The electoral college system was not necessary to give representative credit for the slave population. They could have used the 3/5th compromise to determine the size of congressional districts and limited electors to the number of hose members from a state. The over-representation that the “ready for Hillary” crowd I complaining about was almost entirely implemented to entice the small state. The fact that some other element of the EC (namely counting slaves a 3/5ths of a person when determining how any congressmen (and consequently how many electors) came from a state was not what anyone is objecting to and even in the absence of slavery, we would have adopted n EC system to satisfy the smaller states.
TLDR: slavery is not a but for condition of the EC, we would have had it with or without slavery. Some posters try to associate slavery with everything they don’t like and it is getting really tedious.
But the fact remains that we can’t just take your population list completely at face value and say “see, some of the larger states were slave states” Nor should we lazily say “about 10% of the population was enslaved” when the distribution is so lopsided. How would the population list look while applying the 3/5ths rule would be more meaningful and a much more nuanced look at what constitutes free v slave state is required. As I mentioned upthread, right around the time of the signing, New York for one was passing laws very much curtailing the institution of slavery. Is it fair to lump it in with Georgia?
As Madison would point out, though–other states were seeking to count as “free persons” any number of white non-slaves that had diminished (significantly) political freedoms.
It’s also worth noting that representing property was actually considered a valid concept in the 18th century–it’s outrageous by the standards of 2017 but not by the standards of 1787. Madison actually “lightly” bashed New York on just this topic when writing about the 3/5ths, when he noted that the legislature of New York “provides for the representation of property”, because New York had onerous property qualifications (you had to be resident in the state six months, own a freehold of at least 20 pounds in value, or pay a tenancy with annual rent of at least 40 shillings, and you had to have filed and actually paid taxes within the year prior to the election–currency conversion to this era are troublesome, but as a frame of reference £20 in the colonies around this time would have bought you 3 horses with £2 left over) and apportionment of Assembly (lower house) and Senate seats in New York’s legislature was not based on inhabitants but the number of freeholders in a given district relative to the number of freeholders in other districts.
Madison contrasted this with other states that had large numbers of voters (but perhaps less “free persons” than New York), and states which apportioned state legislative districts based on “persons” instead of “freeholders.” Obviously apportioning by “freeholders” means wealthy districts get a higher per capita share of political power.
You didn’t pluralize “vote,” and that means your argument suffers the same flaw as the article.
If we look at our country as primarily a federation of states, then it makes sense to talk about California’s vote. But that’s an undemocratic system, and it’s highly outdated, given the improvements in transportation and travel, and the increased mobility of the US population, since the eighteenth century.
If we look at our country as primarily a democratic republic, then it makes no sense to talk about the “vote” of California. Instead, we should be talking about the “votes” of people that live within California. And until you have 100% of those votes, it should make sense to campaign in that state.
Clinton only won 61% of California’s vote. That means the number of voters in California who voted for someone else exceeded the entire number of people who voted in Ohio. Our system ought to have encouraged her to campaign more, not less, in California (despite how irritating that would’ve been for you).
Not to my knowledge, the major plans of government before we got near the final form were the Virginia/Randolph plan (Congress elected the President), the New Jersey plan (Congress elected the President, but a certain number of State governments could petition for his removal), the Hamilton plan (a congress of electors convened by the 13 States would then elect the “Governor”, who under Hamilton’s plan enjoyed his office for a life tenure i.e. the “elected King” plan.) The Pinckney Plan was less developed than the other three, and contained a weirdly high number of representatives in the lower house (if it had been carried forward to the present day we’d have over 300,000 members of the House of Rep), but this plan also called for legislative election of the executive.
The Founders were in a weird position because they were unfamiliar with a democratic executive as a separate office from the legislature. In their own systems of government, the Governors were all historically appointed by the King. In Britain proper the King was obviously a hereditary monarch, with Parliament being elected by a very restrictive franchise and the leader of Parliament (the day-to-day executive of government), being the chief minister who enjoyed his office when his faction enjoyed both a legislative majority and support (or tolerance) of the King.
Some States had provided for direct election of Governors after independence was declared, but often in a restricted way. Note that above I mentioned the general property requirement to vote in New York elections was owning a freehold valued at £20 or more, or holding a tenancy with an annual rent of at least 40 shillings. But to vote for State Senators you actually had to possess a freehold “value of one hundred pounds, over and above all debts charged thereon.” So five times as high to vote for State Senator as for Assembly members, and also it was the “net value” of the freehold instead of just being its assessed value, so you could’ve voted in an Assembly election if your freehold was worth £20 even if you had £5 of debt outstanding with the freehold as collateral. To vote for Governor you had to be qualified to vote for Senators.
The United Provinces of the Netherlands, which the Founders studied intensely, had a system where there were 7 provinces that sent representatives to the States-General. Each province was basically legally equal in representation. There was actually an 8th province, Drenthe, but it was so poor that it was assessed no taxes to support the national government and as a consequence received no representation in the States-General–enforcing the idea that property representation was not an uncommon concept. The United Provinces had no singular executive, instead each of the 7 provinces elected a Stadtholder, who commanded the military of that province (they also had 7 different armies, technically.) However in practice, the House of Orange controlled these Stadtholder offices, generally members of the House of Orange were Stadtholders for all 7 of the provinces, and sometimes (often) one man would be the Stadtholder of multiple provinces–typically the head of the House of Orange would be Stadtholder of the 3-4 largest/most powerful Provinces, and pseudo-function as a de facto national executive.
