JULY

**9, 2020**

Meyerson on TAP

One More Confederate Monument to Destroy: The Electoral College

For anyone who still wonders why Confederate monuments need to come
down, let me refer you to a famous line from the great bard of the white
South, William Faulkner. In the white Southern universe-that is, in
matters of white racism-Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead.
It's not even past."

The statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and their traitorous ilk
were erected to perpetuate and reinforce white supremacy, and hence are
completely valid targets for teardowns. But America suffers from one
particular legacy of racism more damaging than the monuments, and the
great Black Lives Matter movement that is seeking to create a more
egalitarian nation needs to target that legacy, too.

I refer to the Electoral College.

As I discussed in my On TAP on Tuesday, the Supreme Court, by striking
down earlier this week the ability of a presidential elector to vote for
a candidate other than the one that their state's voters supported,
affirmed that popular majorities determine whom a state will support for
president-but not whom the nation will support. Al Gore received half
a million more votes than George W. Bush in 2000 but lost the Electoral
College vote to him. Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more
votes than Donald Trump, but also lost in the Electoral College.

Though I've been writing about the racist origins of the Electoral
College for several decades, beginning during the weeks of the 2000
election's long count, I didn't discuss it in my Tuesday blog post.
My friend Karen D'Arc pointed out that omission to me (her normally
dulcet tones rising to unusually high decibels during the phone call),
and she was right to do so.

The Electoral College was one of the last particulars that the
Constitution's drafters settled upon. Two factors led to its creation.
The first was the pre-democratic belief that only a handful of men drawn
from the nation's elite had the brains and dispositions to select a
president. The second was the insistence of the drafters from slave
states that the presidency should not be determined by popular vote, as
the eligible electorate (at that time, white men of property) in
Northern, non-slave states exceeded and would likely continue to exceed
the eligible electorate in the South. Their fear, of course, was that
under a popular-vote system, an anti-slavery candidate might one day win
the presidency. Hence, they created the Electoral College, which
benefited slavery and the South by giving every state, no matter its
population, two extra votes (reflective of its Senate representation)
and by lumping slaves into their population count by tallying them as
three-fifths of a person.

From a Southern perspective, the system worked brilliantly. Had the
Democratic Party not split in two (into a Northern
indifferent-to-slavery wing and a Southern rabidly pro-slavery wing) in
1860, the Electoral College would have perpetuated slavery until God
knows when. Once slavery was abolished and the 15th Amendment to the
Constitution ratified in 1870, the South had to find other ways to
suppress Black voting, and with its current Republican friends on the
Supreme Court, it has managed to do so to this very day.

But as the United States becomes more racially diverse, and as the
governing principle of the Republican Party has overtly become white
supremacy, that racist Republican right can only cling to power through
its reliance on the Electoral College, which stands athwart the
principle and reality of majority rule. (Having long favored suppressing
minority rights, Republicans have also come to favor suppressing
majority rule, now that it's clear they can't win majority support
among the nation's voters.)

In short, the Electoral College reflects and perpetuates the same values
that those Confederate monuments reflected and perpetuated. Those who
believe that Black Lives Matter need to topple this deeply undemocratic
monstrosity, too.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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