the election of the House of Representatives, or the election of the
Senate. In short, it is a good example of the form of government created
by the Constitution: a federal republic.
Writing in the
Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton
described the system devised for electing the president through
electors, though not perfect, as “excellent.” He stated, “The mode of
appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States is almost the
only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without
severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation
from its opponents.”
And it had
nothing to do with slavery.
