How the Electoral College Is Tied to Slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise
White supremacy is systemic. It lives in policies like law-and-order policing and access to public goods and services. It thrives in politics with systems that Americans rely on to elect leaders, like the electoral college, a process originally designed to protect the influence of white slave owners, which is still used today to determine presidential elections.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, state delegates came together to draft what would become the U.S. Constitution, establishing the rule of law for the newly founded United States of America. The country, still in its infancy, had liberated itself from the colonial rule of Great Britain’s King George III in the American Revolution.
With George Washington presiding, the delegates discussed the current state of affairs among the 13 states governed under the Articles of Confederation, which was proving insufficient in maintaining federal governance among the states. At the urging of Virginia Delegate James Madison and others, they began to draft a new national constitution, which would design the role and power of the new government, including elections of head of state. But steeped in the throws of the slave trade, and a little less than 100 years before the Civil War, there was already a divide between the interests of northern and southern states.
The idea of a simple popular-vote election struck fear in delegates from slaveholding states because while their states boasted large populations, much of the populace was comprised of enslaved black people who could not vote. By contrast, northern states had smaller populations with a greater number of eligible voters (read: white, male, and generally property-owning).
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/electoral-college-slavery-three-fifths-compromise-history
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