N
Nepperhan
Guest
As we face another presidential election and concerns about the electoral college, many folks are unaware how racism was involved in establishing the system and preventing its change.
"After Reconstruction, the white “Redeemer” governments that came to power in Southern states became the political beneficiaries of what amounted to a “five-fifths” clause: African-Americans counted fully toward representation (and thus electoral votes), but they were again disenfranchised — despite the formal protections outlined in the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which stated that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” White Southerners consequently derived an even greater benefit from the Electoral College than they had before the Civil War.
A national popular vote would have eliminated that benefit. As the region’s political leaders recognized, passage of a constitutional amendment instituting a national popular vote would have spawned strong legal and political pressures to enfranchise African-Americans. Even if those pressures could be resisted, an Alabama campaign pamphlet noted in 1914, “with the Negro half of our people not voting, our voice in the national elections, which is now based upon total population, would then be based solely on our voting population and, therefore reduced by half.” The political consequences of a national popular vote could simply not be countenanced.
By the 1940s, many Southerners also came to believe that their disproportionate weight in presidential elections, thanks to the Electoral College, was a critical bulwark against mounting Northern pressures to enlarge the civil and political rights of African-Americans. In 1947 Charles Collins’s “Whither Solid South?,” an influential states’ rights and segregationist treatise, implored Southerners to repel “any attempt to do away with the College because it alone can enable the Southern States to preserve their rights within the Union.”…
"When the amendment resolution finally came to the floor of the Senate in September 1970, thanks to the prodigious efforts of an Indiana senator, Birch Bayh, it was greeted by a filibuster led by segregationists Sam Ervin and Strom Thurmond (with an assist from the Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska). Although things were changing in the South, its political leaders remained steeped in the values and perspectives that had informed their hostility to the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act. “The Electoral College,” wrote Senator James Allen of Alabama in 1969, “is one of the South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep it.”
Understanding the underpinnings of the electoral college can also help explain why there were new voting restrictions in selected states. The states get electoral votes based on population, not the number of people who actually vote. Direct elections would be much more democratic.
"After Reconstruction, the white “Redeemer” governments that came to power in Southern states became the political beneficiaries of what amounted to a “five-fifths” clause: African-Americans counted fully toward representation (and thus electoral votes), but they were again disenfranchised — despite the formal protections outlined in the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which stated that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” White Southerners consequently derived an even greater benefit from the Electoral College than they had before the Civil War.
A national popular vote would have eliminated that benefit. As the region’s political leaders recognized, passage of a constitutional amendment instituting a national popular vote would have spawned strong legal and political pressures to enfranchise African-Americans. Even if those pressures could be resisted, an Alabama campaign pamphlet noted in 1914, “with the Negro half of our people not voting, our voice in the national elections, which is now based upon total population, would then be based solely on our voting population and, therefore reduced by half.” The political consequences of a national popular vote could simply not be countenanced.
By the 1940s, many Southerners also came to believe that their disproportionate weight in presidential elections, thanks to the Electoral College, was a critical bulwark against mounting Northern pressures to enlarge the civil and political rights of African-Americans. In 1947 Charles Collins’s “Whither Solid South?,” an influential states’ rights and segregationist treatise, implored Southerners to repel “any attempt to do away with the College because it alone can enable the Southern States to preserve their rights within the Union.”…
"When the amendment resolution finally came to the floor of the Senate in September 1970, thanks to the prodigious efforts of an Indiana senator, Birch Bayh, it was greeted by a filibuster led by segregationists Sam Ervin and Strom Thurmond (with an assist from the Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska). Although things were changing in the South, its political leaders remained steeped in the values and perspectives that had informed their hostility to the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act. “The Electoral College,” wrote Senator James Allen of Alabama in 1969, “is one of the South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep it.”
Understanding the underpinnings of the electoral college can also help explain why there were new voting restrictions in selected states. The states get electoral votes based on population, not the number of people who actually vote. Direct elections would be much more democratic.
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