HONOLULU (KHON2) -- Back in the late 1700s around the time Native Hawaiians were first encountering Captain Cook, the United States government was just beginning to be formed. The leaders of the newly conquered lands wanted to make sure that all men traditional Northern European descent had a fair say in choosing the President.
But they had a big problem: the states were very different from each other. Some states were large territorially with lots of people, others were smaller with fewer people and still others had lots of people who were not considered to be people with rights who were also known as slaves.
The slave holders did not want to extend citizenship to the people they considered property, but they also wanted them counted in order to make their populations look larger. In essence, they wanted the pie and the ability to eat it, too.
So, they needed a system that would be fair to both sets of white men, the slaveholders and the non-slaveholders.
To solve this, the group of men created something called the Electoral College. Let's take a journey to understand how and why they did this.
The Great Compromise
When the leaders, who dubbed themselves the Founding Fathers, met to design the new government, they had many disagreements. One big argument was oriented around the slavery issue. Are slaves counted in the population and how does that impact representation and power.
States like Virginia had lots of slaves and a few landowners; so, they wanted more power in choosing the President. States like Delaware did not have large populations of slaves and didn’t want to be ignored simply because they had not embraced the slave paradigm like the southern colonies had.
So, rather than creating the hierarchy of state representatives being elected who then selected the Senators to go to the Nation's capital who would then select a president from amongst their ranks, they came up with the Great compromise.
This was a big agreement that created two houses in Congress:
- The House of Representatives, where the number of representatives each state gets is based on its population numbers. This is why the census is so very important.
- The Senate, where every state gets two senators, no matter how big or small it is.
But there was still the problem of how to choose the President.
The Birth of the Electoral College
At that time, some wanted the President to be chosen by Congress, while others wanted the people to vote directly. But both ideas had problems. If Congress chose the President, it would have too much power. If the people voted directly, the big states would always win.
So, the Founding Fathers from the slaveholding states came up with a new idea: the Electoral College. This was another compromise. Here’s how it works:
- Each state gets a certain number of electors. The number of electors is equal to the number of its representatives in the House plus its two senators.
- When people vote for President, they are really voting for a group of electors chosen by their party. These electors then vote for the President.
The Three-Fifths Compromise
There was another tricky issue they had to solve: slavery. Some states, mostly in the South, had lots of enslaved people.
These states wanted to count enslaved people as part of their population to get more representatives in the House and more electors in the Electoral College. But the Northern states, where slavery was not as common, thought this was unfair.
They reached another compromise called the Three-Fifths Compromise. They decided to count each enslaved person as three-fifths of a person. This way, the Southern states got more representation than if enslaved people weren’t counted at all, but not as much as if they were considered to be full citizens.
Disproportionate Representation
Because of these compromises, the Electoral College gives more weight to smaller states. For example, a small state like Hawaiʻi has four electors, which doesn’t seem like much.
But because we have a smaller population, each elector represents fewer people. In contrast, a large state like California has many more electors, but each one represents a lot more people.
This means that the votes of people in smaller states can have more impact than the votes of people in larger states.
Imagine you and your friend each have a pie, but your friend’s pie is significantly larger. You both get to vote on the flavor of the pies. Although each of you has one vote, your vote effectively counts more because your pie is smaller and easier to finish.
This is similar to how the electoral college works, where less populous states have a disproportionate influence on the outcome of a presidential election.
In the electoral college, each state is allocated a certain number of electoral votes based on its population, but smaller states have relatively more electoral votes per capita than larger states.
This means that voters in smaller states have more influence per person compared to voters in larger states, just like how your vote has more influence in deciding the flavor of a smaller pie.
The Electoral College was created to balance the interests of large and small states and to solve disagreements about slavery and how to choose the President.
It’s a unique system that tries to make sure every state has a voice, even if it means some voices are a little louder than others. The story of the Electoral College is a tale of compromise and trying to make everyone happy in a new and growing country.