Not quite. The EC (along with the 3/5 compromise) was designed to protect the interests of slave-holding states, while also avoiding direct election of the president (ie, the people were too stupid to elect directly).
And now, instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority. Due to capping the number of members of the House, those small-population states have disparate impact on federal issues.
Post-Civil War, it also incentivized voter suppression.
The southern states benefited from emancipation, insofar as they gained seats in the house and electoral college (they got a 5/3 multiple on their prior proportions, which had only narrowly elected Lincoln pewar).
One motivation for Jim Crow laws was to keep the southern voting-sampled portion of the south white and segregationist (in spite of the true distribution of local sentiment), while simultaneously benefiting from the larger population in magnifying their representation in national politics.
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If I were dictator for a day, I'd make the number of house and electoral college seats directly proportional to the last-n-election-cycle-average of number of participating voters (not population!).
This change would flip the voter suppression script, which I think has been one of the more troubling developments in the last 100 years of our republic. It would also rightfully suppress the influence of the regions in this country that wish it was still the 1830s, but give them a path to return to influence that's contingent on uniting their polities.
We'd see states competing to make voting more accessible in a nonpartisan manner, because every state wants to have more representation in the electoral college and the congress, regardless of which party is in power.
This would force parties to actually represent their neighbors, whom they can safely ignore and suppress today.
With this change as an example, I think the Electoral College could actually be leveraged to steer our system in more inclusive direction. I'd love to simulate this version of history.
Thank you! I hope my government teacher would be proud. :)
I'd love to hear anybody poke holes in this idea. It's a recent one for me. I'm sure they exist, but I haven't come up with them yet.
Obviously, there's the incentive for fraudulent votes. But there's already an incentive for fraudulent votes, and it doesn't seem to cause much of a problem.
One additional thought: it may be appropriate then to have an option for a ‘present’ vote or the like to allow those who wish to protest their options on the ballot still be counted. I suppose that’s a write-in ballot, however?
Also, it seems to disadvantage populations that have disproportionate bias towards non-voting. I’m thinking areas of lower socioeconomic status, even with as many pro-voting initiatives as can be, will still ultimately be undercounted.
I've long been in favor of the vote of no-confidence. I'm not sure what the system should do with it, (I'd like it to have some teeth) but alas, I'm uncertain as to it's efficacy.
> I'd love to hear anybody poke holes in this idea.
I really like the idea, but I'll volunteer to offer the criticism you'll probably hear.
If a state can give itself more power by counting more votes, then state governments which are confident that their dominant party will win will have a lot of incentive to allow fraudulent votes, and potentially a lot to gain.
For example, if the state government knows that 70% of voters will vote for the Yellow Party, then they can risk encouraging 10% of the population to cast, say, 4 extra votes (for their deceased grandparents), without worrying that the dreaded Purple Party might exploit this laxness and give Purple the win.
Combine that with some selective enforcement (so Purple voters know that, in practice, only they are at risk of prosecution for voter fraud) and the state will be able to magnify its relative strength compared to states that are more scrupulous.
> then they can risk encouraging 10% of the population to cast, say, 4 extra votes (for their deceased grandparents), without worrying that the dreaded Purple Party might exploit this laxness and give Purple the win.
The calculus of voter fraud will definitely change. But I don't know. In order for an individual to commit voter fraud, they have to believe that the benefit is worth the risk them as an individual.
And, for the individual, voter fraud would only "work" to the extent that they think everyone else will do it too.
I intuitively feel that voter fraud is a much bigger bogeyman than people make it out to be.
I think the bigger fear is corruption of the election commission; such that they turn a blind eye to or even contribute to voter fraud.
Of course, no system is incorruptible, and the test for acceptance shouldn't be perfection, but improvement over the status quo (this idea of iteration is the cornerstone of our constitution).
That being said, I'm not convinced that the voter fraud risk makes this proposal more corrupt than the system we currently have. Voter fraud is an easier problem to solve than voter suppression, IMO.
Voter fraud is not currently much of a problem, because solid-red and solid-blue states don't have much incentive to allow it (since the ruling party is already confident of its majority), and swing states don't want to risk encouraging it in case the other side gets into power and uses it against them.
Once there is even a suggestion that some state might be increasing its power by encouraging voter fraud, there will be an arms race of other states trying to "counteract" this by encouraging their own voter fraud.
And it works the other way, too. There will be a disincentive for Democrats in Texas and Republicans in California to vote. Their vote for their more favoured party would increase the congressional power of their less favoured party!
Yeah, I think the system would would have to go hand-in-hand with proportional representation (similar to how Bundestag seats are allotted in Germany).
So, if 80% of you 100-seat state votes, 80% voted X and 20% voted Y, you'd get 64 X's and 16 Y's.
This way, both parties are incentivized to vote. Instead of today.