This system was about as unwieldy as it sounds, and wisely not desired for emulation. Other examples of non-monarchical executives had problems, the Founders looked a everything from the Venetian Doge (really just the head of an oligopoly faction), to the ancient Roman Consuls (an unwieldy system itself.) So the Founders basically just decided to more or less model the Presidency on the colonial Governorships, and the colonial Governors were basically “King Surrogates”, so our Presidency was basically modeled on the British monarchy. We wanted to do away with hereditary nobility so obviously some more Republican form of election was needed, which is why all the proposals involved either selection by the legislature of selection by a special body. The Founders believed one of the “problems” they had found by deeply analyzing colonial governments and British government was the lack of clearly divided powers, so the final form went with a special body to select the President instead of congress. To my knowledge there was never any serious attempt or even proposal for direct election.
I largely agree philosophically with direct popular vote for President, but I don’t find the electoral college “indefensible” even in the modern era. I think it’s basically still valid precisely because, constitutionally, we are exactly a Federation of States; I’d argue in many ways we are much closer to being “one country” in 2017 than we were in 1789, but we haven’t updated our constitution to reflect that.
No, the argument is that it should be both. And it’s quite reasonable, because geography matters. People who live in different places have different political needs, and pandering exclusively to the urban majority is a bad way to govern the third largest country in the world by area. The EC would be unnecessary in Hong Kong, or Singapore. But for a nation that spans a continent, it is a necessity.
How do anti-EC folks feel about parliamentary systems? I never heard this “undemocratic” talk when Justin Trudeau or Theresa May were elected.
Because you don’t live in Canada or Great Britian. People complain about first-past-the-post and a lack of proportional representation being undemocratic all the time.
With the exception of a single comment made by Madison among the myriads made by the FF’s concerning the Constitution, there is absolutely nothing but circumstantial/inferred evidence, which is debatable at that.
I meant the “each geographical region elects a representative who in turn elects the PM”. It’s basically the EC, but the electors are also the legislators. And both Canada and the UK have districts (“ridings”? “constituencies”? I’m not sure on the nomenclature) that vary in population from ~20k to ~130k, so it’s definitely not “one person, one vote”.
Good point about not living there. For all I know it’s a major point of contention during election season in those countries. I just figured we had enough Canadian and British posters that I would have heard the comparison made before now. Maybe I missed it. I read this board a lot, but nowhere near all of it.
Yeah, Britain at least does a better job with first past the post because it has “basically” apolitical commissions to draw boundaries. But “natural geographic sorting” tend to give sides differing advantages. Due to the political differences in Britain, at least over the last 20 years or so there has been a persistent claim that Labour generally requires fewer numbers of absolute votes to win seats than the Conservatives.
Since the nakedly blatantly, partisan gerrymandering State legislatures engage in here in the United States is unheard of in Britain, the issues of “bias” in British districting are far more complex and relate at least partially to a dispute about the “right concept” for fairly drawing districts. There’s a good write up here about it, showing the level of “bias” in the system historically.
People have always complained about weakness of third parties in first past the post systems and problems with it meaning a party can say, win 40% of votes cast but >50% of legislative seats. But Britain tends to be very structurally conservative so the chances of it changing any time soon are small.
People often assume the U.S. is the only system where small parties have problems, but it’s true of all first past the post systems. Our system has the “double whammy”, where we also have a Presidential system that dramatically weakens the power of third parties (they have no mechanism to participate in meaningful coalition governments), but while Britain and Canada both have “more robust” small parties, note that for over 100 years control of government in both countries has basically been centered on the two major parties (one left, one right), with occasional coalitions with smaller parties. Canada had a weird situation in which the organized right until the 2000s were split in like four parties, but they still operated somewhat like one party as a conservative coalition, until formally merging into the actual Conservative Party of Canada. Just like the U.S. the two parties “who hold power” haven’t been static (e.x. the Liberal Party diminished into almost irrelevance in Britain, supplanted by Labour.)
We do lots of things that are “undemocratic”, and unless you are advocating for a pure democracy across the board, then simply calling something “undemocratic” is not much of an argument to make. Personally, I don’t want a pure democracy, so I’m OK with a certain amount of “undemocraticness” in our system. As for being outdated, I disagree. I like the fact that we are a federation of states. We simply disagree on that. One organizational method is not objectively better than the other.
I’m also not concerned with whether a given system encourages or discourages candidates to campaign in certain areas. That, to me, is of secondary concern when compared to how we want to govern our country.
I’m open to the idea of changing the apportionment of electors, but I’m perfectly OK with the states electing the president, not the people. I like federalism, and think of it as a feature, not a bug. Uniformity is for ants, not for people.
