« David E. Young's books on half price sale | Main | Disgruntled progressives stocking up on guns »

Electoral College nonsense from the NY Times

The editorial's author(s) apparently can't be bothered to do a little research before writing that the Electoral College was a concession to the slave states:

"The Electoral College, which is written into the Constitution, is more than just a vestige of the founding era; it is a living symbol of America's original sin. When slavery was the law of the land, a direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did, gave the slave states more electoral votes."

The EC was a concession to small (in population) states. If we go back to the Census of 1790 to see which those were, just counting while males above the age of 16, the largest state was Virginia, with 110,000 of them. That was just about equal to the COMBINED populations of the same class of persons in Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine, and Delaware. North and South Carolina each had such populations larger than Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Delaware, taken individually. The only small southern states were Kentucky and Georgia, which were on the western edge and growing. It was widely assumed that this would continue, since the southern states could expand into good farm land to their west, while the midwest, still unexplored, was thought to be too cold for farming.

So the Electoral College was a concession to the small states, the great bulk of whom were located in the northeast, not the south.