B lack voters have plenty to gain from replacing the electoral college—a system built originally to protect the interest of white, male slav...
Black voters have plenty to gain from replacing the electoral college—a system built originally to protect the interest of white, male slave owners—with selecting presidents through a popular vote.
SEE ALSO: The Power Of The Black Vote And How To Make Each One Count
Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a 2020 presidential candidate, endorsed ending the electoral college Monday night at a town hall meeting at Mississippi’s Jackson State University, a historically Black college.
“You know, come a general election, presidential candidates don’t come to places like Mississippi. They also don’t come to places like California and Massachusetts, right? Because we’re not the ‘battleground states,’ ” Warren said. “Well, my view is that every vote matters. And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting. And that means get rid of the electoral college, and everybody counts. Everybody. I think everybody ought to have to come and ask for your vote.”
Looking ahead to 2020, Democratic voters were working to avoid a repeat of 2016, in which Hillary Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes than Donald Trump but lost the electoral college vote.
In our system, voters do not elect the president directly. Instead, they choose which candidate receives their state’s electors.
The electoral college is made up of 538 electors who technically cast votes to decide the president and vice president. The candidate who receives a majority of electoral votes (270) wins the presidency.
The number 538 is the sum of the nation’s 435 Representatives, 100 Senators, and 3 electors given to the District of Columbia. Electors are apportioned to states based on their population, meaning that larger states have more electoral votes than smaller states.
It’s a winner takes all system. A candidate gets all the electoral votes of a state whether they win it by one vote or one million votes. In 2016, Clinton won huge majorities in racially diverse states like California and New York that ran up her popular vote count but meant relatively little in the electoral college count.
“In addition to the problem of this winner take all logic, there is also the issue that people in large states are explicitly underrepresented in the electoral college,” according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
The smallest states are guaranteed at least three electoral votes. Consequently, a small state like Wyoming has one elector for every 195,000 residents. By contrast, California has the most electoral votes (55), but each elector represents every 711,000 residents.
“White people tend to live in states where their vote counts more, and minorities in places where it counts less,” CEPR noted.
Wyoming is 84 percent white, compared to California’s 38 percent white population.
That dynamic means that Black votes count less because they tend to live in large states. African-Americans are also many times clustered in large urban communities that are in Republican-leaning states.
“[The electoral college] dilutes our power,” Rep. Emilia Sykes, an Ohio state lawmaker who has been a leading voice against it, told PBS last year. “And we recognize that, and we get it, and we don’t want it. We want our power to be used to its fullest potential.”
SEE ALSO:
Democrats Investigate Brian Kemp’s Jim Crow Voter Suppression Tactics Ahead Of 2020 Elections
3 Things Black Folks Need To Know About Supreme Court Voting Redistricting Case
[ione_media_gallery id="3835568" overlay="true"]* This article was originally published here
