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by vonzeppelin
2898 days ago
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>The EC was arguably created (in it's existing format) to protect the interests of southern, slave-owning states. At the time, roughly analogous to resisting tyranny of the majority (as the urban north had more people, especially as slaves weren't fully recognized as people), I don't know that this is true. 1789, 1st Congress Slave States (40 representatives) Delaware 1 New Jersey 4 New York 6 Maryland 6 Georgia 3 North Carolina 5 South Carolina 5 Virginia 10 Free States (25 representatives) Connecticut 5 Massachusetts 8 New Hampshire 3 Pennsylvania 8 Rhode Island 1 |
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Another factor is that there was a much larger disparity in numbers of voters than there was in number of people. Many of the southern states had very restrictive requirements (such as needing to own a large amount of property) to be allowed to vote while while northern states had less restrictive requirements. In the 1789 election[0] Massachusetts had more than four times as many votes cast as Virginia while having fewer electoral votes and New Hampshire had more votes cast than Virginia while having less than half as many electoral vote. Massachusetts and New Hampshire alone had more than half of the votes cast in that election.
The biggest reason for the electoral college was to accommodate the aristocratic tendencies of some of the states. Contrary to what is often claimed, it wasn't intended to prevent the large states from dominating the small states; ironically it was the exact opposite. They wanted to prevent a tiny state like New Hampshire from being able to out vote, Virginia, the largest state.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_e...