[Fact Bomb] Electoral College: Invented to Protect Slavery, Is Stupid, Is Broadly Opposed

This thread is to communicate certain facts about the electoral college that have lately been disputed by @Os Trigonum , among others.

These facts do not just apply if you're a black law student in a law school class, rather they are broadly applicable. There are also some pretty logical arguments contained herein. They are good arguments, even for non-black non-law non-students.

Fact 1 - The Electoral College Was Invented to Protect the Interests of Slaveholding States, Which Were Mostly Interested in Slaving

The electoral college wasn't instituted so that wise electors would choose wise men to become wise presidents, it was a vehicle designed to take the 3/5th's Compromise (the one that said enslaved people would count for 60% of a person in order to give the slave-owners and slave traffickers more represenatation in congress)

The history is summarized by Janelle Bouie here . Northern states proposed direct election. Southern States objected - because they wanted to protect slavery. The result was teh congressional apportionment formula with the 3/5ths compromise included. This gave slaveholding states a disproportionate voice in choosing the President. Nor was it ever seriously contemplated that the EC would do anything other than rubberstamp the popular vote.

Fact 2 - The Electoral College Disenfranchises Hundreds of Millions of Americans

Anybody who lives in a non-battleground state, be they a hard right, pro-Russian, Alex Jones listening Christain Nationalist or a Tulsi Gabbard-supporting Marxist, or a Howard Schultz-loving dotard who somehow thingsks the middle of these two thing is the best of all possible worlds, is entirely screwed. This is the vast majority of the electorate. It doesn't matter if you're in Alabama or Alameda - you're ****ed regardless.

Why do we have this at all? There is no high mnided reason for the stupid outcomes it produces. Further we tend to compound the stupidity of it by doing winner-take-all:

The defining feature of American elections
The true quirkiness of the Electoral College comes from how states award their votes, not how many votes each state has: It’s (largely) winner-take-all.

This is the feature that defines the character of American presidential elections. A candidate who narrowly wins the tipping-point states will win the presidency, regardless of the margin of victory in the rest of the country. That means there’s no incentive for candidates to campaign in any noncompetitive state, whether it’s a populous one like California or the opposite, like North Dakota.

The winner-take-all bias that elevates the battleground states overruns all of the other biases. If the big states were close and competitive, the big states would decide our elections — as they did until fairly recently. In 1888, another time there was a split between the popular vote and the Electoral College, the candidate who prevailed (Benjamin Harrison) swept the nation’s largest states — including its largest, New York, by one percentage point.

What’s so interesting is that this defining feature is largely unintended.

It’s not specified in the Constitution. Most states didn’t award their electors on a winner-take-all basis in the first presidential elections, and even today there are two states that do not: Nebraska and Maine, which award some electoral votes by congressional district.

If states chose to, they could devise an electoral system that better reflected the popular vote. They could award their electors in proportion to the statewide popular vote, or to the winner of the national popular vote, as some states have sought to do through an interstate compact.
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Fact 3 - There Are Many Fine People on Both Sides That Think We Should Get Rid of it
The electoral college poses an existential threat to conservatism, at least insofar as its continued existence is a pillar of the current pro-autocracy bent of the GOP

Continued endorsement of this system by conservatives and the Republican Party will, over time, convince a crucial segment of Americans, especially the young coming of age during this debate, that conservatives do not favor democracy. Forget the slanderous cries of “racist” and “fascist” frequently hurled by the left; if conservatives come to be seen as opposed to democracy itself, Americans will reject their cause.

Conservatives should also favor a change because of the perverse incentives the electoral college creates. We cannot change our country without a majority of people behind us. But the electoral college system encourages a president such as Trump to double down on a base-only strategy that maximizes the political power of important minority groups such as blue-collar whites. This prevents conservatives and Republicans from making the broader appeal necessary to win majority support, rendering their quest to change the country fruitless.
threat to conservatism:​

 

Not directly.

In terms of election of a presiden, this counter-view is not really supported by the facts, let's go James Madison, the Federalist himself

"The people at large,” he argued during the Constitutional Convention, “would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character. The people generally could only know & vote for some Citizen whose merits had rendered him an object of general attention & esteem.” His main reservation was slavery and how it made “the right of suffrage” more “diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States.”​

Further there doesn't seem to be much record of anybody suggesting that the EC should be an independent check on democracy- they were there to submit names that the people chose them to submit in rubber-stamp fashion.