Member-only story
Slavery and the Electoral College
A common claim about the United States presidential election system is that it was designed to protect the institution of slavery and only exists because of slavery. After all, the famous Three Fifths Compromise effectively inflated the votes of slave states compared to a popular vote, and James Madison, widely known as the “Father of the Constitution,” owned slaves. There are three major problems with this claim.
First, the system was invented by James Wilson, not James Madison; James Wilson was from Pennsylvania, not Virginia. Although James Madison and the Virginia delegates supported the system later in the convention, delegates from Southern states were slow to support the Electoral College system.
Second, the Electoral College system was not proposed as an alternative to a popular vote; it was proposed as an alternative to election by Congress, and supported by those who supported a popular vote. Election by Congress would have been just as distorted by the Three Fifths Compromise.
Third, there is a significant body of evidence in favor of the two traditional explanations for why we do not have a popular vote: The Founding Fathers were skeptical of democracy in general, and small-state delegates were concerned about large states controlling the process.
