DISTORTING DEMOCRACY

A historically based argument for abolishing the Electoral College as a major step toward a better democracy.

It’s not breaking news to observe, as Dupont does, that the Electoral College is tightly bound up in the history of slavery. She adds a subtle nuance to the point, however: The slaveholding states gained an advantage during the Constitutional Convention by counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for census purposes, with the result that South Carolina could command more clout in the national legislature than, say, New Jersey. More pressing was the insistence by the slaveholding and smaller states that direct voting be blocked; since enslaved people could not vote, it would have given the populous northern states an edge over the South. “Slavery did not cause the framers to choose an Electoral College,” writes the author. “But slavery did prompt the Convention repeatedly to reject popular election in preference for Congress selecting the president.” She drums on the no-direct-vote trope a few times too many, but to a useful end—namely, that the winner-take-all system of the college effectively disenfranchises huge numbers of voters, from the 6 million Californians who voted for Trump in 2020 to the larger number of Texans as compared to New Yorkers who voted for Biden. A proportional Electoral College would see Texas as a purplish state where Republicans hold only a six-point advantage, at least for the moment. Put another way, a California electoral vote represents 717,000 voters, whereas a Wyoming electoral vote represents 193,000. In the end, Dupont persuasively urges, the Electoral College is a vestige of slavery and white supremacy that “amounts to blatant and extreme political inequality”—good reason for doing away with it.

Repetitive, but with good points to make against an institution whose time has passed.