In my opinion, it's harmful to our democracy that members of the "losing party" feel zero incentive to turn out on election day. It encourages disengagement and disillusionment, not to mention the polarization of the electorate.
In Germany, the "crazy parties" get some seats, so their voices are heard. It has a pacification affect on the mainstream parties.
So you don't essentially get heard get heard until n election cycles after coming of voting viability age?
You've just taken all the complexity of counting people every 10 years and rejiggering the numbers, and now made it nightmarishly more complex given that you're transitioning into that system in the first place.
Furthermore, you're over emphasizing the structural elements (net representatives votes) instead of the important bit, that everyone has an ear to tug to get something listened to up high. You're entitled to an input. Not to skewing the structuring function to optimize for voter population density, neither directly via tinkering with the effective representation calculation, or indirectly via the change you suggested.
It's not a terrible idea to be honest, but there is a degree of simplicity to the way we do it now, and I have the feeling yours would be a hard sell to the average American, or even the above average ones without substantially more in detail analysis.
> One motivation for Jim Crow laws was to keep the southern voting-sampled portion of the south white and segregationist (in spite of the true distribution of local sentiment), while simultaneously benefiting from the larger population in magnifying their representation in national politics.
In theory, there is a (somewhat dated, given other evolutions in voting rights) remedy for that in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, though it can be hacked aroundt by selective criminalization (though that, in theory, is limited by Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment).
Unfortunately, neither of these has been very well enforced, especially Section 2.
I totally agree. It comes down to the legal definition of "abridged", "denied", and "crimes".
Unfortunately, in the present political climate, any reasonable interpretation of these words that hurts the representation of states with regressive voting laws would be seen as an act of politics.
The nice thing about my proposed hack, is that it also incentivizes decriminalization, or at least allowing a broader class of humans in your state to vote. In this way, it doesn't matter if the 14th amendment is well-enforced, because it changes the goal posts.
So, while it might not give felons the vote (this would violate the 14th), it will encourage the dissolution of our current "justice" system that arbitrarily incarcerates people.
If your state incarcerates people for "driving while black", it is effectively diluting its representation in the congress and electoral college.
>Unfortunately, in the present political climate, any reasonable interpretation of these words that hurts the representation of states with regressive voting laws would be seen as an act of politics.
We've been misinterpreting words like "infringed" and "papers, and effects" for well over a century. The current climate while certainly non-helpful but I think there's a deeper root cause that keeps us from strongly enforcing the constitution.
I wonder why no one's pushed for making representation based on votes not citizens or residents. That would incentivize states helping everyone vote. (But might also incentivize fraudulent counts)
I've thought of this before, but have no idea. It could be a lack of imagination?
Sadly, it's more likely that both political parties are simply comfortable with the status quo.
The republican party thinks they can gerrymander and voter-suppress their way to power.
The democratic party thinks they can let the republican party self-destruct, since most of their tactics to hold on to power are illegal, especially as the demographics of our country's states become overwhelmingly out of their favor.
But regardless of which party you belong to, I think universal suffrage is one of those rare principles that every American grows up believing in.
As such, especially in 2020, it makes perfect sense to base federal representation on such a shared principle. It would definitely have the effect of moderating our society. It is a natural evolution of a concept we already have (proportional representation). It does away with the grimy roots of that concept (ceding representation to slaveholders).
There were two initial proposals for Congress: the New Jersey Plan and the Virginia Plan. (Virginia, of course, being the leading slave-owning state.) Under both plans, the President would have been elected by Congress. There were concerns that having Congress elect the President would jeopardize separation of powers. So the Electoral College was created, with one elector for each member of Congress. It had nothing to do with protecting the interests of slave-holding states, but instead was designed to make the Presidency more independent of Congress.
Indirect election of the executive is somewhat anti-majoritarian, but also extremely common. Justin Trudeau was not elected Prime Minister of Canada by the general population. He was elected by about 80,000 eligible members of the Liberal Party, and became Prime Minister when the people elected other members of his party to the Parliament. I will add that the leading proponent of direct election of the President and the Senate was Andrew Jackson, strongly opposed abolition and was generally a horrible person.
Now, the New Jersey Plan would have allocated one member of Congress to each state. It was also supported by New York, Delaware, and Connecticut. Of those, only Delaware had a significant enslaved population. The Virginia Plan created a two-chamber legislature with proportional representation based on population. Yes, slave-holding Virginia was the one that wanted proportional representation. The Connecticut Compromise that led to the current allocation really was about small versus large states, not slavery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1790_United_States_Census. Large states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had few to no enslaved persons, and small states like Georgia and Delaware had significant numbers of enslaved persons.
