The short answer to your question is because states are not simply administrative subdivisions of the country. Some people may wish they were, but they are not.
Or maybe I was just responding to what a poster actually said, and I quote:
I could argue the same outdated system allowed Bill Clinton to cater to a “minority of citizens and to thereby maintain control over the majority of citizens. That’s messed up.”
Hell, Abe Lincoln won under 40% of the popular vote. I’m not rejecting arguments for or against direct election, I’m just saying the phrasing LHoD uses can be pretty easily applied to Democrats as well. It’s not an “intrinsic problem”, because our system doesn’t pre-suppose you need an absolute majority of voters to govern, and many other “modern” countries likewise like that as a feature of their system. Plurality rule isn’t that uncommon.
That is, at best a partial answer, and at worst a complete non-response.
There is no logical reason that a popular vote cannot exist alongside all other current aspects of American federalism. Nothing about a popular vote requires that the states be considered, in any other respect, “simply administrative subdivisions of the country.” A popular vote for President would not eliminate the different modes of counting and election in the House and Senate; it would not otherwise challenge the Constitutional balance of powers between national and state governments, nor the separation of powers within the national government.
Because protecting regional interests was part of the agreement that everyone joined the United States with. You may think it more fair to switch to popular Prssidential election but yoinking that part of the deal, now that all the small states are stuck in the agreement, isn’t exactly fair, istm.
To be honest, I don’t want my thread to devolve into a debate about the value of the EC. It’s a debate about the origin of the EC and its relation to slavery. We’ve had many, many debates about the value of the EC, and I’m sure we will have many more.
FWIW, I’ve been discussing the electoral college on the internet since at least 2000 and probably longer, I don’t know that discussing its virtues vs its vices is a productive debate. Anyone reasonably informed on the issue knows its pros and cons, and knows the pros and cons of the alternatives. It’s pretty old hat at this point.
The issue at hand, as to whether the electoral college “was created to keep the slave states in the Union” is a different, less explored topic. At least thus far I think the side saying it was created for the slave states have presented basically no evidence at all to support that claim, and there has been considerable evidence presented to the contrary.
Well, it was indeed, a compromise and the free states suggested that slaves no be counted at all.
Yes, he was confusing the 3/5th compromise, designed to make slaves states & free states both happy, and the Connecticut Compromise, which was intended to make the small states happy. The South, by and large had larger populations.
The five slave states had about the same populations as the rest of the Union. The only “small” southern state was Georgia.
The smallest states were Delaware, RI, Georgia then New Hampshire.
The Senate compromise was to make the small states happy, NOT the slave states.
*During the summer of 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia established equal representation in the Senate and proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Called the “Great Compromise” or the “Connecticut Compromise,” the unique plan for congressional representation resolved the most controversial aspect of the drafting of the Constitution.
In the weeks before the Constitution’s framers agreed to the compromise, the delegates from the states with large populations argued that each state’s representation in the Senate should correspond to the size of the state. Large-state delegates promoted James Madison’s Virginia Plan, the document that was the basis for several of the clauses in the Constitution. Under this plan, the Senate and the House would base their membership on the same proportional “right of suffrage.” That is, the number of senators in each state would be determined by its population of free citizens and slaves. Large states, then, stood to gain the most seats in the Senate. As justification for this advantage, delegates noted that their states contributed more of the nation’s financial and defensive resources than small states, and therefore, required a greater say in government.
Small-state delegates hoped to protect states’ rights within a confederate system of government. Fearing the effects of majority rule, they demanded equal representation in Congress, as was practiced under the Articles of Confederation and assumed in William Paterson’s New Jersey Plan. In fact, some framers threatened to withdraw from the convention if a proportional representation measure passed. *
**Nothing whatsoever to do with slavery. **
My understanding is that slavery was on the way out when the cotton gin made slavery profitable again.
But people were already morally aware enough to recognize that slavery was bad so they prohibited the import of new slaves. This led to what made American slavery particularly horrible. It led to slave breeding and sale of children down the river where the demand for slaves were higher in the land of cotton than in tobacco country.
The North had already realized that you were better off renting people for their useful lives and discarding them than buying them and taking care of them in old age.
Like how the second amendment was so the slave states could arm their slave patrols. :smack:
But all this misses the point. You can’t act like New York, with ~6% slave population and undergoing gradual abolition, is just as much of a slave state as Virginia, with ~40% slave population and no intention of abolishment.
But that is still separate from the electoral college. Noone is arguing that the 3/5th compromise wasn’t about slavery. The question is whether the electoral college is rooted in slavery.
Nobody actually campaigns in California. What they are doing is more accurately described as fundraising. When Republican presidential candidates go to Orange county for a rally, there is inevitably a series of fundraising dinners before and after the rally.
In the context of this thread, I guess it can be said that we Californians are nothing more than slaves to the campaign funding process. 
My list stands for the proposition that some slave states were big and some slave states were small. Some free states were big and some free states were small. Mhendo seems to want to read more into that list. All I said was:
I think we may be conflating two issues. Noone is arguing that the 3/5th compromise and the constitution generally was a product of concerns about slavery. The argument that was presented to us in the other thread was that the purpose of the electoral college was to keep slave states in the union.
What the electoral college does is give every state two votes that are not attached to population. Elvis states that this was to get slave states to join the union. I think the rest of us correctly called bullshit.
I think the argument for the electoral college having anything to do with slavery is so attenuated that all I had to show was that there some small states were slave states and some small states were free. Some big states were slave states and some big states were free. So the advantage of giving two free electoral votes to every state merely because they were states didn’t really create much of an advantage for slave states.
