Abolition isn’t over until the Electoral College is gone
The Electoral College is an institution to protect the votes of Southern plantation owners after dehumanizing Black lives.
Slavery is America’s original sin and it helped to elect Donald Trump.
As the Founders sat down to write the Constitution, they had many compromises to make. Among the most important was how to balance the fact that Black Americans under the oppressive system of chattel slavery clearly shouldn’t vote, yet enshrining the principle of one person, one vote meant that Southern plantation owners would be near silenced if Blacks simply became a political non-person. This started with the Three-Fifths Clause, stating that Black Americans were only worth three-fifths of a person, and continued with the production of the Senate, an institution to make certain that no matter how much a Southern state rejected large swaths of its population they would still have as much say in government in the Congress.
Similarly, states are used to run the electoral college, with each state’s election serving as a manner for setting the presidency. Every four years, this sneaks up upon the majority of the American public, and normally it works. In all but five presidential elections, the popular vote has aligned with the results of the electoral college. But two of those have been within our lifetimes, with Bush losing the popular vote to Gore in 2000 and Trump losing the popular vote to Clinton just this week.
The electoral college serves as a national-level gerrymander, with states with large, diverse populations immediately disadvantaged to those with low population density. To this day, a rancher in Wyoming is worth more to the presidential vote than a person of color in L.A. Trump’s consistent work for a backbone of low-population and thus higher worth-per-vote demonstrates the power of a system that is still set up to deny the basic democratic principle of one person, one vote.
Democrats need to focus on these states too but our cities should not be beholden to rural areas. Our cities are the backbone of our part of an internationalized economy and deserve as much say in our national politics as my hometown of Greenville, Ohio.
Land owners no longer directly own slaves. It’s time they no longer own the national government. Abolish the Electoral College.