The 3/5 compromise was designed to reduce the interest of slave-holding states. The number originated in an amendment proposed to the Articles of Confederation, which proposed to set the tax obligation for each state to the federal government "in proportion to the number of inhabitants of every age, sex, and quality, except Indians not paying taxes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise#Confed.... Virginia complained that this would count enslaved persons, thus increasing Virginia's tax obligations. Eventually, they settled on counting 3/5 the number of enslaved persons towards the state's tax obligation. That same compromise came up later in the apportionment context.
I remember reading about all of this in AP US History back in high school, and it's going to forever confound me that we seem to have uninstalled this history from our collective memory.
You should be careful about that. The College Board's APUS curriculum is heavily criticized by the americanists I know and it can be a grave error to assume that you've got the full picture from a high school textbook.
The debates are mainly about what is included and what isn’t. For example it’s very thin on Reconstruction and the end thereof; about the civil rights abuses under the New Deal; etc. There’s also debates about how to characterize certain things (for example Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric was called “bellicose” in a 2014 revision and that generated a kerfuffle.) So yes, don’t assume you learned all the history you need to know.
At the same time, don’t make the opposite mistake of assuming “everything your history teacher told you was a lie.” The New York Times made some bold assertions in the 1619 Project and has had to walk back some of the most fundamental assertions: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/nyt-1619-project-.... If you go through and strip out all the rhetoric based on factual premises that have been abandoned or debunked (even by the left, see: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-c...) what’s left is a really interesting take on aspects of history your AP US History curriculum doesn’t cover, but which doesn’t fundamentally contradict what you learned in school.
With respect to this particular issue: the AP US History curriculum correctly taught what the 3/5 compromise was (and it was what it was). And it also correctly taught that the Connecticut Compromise was about small states versus big states, not slavery. It was a slave-owning southern state, Virginia, that proposed proportional representation in both houses. And the small states that benefited from the structure of the Senate included both northern states and southern states.
The connection is also a weird thing to bring up today, because most of the small states that benefit from the structure of the Senate today were free states. Several, like north and South Dakota, were split up when admitted to break the power of the slave states in the Senate. Midwestern states like Iowa and Minnesota made a huge contribution to beating the south. Iowa sent troops to fight before the union army was even ready to go to war; they sent the largest percentage of their population to war of any state; and they had the highest percentage of casualties: https://valleynewstoday.com/news/local/iowa-played-a-large-r....
I appreciate your efforts here to re-expose what used to be a common understanding of this history.
As it happens, on my fraternal grandmother's side we had family that fought in the Civil War for the Union from Iowa. One day I'll look all that up and figure out what units they fought in and where they're buried.
I'm not trying to say that "the EC was about slavery" is a correct narrative or even more valid than "it was about states". The point I'm trying to make is unrelated to the specific question about the EC and slavery. The point I'm trying to make is that there are hundreds of narratives for almost every historical event. Motivations that range from the smallest microhistory to the largest historical narratives. And that "APUS said it was about X" is going to miss a whole lot of interesting scholarship.
Again, I'm not trying to make any statement about the EC. I'm trying to make a broader suggestion about the limitations of high school history classes.
Also keep in mind the Framer's never intended or expected the formation of organized national conventions.
The Electoral College had zilch to do with slavery besides momentarily (in that time frame) possibly benefiting from how Southern States populations were calculated, but look how that turned out.
Also, if you specifically look at what was outlined in the Federalist Papers, a Faithless Elector was a feature, not a bug. Political parties have completely ruined it by orchestrating to try to legally compel voting via data rather than by conscience and good sense, which fundamentally undermines the proof against a crowd pleaser, but ultimately incompetent actor the Framer's were trying guard against.
I can understand being upset that the Electoral College doesn't seem to be working as promised, but it's the byproduct if taking the screwdriver that is the EC as designed and trying to use it to turn a nut. There is a level of not being applied as designed. You aren't going to fix that without revisiting some structural assumptions. Also, no, I squarely do not buy the Anti-Federalist tune that crowds are somehow free from being shaped and manipulated more than a small number of individuals relatively randomly selected put into a position of deliberation.
People are collectively pulled down in the fidelity of collective reasoning by the damping effects socialization and large numbers, prone to passionate but ineffectual reasoning, and represent a great indicator that something need be done, though amazing at constraining a problem space through Wisdom of the masses, but terrible at managing the gory details for all of the shouting going on.
A person is smart, capable of forethought, reasoned, and generally best equipped when given several options of being able to justify which is better, and developing a workable solution that balances against a wide variety if pre-existing weighting factors.
The entire intent of the structure of our political process was to filter the energy of the whole, into paths of effectively achievable actions to be carried by a few such that the Nation could be driven without an undue on everyone. If you hate Jury duty, imagine how bad life would be if you had to be polled constantly on every decision needing to be made whether you knew anything about it or not.
And now, instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority. Due to capping the number of members of the House, those small-population states have disparate impact on federal issues.