A recent letter to the editor — “Support for Electoral College“, Robert Casimiro, Jan 29 — left out some important facts.
We can all have opinions, but facts matter, and in his letter he does an injustice to the truth when he states there was no mention of slavery concerning the compromise that the Electoral College reached in 1787.
A major factor of this deal was the three-fifths compromise, which was based on slavery. It counted three-fifths of each state’s slave population toward that state’s total population for the purpose of apportioning the House of Representatives.
In the U.S. Constitution, the three-fifths compromise is part of Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3. In 1868, Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment superseded this clause and explicitly repealed the compromise.
The Electoral College needs to be abolished, because it ignores the will of the people for the following reasons.
The reasons the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College are no longer relevant. Modern technology and political parties allow voters to get necessary information to make informed decisions that could not have been foreseen by the Founding Fathers.
The Electoral College gives too much power to “swing states” and allows the presidential election to be decided by a handful of states.
There are over 330 million people in the United States, but just 538 people decide who will be president.
These are facts, and facts matter.
Sidney Pew, East Andover
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