I drew the line between states where slavery was legal and where it was illegal. It seemed like a pretty bright line. If you want to draw a different line based on how many slaves were actually in the state, be my guest. Its not hard math but I’m not inclined to dissect the numbers a hundred different ways because you don’t think my way accurately portrays every nuance of what was going on between 1609 and 1789.
This isn’t a debate about slavery and the founding of our nation. Its about whether the electoral college was put in place to keep the slave states in the union.
OK then.
I’ve already said in this thread that i think it’s a stretch to say that the electoral college was created to keep slave states in the Union.
But this doesn’t mean that slavery was irrelevant to the creation of the electoral college. In fact, some of the most ardent supporters of the EC were the delegates from South Carolina, who came to the Constitutional Convention very concerned about maintaining slavery as an institution in the new nation. The SC delegates pushed for the fugitive slave clause that ended up in the Constitution (although the clause itself never actually used the word “slave”), and they were strong supporters of the electoral college, recognizing that it would, in combination with the three-fifths clause, give them an influence in national politics disproportionate to their (free white male) population. Other slave state delegates recognized this too.
Hugh Williamson of NC argued against popular election of the President:
The delegates rejected the idea of a popular vote which, as i established in an earlier post, had been pushed hard by James Wilson of Pennsylvania. In fact, when the delegates rejected popular election, the PA delegation was the only one to vote for it.
Having rejected a popular election, however, they had to work out exactly what to use instead. Some had advocated for allowing the Congress itself, particularly the House, to choose the President. As other argued, however, this would totally fuck up the whole separation of powers thing, because it would leave Presidents trying to please Congress in order to get re-elected.
Here’s what Madison had to say about the issue:
So here, Madison recognizes that you can’t have the President chosen by the Legislature, even if you term-limit the President to a single term of office, because it would leave the Executive too prone to possible corrupting influences. He also expresses considerable support for the idea of a popularly-elected President, expressing considerable confidence in the people as a whole to do a good job in electing such a person.
I tend to agree with legal scholar Paul Finkelman** that this quote by Madison, as well as many other quotes from the Constitutional Convention, suggests that the founders were not quite as opposed to the popular will as some people like to believe. Or at least to the popular will as they understood it, because as Finkelman notes, in the early years of the Republic many states had property and other qualifications for voting, and most states had even more stringent property qualifications for office-holding. The voters of the early republic, as Finkelman notes, “were hardly the common people” in most states. He adds: “In most places the rabble could not even vote, much less hold office.” (see pp. 1147-1149).
[**Paul Finkelman, “The Proslavery Origins of the Electoral College,” Cardozo Law Review, 23:4 (2002)] PDF
Madison continued his discussion of the popular vote, however, by connecting it explicitly to the problem of slavery, and especially the problem of the slave population in Southern states. Here’s what he said:
It appears that Madison is saying, “Hey, election by the people would be swell, but because some of the states have so many Negroes (i.e., slaves), those states wouldn’t have sufficient weight in the election of the President under such a system.”
As Finkelman notes in his article, the delegates had already, by this point, agreed to count three-fifths of the slaves for the purposes of legislative apportionment in the House, so Madison’s argument against the popular vote and in favor of state-based electors was one that pushed the electoral college as a way to protect the interests of states with large slave populations.
Finkelman points to one particular historical electoral consequence of this system:
Make of all that what you will, but while i think it might be going a bit too far to say that the electoral college was created to keep slave states in the Union, i think it’s reasonable to argue that the creation of the electoral college and its use in electing the President reflected, along with the three-fifths clause, the power and influence of the large slave states at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
Well, fair is always a rather subjective term, but let me ask you this:
When states entered the union under the original Constitution, it was also “part of the agreement” that the international slave trade would not be prohibited until 1808, and that fugitive slaves should be returned to the states from which they had run. Is the 13th Amendment to the Constitution therefore unfair?
When states entered the union under the original Constitution, it was “part of the agreement” that states could limit voting (which they nearly all did) based on race and on sex. Are the 15th and 19th amendments therefore unfair? Or the 26th, for that matter?
When states entered the union under the original Constitution, it was “part of the agreement” that US Senators would be elected by state legislators. How do you feel about the 17th amendment?
When states entered the union under the original Constitution, it was “part of the agreement” that the federal government couldn’t tax your income. Is the 16th amendment unfair?
I’m still interested to know where your population figures for the Constitutional era came from.
Can I tell you how lovely it is to have folks demonstrate their shitty mindreading abilities? No, I’m not just mad that Trump won on the backs of areas of the country I disagree with. Thanks for playing, though!
Good thing that that has nothing to do with my case, then.
My numbers are only questionable if you ignored what I said. Yes, he didn’t “enter” the White House in 2004, which is why I phrased it the way I did. Given what I said, about “entering” the White House, the last time a Republican did so while winning the popular vote was in 1989, almost 30 years ago.
Our country had an opportunity to address this issue when we passed an amendment that selected electors based on an election. Turns out that the small states didn’t like it and states like California thought it would be wonderful.
If you want to renegotiate the mechanics of how our democracy works, I am not married to the EC, go pass an amendment. But I am against the notion that the EC was created to appease slavers.
Who cares? The point of my original post was that there is diversity of size within the slave states and within the free states. You got a way of looking at things that makes this not true?
I lived in California for a while and frankly I kind of enjoyed being politically irrelevant. I could blame the rest of the country for the mess we were in and I didn’t have to hold hard feelings towards people who voted the other way because THEIR vote didn’t matter either.
We just went on our happy way enjoying being one hour from surfing and 60 minutes from skiing in weather that was sunny 90% of the time.