The U.S. Electoral College is slave-based. It was created as a mechanism to facilitate Southern slave-owners in retaining control over presidential elections – the first five Presidents were Southern slave-owners…it worked.
They convinced the U.S. Congress to approve a law that allowed each slave to count as two-thirds of a vote, even though they obviously could not vote.
The population growth in the North was growing at a faster rate than in the South, and that meant the South was losing power. Creating the Electoral College, where the number of “Electors” a State could send to the college was based on population, and then passing a law to augment their population by including slaves, enabled the Southern politicians to retain their power. Eventually, even that was not enough, and the first “Northerners” became President for the first time.
Add to that, the even-more-undemocratic process, whereby the “Electors” were not elected but appointed by committees, and you have a U.S. Presidential Election that has nothing to do with the “will of the people”.
The U.S. Electoral College is slave-based, and still operates that way today. The only difference is the disappearance of the “a Slave equals two-thirds of a vote” element. There is another anomaly that makes the process even worse. In many States, the appointed “Electors” can actually vote any way they want when they get to the Electoral College meeting– they do not have to vote the way the committees that appointed them, want.
Slave-based, anachronistic, undemocratic and open to perverting the will of the people, it is scandalous, an embarrassment, and totally contradictory to the democratic image the U.S. tries to espouse.
It is time to abolish it completely. In fact, it’s way past time to consign it to the unsavoury side of history.
Recent events have highlighted this problem. The simple fact that the Electoral College exists at all, offered Trump an avenue and an opportunity to reverse the will of the people.
I would say that the Founding Fathers must be “turning in their graves” at the chaotic process of this last Presidential election and its aftermath. However, several of them were the same slave-owners that created the Electoral College in the first place.
If they are turning in their graves, we should have little sympathy for them.
It is a basic tenet of western democracy that the majority always wins, and always should win.
The U.S. Presidential election process deliberately opens up the opportunity to deny that basic tenet. It’s a disgrace as well as an embarrassment, and should be changed immediately.
