He. Tried. To. Kill. You.

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    It allows lower populated areas to not bexome a minority and a bit more power over their future.

    At the risk of having an extended debate in the finer points of what some wigged weirdos were envisioning hundreds of years ago when they wrote this lauded document, I don’t think that the founding fathers necessarily intended that…I think it’s unlikely that they knew that some areas of the country would house as many people as multiple states in a single city in the long run.

    • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Wanna know what the wigged weirdos thought?

      Slavery.

      Half the wigged weirdos had a bunch of people living in their states that they considered property and certainly weren’t about to let them vote…but at the same time, they were doing the work of people who would have to live there if not for the slaves.

      So they wanted to have their cake and eat it too: they wanted to have their slaves count as population when it came to representation but they weren’t remotely considering those same people as population when it came to actual voters.

      So you got the 3/5 compromise in it’s appalling simplicity, and the electoral college which favored lower population (read: plantation) states by giving them outsized influence over national elections compared to what their actual population would normally warrant.

      If that wasn’t enough, the EC was also intended as an insurance policy for the elite: if the population ever overwhelmingly elected someone that the elites overwhelmingly opposed, the EC could serve as a last ditch firewall to protect their interests and simply ignore the will of the voters to choose their own leadership.

      You’ll notice that none of the purposes of the EC are in the interests of the people.