Can you provide a link to your source/s of information? Because, to my knowledge, the most accurate count of the US population in the immediate aftermath of the Constitutional Convention is the Census of 1790, and the numbers from that census, which i provided on the first page, do not come close to the figures you are providing.
You suggest a total population of just over 2 million, but the census of 1790 shows a total population of about 3.9 million.
You say that there were about 250,000 slaves, but the 1790 census shows almost 700,000. Figures i have seen in other historical works suggest that the enslaved population of the American colonies passed the 250,000 mark in the 1750s.
You say that the slave states had more free (i.e., non-enslaved) people than the free states, but the 1790 census shows about 1.9 million free people in the states from Pennsylvania northwards, and about 1.3 million free people in the states from Delaware and Maryland southwards.
Your slave state /non-slave state numbers only work if you stick to the argument that any state with any slaves remaining in it was a “slave state,” but that is a historically untenable argument in the context of the current discussion.
But it doesn’t really work that way at all. Each party has its own method of choosing its leader, who is PM if they end up the largest party. There is no vote for PM.
…so the solution is apparently to pander exclusively to the rural minority, letting them dictate policy to the urban majority? Is that what you’re saying?
Consider that it’s been nearly thirty years since a Republican entered the White House with a majority of votes. Our outdated system allows the Republican party to continue catering to a minority of citizens and to thereby maintain control over the majority of citizens. That’s messed up.
It makes no sense at all. It also ignores the fact that urbanites aren’t concentrated in a handful of states: the urbanites here in NC have a lot more in common with urbanites in CA than with their rural neighbors, but their votes are clustered with rural neighbors instead of with their urban counterparts.
Geography matters far less than it did in the eighteenth century. I believe that claim is uncontroversial; please let me know if you disagree. But our political system has not adjusted to the massive changes in communication and transportation technology, nor to the massive changes in culture that resulted. It’s long past time we adjust.
You’re just mad that Trump won on the backs of areas of the country you disagree with. That doesn’t make the system intrinsically wrong. Winning a majority of the popular vote is relatively rare in our modern political system. Barack Obama, for example, was the first Democrat to enter office having won a majority of the popular vote for 32 years, so your statistic about the Republicans isn’t really indicative of any crazy pro-Republican process in our system. Note that in the 32 year span I indicated the Democrats had the White House for 12 of those years (Carter 4, Clinton 8.)
Also your numbers are a little questionable, Bush in 2004 actually won over 50% of the popular vote (i.e. a majority), he may not have “entered” the White House, but he entered his second term with a majority of the country having voted for him.
You’ve done a nice rhetorical slide here, focusing on winning a “majority” of the popular vote rather than on winning the popular vote.
It is true, for example, that Clinton did not win a majority, but he still won more of the popular vote than any other candidate for President. Trump did not win a majority, and he also did not beat the other candidate in terms of the amount of votes he received. Do you grasp the difference between these two things? In the first case, there was no candidate who was preferred by more Americans over Clinton, but in the second case there was, in fact, a candidate who was preferred by more Americans over Trump. That is, for me at least, the main principle at stake here: the person who is desired as President by more American voters than any other candidate in that particular election.
Now, you may believe me or not, but i would have felt exactly the same way about the electoral college if Gore or Hillary had won the EC while losing the popular vote. In those cases i would, of course, have been happier with the actual outcome, but i still would have argued that the EC is a flawed system. I believe it is flawed, completely independent of whoever happens to be running in or winning any particular election cycle.
I would also, looking at situations like Bill Clinton’s, be willing to balance my concern about the electoral college with a system such as instant runoff voting (what we call in Australia the preference system of voting), where you number your candidates in order, and if your first candidate is eliminated your vote goes to your second candidate (and so on) until one candidate receives the vote of more than 50% of the population. So, in 1992, once Ross Perot came in third, his supporters’ votes would have been allocated to their number two choices. This might well have given Bush the election, a result i would have been unhappy with, but a result i would have felt was fair.
And what people seem to miss is that using the popular vote for President would change the very shape of elections, such that we can’t simply predict the outcome based on what happened in elections where we had the electoral college. So, for example, if last November’s vote were, from the beginning, based on the popular vote, the very nature of the campaign would have been different. Both Trump and Clinton might have felt more pressure to campaign in places like California, because getting votes here could have helped both of them. Had Trump spent time here, he might have helped to turn out hundreds of thousands more California Republicans, especially in the Central Valley and in the more conservative coastal counties like Orange and San Diego. If Hillary had a good campaign in Texas, she might have garnered more Democratic votes there as well.
I just don’t understand why a person’s vote for President is deemed to be worth less if he or she lives in a state with a larger population. Why are people who live in apartment buildings less important than people who live on farms? Thomas Jefferson would give you a long and articulate response about the virtue of rural life and the iniquity of the city, but unless you really believe that centuries-old dogma, there’s really no excuse for such disparities in our electoral system.
Why do the 37 million people who live in California control 55 EC votes, but the 37 million people who live in Wyoming, Vermont, DC, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska, New Mexico, Kansas, Nevada, Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah, and Iowa combined control 95 EC votes between them?