{"id":343,"date":"2008-05-01T09:28:10","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T14:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=343"},"modified":"2008-05-01T09:28:10","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T14:28:10","slug":"democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=343","title":{"rendered":"Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I always just assumed that the United States has an electoral college (rather than direct election of a president) because the founders were nervous about direct democracy.<\/p>\n

That is, they believed in representation of the people, but stopped a little shy of a simple show of hands for anything as important as putting Bush in office.<\/p>\n

According to Amar Reed (who has appeared before<\/a> in these pages), I’m in good company. Lots of people think the same thing. But also according to Reed, we’re wrong.<\/p>\n

To refresh the memory (and build the argument a bit):<\/p>\n

1. Each state sends a certain number of “electors” to Washington. Each elector then usually (but not necessarily) votes for the candidate who received the most votes in the elector’s state. It’s these votes that count, not the ones that citizens cast in ballot-boxes around the country.<\/p>\n

2. Each state gets the same number of electors as it has representatives in Congress. And the number of reps in Congress is two senators, plus a certain number of House reps, based on population.<\/p>\n

So the smallest state would have three reps in Congress (two senators, plus one House rep), and therefore three electors for the president.<\/p>\n

That’s how it works, in a nutshell.<\/p>\n

So why did the big brains of 1789 choose to do it that way? Why not just count every citizen’s vote and pick the winner from the majority?<\/p>\n

Reed says that the biggest reason was:<\/p>\n

SLAVERY.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ok, so remember that House reps (and therefore electoral votes) are based on population. And the framers of the Constitution had already decided that slaves would count as part of the population. Remember the 3\/5 compromise?<\/p>\n

Each five slaves would count as three people. So if you have a state with one million free people and five million slaves, you actually get to claim a population of four million people (even though in every other way, those slaves are considered property, not people).<\/p>\n

It was a disgusting and hypocritical compromise that gave the slaveholding states vastly more power than they would have had based on a fair reckoning.<\/p>\n

Without being able to vote (or expect free men to vote in their interest), slaves, by their mere presence, gave their oppressors more power in the federal government.<\/p>\n

Among other things, this fact was an incentive to keep getting more slaves! The more slaves, the more legislative representation each white person had.<\/p>\n

[Some people claim that the three-fifths compromise was necessary for ratifying the Constitution. The slaveholding states would have walked out without it. Maybe that’s true, but it’s another issue that Reed suggests isn’t as clear as we may have been taught.]<\/p>\n

Now we come to the election of the president. To agree to a purely democratic election, the slaveholding states would only get one vote per person voting. They didn’t like that at all.<\/p>\n

But if they tied the elections to the number of representatives, then the three-fifths compromise could work its magic. Not only would they get to\u00c2\u00a0keep the extra boost in the legislative branch, they could also get more voting power for the executive (which appoints the judicial).<\/p>\n

Hence the electoral college was born. Not out of fear of pure democracy, but out of fear of the disunion of the states. It was the three-fifths compromise, part two.<\/p>\n

And like other historical examples of craven appeasement, it didn’t work for long. Seventy years later, it was all torn to shreds anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I always just assumed that the United States has an electoral college (rather than direct election of a president) because the founders were nervous about direct democracy. That is, they believed in representation of the people, but stopped a little shy of a simple show of hands for anything as important as putting Bush in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}