How the Electoral College Is Tied to Slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise
White supremacy is systemic. It lives in policies like law-and-order policing and access to public goods and services. It thrives in politics with systems that Americans rely on to elect leaders, like the electoral college, a process originally designed to protect the influence of white slave owners, which is still used today to determine presidential elections.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, state delegates came together to draft what would become the U.S. Constitution, establishing the rule of law for the newly founded United States of America. The country, still in its infancy, had liberated itself from the colonial rule of Great Britain’s King George III in the American Revolution.
With George Washington presiding, the delegates discussed the current state of affairs among the 13 states governed under the Articles of Confederation, which was proving insufficient in maintaining federal governance among the states. At the urging of Virginia Delegate James Madison and others, they began to draft a new national constitution, which would design the role and power of the new government, including elections of head of state. But steeped in the throws of the slave trade, and a little less than 100 years before the Civil War, there was already a divide between the interests of northern and southern states.
The idea of a simple popular-vote election struck fear in delegates from slaveholding states because while their states boasted large populations, much of the populace was comprised of enslaved black people who could not vote. By contrast, northern states had smaller populations with a greater number of eligible voters (read: white, male, and generally property-owning).
“The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes,” said Madison, who would later become the nation’s fourth president. “The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.”
Fearful of being outnumbered, Madison pushed for the electoral college, and championed representative government by state as a solution. Seats in the House of Representatives would be based on population size, and delegates from slave-holding states sought to have slaves included in the count for total population. Those opposed recognized this would mean fewer seats from the smaller states.
And so the states made several compromises. The first, known as the Three-Fifths Compromise, was a racist, manipulative policy that outlined the rules for legislative representation and taxation of the states. It read, “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
Enslaved black people, ordinarily only regarded as property, were declared three fifths of a person in order to strengthen the power of the white men who kept them in bondage. It would remain that way until the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to slaves in 1868.
The second compromise was the advent of the electoral college in deciding the general election. Instead of popular votes, electors would make selections on behalf of their states.
The way electors were chosen varied by state, but they were usually elected officials and party leaders, as is true today. The number of electors for each state was set to equal its total number of congressional representatives: two senators and however many representatives it had in the house. (In 1961, the District of Columbia would be awarded three electoral votes as well.)
There is no federal law that governs how electors cast their vote — this, too, is determined by state law, both now and then. Candidates had to receive a majority of electoral votes to win an election. So in deciding how to elect the leaders of government, slaveholding states were advantaged by the size of their slaveholding populations.
Virginia, which boasted the largest total population, saw many of its own occupy the White House in the early years of presidency, including Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Madison. The impact of the electoral college and the dominance of southern electors is even clearer when considering how many presidents were slave owners themselves — 12 in all, including eight who owned slaves while in office. Still, many others endorsed “states rights,” coded language that’s still used today with the introduction of emerging voter suppression laws, designed to alienate and disenfranchise voters.
Since its creation, there have been four elections where the electoral college winner did not receive the popular vote. Two have come this century: the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush and the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Both of these instances have drawn the ire of electoral college critics, who say the system is outdated and should be replaced with “one person, one vote” direct elections that truly represent American democracy.
