Hacker News Reader

Comment by CptFribble | Hacker News Reader

The Electoral college exists because of slavery.

The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers.

The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. The southern delegates would have never supported a popular vote. Thus, the electoral college.

Madison wrote about it here: http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif

View on HN

That page you linked (http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif) contains that argument from Madison followed by a non-slavery based argument made by someone else.

To say that the electoral college exists "because of slavery" is an oversimplification. It ignores the misgivings about a popular vote that are mentioned in the page you linked, and it also ignores the desire of the state governments to exert control over their representation in the Federal government -- senators were not directly elected for the same reason.

If you want to point to part of the Constitution that exists purely because of slavery, the 3/5 compromise is a better example. The decision to adopt an electoral college was certainly influenced by complications introduced by slavery, but there were a lot of other arguments in favor of an electoral college that were persuasive at the time.

Actually, or perhaps also, the electoral college exists because the founding fathers didn't trust the people to make good decisions. This is discussed at length in the letters the founding fathers wrote about their political opinions.

> The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence.

I'm not saying you're wrong, bc clearly you've done at least some research and I've done none. But didn't most states not have anything resembling a "popular" vote at first?

In the first presidential election 43,782 cast a ballot. (Population nearly 4 million in 1790.. so about 1% got a vote.)

When many states didn't even HAVE a popular vote at the state level, is it really true that they were considering using a popular vote rather than state electors based on populations?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com