Voting is the most precious right in a Democracy

Article II Section 1 of the Constitution

In a nutshell, Americans don’t directly elect the President. We empower electors to vote on our behalf. There are 538 electors and it takes 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency.

Electoral College-Each state is given one elector for each member that it has in Congress(100 Senators-2 for each state and 435 Congressmen). The District of Columbia gets 3 electors. There are 538 electors that constitute the Electoral College. Since 1868, electors have been selected directly by the people in each state. Most electors typically vote for the candidate they pledge to vote for.  In most states the candidate who wins the popular vote earns all the electoral votes. A candidate can win the electoral vote, without winning the popular vote, if he wins the larger states with the most electoral votes. There have been 4 elections when the candidate who won the Presidency did not win the popular vote-1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016.

The year was 1787 and the “founding fathers” were creating the Constitution for the most unique government that had ever existed anywhere in the world. It was to a government “for the people and by the people.” “We the People…in Order to form a more perfect Union establish Justice…” The “people” would vote for a President. There would be no king, no monarchy where people ascended to the throne because of their family lineage. Yet, the “founding fathers”, did not trust “The People”. At the time most white people in the 13 original colonies that would become the United States of America couldn’t read or write. Women had basically no legal rights and even the children belonged to the husband. Women couldn’t own anything or transact business. Poor white men also had very few rights. Under the original constitution ratified in 1789, voting rights were given to white men who owned property and paid taxes. 

In 1787, 92% of African Americans were enslaved primarily in the southern colonies. Most of the enslaved African Americans were held in Virginia. In most of the southern colonies there were more enslaved African Americans than the white population. The population in Virginia was 60% enslaved African Americans.The southern colonies refused to join the Union and ratify the Constitution unless there was a voting loophole.  Population is used to decide how many Congressmen and how many electors a state could have. For the purpose of deciding population, southern states were allowed to count enslaved African Americans as ⅗ of a person. This created yet another unjust imbalance in the new country. Virginia received 25% of the electoral votes. Our first 11 Presidents, 7 were from Virginia. 

Electoral college concept was developed as a check/balance so the election of the President and Vice-President would not be in the hands of the “ poor and uneducated and uninformed” However, in 1787 the political system was very different. There were no political parties, most people couldn’t read or write, and there was slow transportation and communication. Most people knew very little, if anything, about the candidates.

This system seems undemocratic, yet it can only be abolished by a constitutional amendment that requires ⅔ approval by the House and the Senate and then it would have to be ratified by ¾ of the states.