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it sounds like it makes just about as much sense as the three fifths compromise.
Maybe that's because James Madison included the 'three-fifths compromise' in his proposed Electoral System; this is the same system we use today.
Are you saying neither makes sense?
Quote:
When the founders of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 considered whether America should let the people elect their president through a popular vote, James Madison said that “Negroes” in the South presented a “difficulty … of a serious nature.”
During that same speech on Thursday, July 19, Madison instead proposed a prototype for the same Electoral College system the country uses today. Each state has a number of electoral votes roughly proportioned to population and the candidate who wins the majority of votes wins the election.
...Madison knew that the North would outnumber the South, despite there being more than half a million slaves in the South who were their economic vitality, but could not vote. His proposition for the Electoral College included the “three-fifths compromise,” where black people could be counted as three-fifths of a person, instead of a whole. This clause garnered the state 12 out of 91 electoral votes, more than a quarter of what a president needed to win.
Electoral College is ‘vestige’ of slavery, say some Constitutional scholars
So those who live in low-populated and mostly rural states will have almost no say in government whatsoever?
I would definitely NOT be in favor of that. The Constitution was established in the way it was for a good reason. Let's not mess with that.
The US Constitution was established in the way it was for the reasons represented by the times, the greatest compromises made were to appease the Slaver States.
This makes no sense. No voter receives 3/5 of a vote.
Both the Electoral College & the 'three-fifth compromise' made sense to the folks at the first (only) US Constitutional Convention.
Not really.
Just another example of the Free States in the Northern US caving in to the Slaver States in the Southern US.
In a direct election system, the Northern Free States would outnumber the Southern Slaver States whose many enslaved people could not vote.
The Northern States caved to the Southern States by refusing to insist on direct national election.
It should come as no surprise, for the next 36 years following its ratification, that a slaveholding Virginian would occupy the presidency.
Quote:
At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
...After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive.
... If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
My off-hand "guesstimate" is that Texas will get 9 (give or take one or so). So Texas benefits too. People in Georgia and North Carolina should be onboard with this one too. Even Tennessee and Missouri would be wise to join in.
Small states such as Connecticut, New Hampshire, and minimally "slave" Delaware were in the mix asa well.
All of the states were in the mix, including the 3 you mentioned.
The 17th Amendment would not be proposed & ratified until 1913; US Senators (2 for each state) were elected, not by the people, but by the states' legislatures, as per article I, §3, Clauses 1 & 2 of the Constitution.
As per the 1860 US Census, the % of those enslaved in the state of Connecticut was 0%, in New Hampshire 0%, & in Delaware those enslaved as a percentage of the total population was 2%.
The more people enslaved in a state, the more electoral votes that particular state received. The electoral voting system was rigged from day 1 to favor the Slaver states.
This rigging ensured that for 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian would occupy the presidency, & in turn, would thereby influence the makeup of the Supreme Court of the US for that timeframe. The weight of the decisions influenced or, in fact, was, the law of the land. This rigging of the SCOTUS resulted in 1 of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. Plessy v. Ferguson makes all similar listings, here's just 1:
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4. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): The Court's famous "separate but equal" ruling upheld state segregation laws. In doing so, the Court made sure that the gains of the post-Civil War reconstruction era were quickly replaced by decades of Jim Crow laws.
I find it funny how much ignorance there actually is on this board, and how many don't realize that the Senate was specifically proportioned to ensure that all power isn't concentrated in just a couple of overpopulated states. Our founding fathers were a lot brighter than today's activists.
The earliest designers of our US Constitution, while bright, were also, inarguably, conflicted.
"Madison’s position reflected the contorted moral logic of slaveholders enacting a slavery-protecting constitution while claiming to oppose that very institution.’’
Quote:
While drafting the Constitution, James Madison strove to ensure the protection of minority rights but also proposed that a slave be counted as three-fifths of a person. The contradiction, etched into the Constitution, would come to define Madison and a nation irreconcilably founded both on slavery and the ideals of liberty and justice. ...
Looking back at James Madison, an advocate of minority rights who protected slavery
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