.webp "The electortal Racism of USA")
Does american Constitution allow for a political system that is colorblind? If so, little was accomplished to improve the situation by the Supreme Court's 2013 dismantling of the Voting Rights Act. Although voter suppression against Black Americans has not reached the heights of the 1950s, efforts to prevent them and other citizens from casting ballots started the day after the Shelby County v. Holder verdict and have only intensified since then.
Justice Antonin Scalia said, "Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes," during Shelby County's oral argument. Paradoxically, there is some validity to this otherwise horrifyingly numb assertion. Racial entitlements have a long history in American elections, but black Americans are not given preference.Since ancient times, white votes have been given undue weight due to inventions like voter-ID laws and poll taxes, as well as overt acts of violence against racial minorities. (The argument made by William F. Buckley in his essay "Why the South Must Prevail" was clear to anyone who was paying attention: white Americans have the right to "take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally," in situations where they are outnumbered because they belong to "the advanced race." However, American institutions have contributed to the rise of white political power in less evident ways. One such program is the Electoral College, which is the oldest structural racial entitlement in the country and also one of the most significant.
Commentators nowadays frequently minimize the degree to which slavery and racial issues influenced the Framers' formulation of creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of
the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and
slavery were perhaps the foremost.The Electoral College was designed by the Framers for a variety of additional reasons, of course. Fearing that the president could succumb to a variety of civic vices, including cronyism and corruption, create division, or overreach, the men worked to limit the president's executive power in a way that adhered to checks and balances and federalism. The participants to the Philadelphia convention were ill-prepared for the responsibilities, authority, and boundaries of the American presidency. However, they did have a few suggestions regarding how the CEO should be chosen. They openly complained that a popular vote may lead to excessive democracy when the concept was brought up. Few questioned them, so they quickly abandoned the idea that the people might choose their leaders.
However, representatives from the slave-owning South had another justification—and they were not afraid to state it—for rejecting the direct election approach: it would be to their detriment. Even James Madison, who claimed to be a theorist who supported popular democracy, gave in to the demands of the circumstances. The future president admitted that, in his view, "the people at large was the fittest" to choose the head of state. However, he expressed the South's sentiment in the most "diplomatic" way possible in the same sentence:
"There was, however, a significant issue pertaining to the people's prompt decision. The right to vote was far more widely distributed in the Northern states than in the Southern ones, and the latter were unable to affect the outcome of the election based on the votes cast by African Americans. This problem was avoided by substituting electors, which also generally thought to be the least objectionable option.
The Electoral College has taught us a lot about the impact of racial entitlement on presidential selection from the very beginning. History aficionados and admirers of Hamilton know that the Electoral College created a tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, his presumed running partner, in its first significant setback. Less is known about the 1800 election than one might think, but the Electoral College succeeded in doing what one may have predicted given its acceptance of the three-fifths compromise. The election result was determined by the South's inherent advantages, which included the extra electoral votes it was awarded for keeping slaves although forbidding them from exercising their right to vote. It provided Jefferson, the owner of slaves, an advantage over the incumbent John Adams, abolitionist and president. The third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves,” to paraphrase Yale Law's Akhil Reed Amar. Up to Abraham Lincoln's triumph in 1860, the election of that year maintained an almost continuous tradition of southern slaveholders and their dough faced supporters winning the White House.
The agreement simultaneously signaled the beginning of the Jim Crow era, the restoration of the old South, and the end of the brief Reconstruction era. By systematically denying Black people the right to vote, the decision to withdraw soldiers from the South resulted in the restoration of white dominance in the voting process, thereby achieving in the following eight decades what slavery had achieved in the previous eight. Because of this, the Electoral College's miscalculation in 1876 contributed to the racialized patchwork democracy that persisted until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, rather than eradicating the original stain of slavery but rather spreading it throughout the other parts of the Constitution.
More significantly, this "voters will be ignored" justification is ethically repugnant. A dictatorship of the minority would result from giving a numerical few voting "enhancements" the power to decide for the many. An electoral system that gives some votes more weight than others would be considered absurd in any other situation, as the Supreme Court, in a number of significant instances, essentially did. Can you envision a scenario in which black voters' ballots were given more weight because they would otherwise be disregarded by presidential candidates? Or for any other reason? No. An entitlement based on race would be that. The racial injustices that the Electoral College still inflicts upon them are more easily imagined.
It is appropriate for those who criticize the Electoral College to point out that it has twice in the last twenty years granted victory to the loser of the popular vote. They are also right when they point out that it skews our politics, pushing, among other things, presidential campaigns to focus their attention on a small number of states that are not typical of the nation. However, since the disempowerment of black voters is fundamental to the purpose of the Electoral College and has always been, it must be added to that list of worries.
The Electoral College's racial conscience in its founding and maintenance has fostered an entitlement system that our democracy in the twenty-first century cannot legitimate. People should start by removing that odd, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution if they genuinely want our politics to be racial-blind.
