[Political Junkie Too]

Maybe it's too early in the morning for me to think, but how did a measure which effectively reduced the populations of the slave states give them more electoral votes?

The NYT suggests that direct popular vote would have not counted the slaves at all, but that counting them even at a 3:5 ratio for the House of Representatives still resulted in slave states having more relative vote-power through the Electoral College than they would have through direct voting.

The author counters that Virginia was the largest population even without the slaves, so the point is moot; they would have dominated the popular vote anyway, making the suggestion that the Electoral College was about protecting slavery wrong.

-PJ

[Steve_Seattle]

Thanks. I now see what the Times is getting at, but I think they’ve got it backwards by suggesting that the 3/5ths rule was intended to increase the voting power of the South. I was always taught that it was a kind of “punishment” - or perhaps “compromise” is a better word - to prevent the slave states from allowing slaves to count towards the allocation of electoral college votes while simultaneously denying them the right to vote.