Slate: The electoral college is an instrument of white supremacy-and sexism

[Cashew]

The article isn't wrong, nor is it asserting that the Electoral College currently intentionally serves the purposes of white supremacy and sexism.

Points to title

is not was

At best it is clickbait.

[RINO Tom]

Did anyone actually read the article, or did you just see the words "white supremacy" and start shaking your cane at the screen mumbling "those darn SJWs"?

The article isn't wrong, nor is it asserting that the Electoral College currently intentionally serves the purposes of white supremacy and sexism. All the author is saying is that it was originally designed to empower the proportionally underpopulated slave states of the South by allowing their counting of slaves as 3/5ths a person to enlarge their number of electoral districts and, consequently, electoral votes. In addition, had they not counted women when they were disenfranchised, then they could not have counted them when creating congressional districts and there would have been an incentive to enfranchise women for those states to receive more districts and electoral votes. Today, it continues to privilege white, rural states at the expense of those with large minority populations, thereby resulting in an election like this one where Clinton can win by millions of votes yet still lose. Does anyone mind pointing out how this is so horribly inaccurate?

It's not "horribly inaccurate" for Republicans to say that there are a lot of lazy people who take advantage of welfare programs or that Democrats get a lot of votes by promising free stuff to people who aren't willing to work for it ... doesn't change the fact that 1) the vast majority of people on welfare are neither lazy nor scamming the system (just as the vast majority of people who support the EC do it for reasons totally unrelated to White supremacy) and 2) it just makes you sound comically out of touch (as Slate sounds here).

[Kalimantan]

Well, the electoral college does mean that some kinds of people are more important than others when it comes to winning elections. I doubt its white supremacists, but the outcome is certainly unfair

BTW, did you also complain, when UKIP got basically nada in UK elections because of similar rules?

Absolutely,  but I come at it from the side of the libdems and greens. Yes, not representative either,  although there would always be issues of govt stability in a non-presidential system. Half the tories are indistinguishable from ukip anyway, so the politics doesnt matter.

[angus]

Actually it was designed as a special purpose single use Congressional substitute so as to preserve separation of powers.  Even had they wanted to, using a national PV to elect a President in 1787 would have been untenable.  Quite a few states at the time had their legislatures pick the executive.  Had there not been an EC, the President would have been elected by a joint session of Congress every four years.

That was always my impression as well, but lately more and more articles cite the paranoia of James Madison as the main reason for the EC.  Is that just historical revisionism?  If so, it is accurate?

[m4567]

Racism and sexism is not the main reason why democrats lost the electoral college, but it's part of it.

[Simfan34]

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