OK HERE IS A PORTION OF THE ARTICLE "WHY WAS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE CREATED" POSTED BY UNCOACH THAT SUPPOSEDLY DOESN"T MENTION SLAVERY. You three are wrong. Is this the substantive proof you seek, that UNCOACH posted but you did not read? LOL
But determining exactly how many electors to assign to each state was another sticking point. Here the divide was between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn’t the Founders include slaves in counting a state’s population?
In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were enslaved Black people, who couldn’t vote.
James Madison from Virginia—where enslaved people accounted for 60 percent of the population—knew that either a direct presidential election, or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South.
“The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States,” said Madison, “and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.”
The result was the
controversial “three-fifths compromise,” in which three-fifths of the enslaved Black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that Southern states would ratify the Constitution and gave Virginia, home to more than 200,000 slaves, a quarter (12) of the total electoral votes required to win the presidency (46).
Did you know? For 32 of the United States’ first 36 years, a slave-holding Virginian occupied the White House (John Adams from Massachusetts was the exception).
Not only was the creation of the Electoral College in part a political workaround for the persistence of slavery in the United States, but almost none of the Founding Fathers’ assumptions about the electoral system proved true.
