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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 14, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------Mumia from death row
Electoral College: rooted in oppression
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
A perfect democracy is therefore
the most shameless thing in the world.--Edmund Burke,
"Reflections on the Revolution
in France"In the ensuing controversy over the 2000 presidential election, the average American has had to give some thought to a mysterious institution that usually goes ignored: the Electoral College.
Well, it should be somewhat mysterious, for it's not a college. It doesn't meet in one place. It has no professors, nor faculty. Yet it played and continues to play a pivotal role in U.S. presidential politics.
In fact, contrary to what most folks believe, Americans don't vote for their presidents. They vote for electors who in turn vote for the U.S. president and vice president.
Who are these unknown, unnamed electors? They are people chosen at a political party's nominating convention, and they are numbered according to the number of senators and U.S. representatives in each state and Washington.
Every state has two senators, so that's 100 electors. There are 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, so that's 535 electors. Since 1964 Washington acquired three electors. The majority of those 538 people, or 270 of them, to be exact, chooses who will be the president of the United States.
Remember the constitutional discussion that refers to "three-fifths of a man?" That provision refers to the Electoral College, and gave the slave-owning plantocracy in the South the right to count the slave population in order to determine the number of representatives in the U.S. House, and also the number of electors selected to choose a president in the Electoral College.
Even after slavery and the Civil War, the Electoral College was used to suppress Black freedom. If the 2000 presidential election goes as it did in 1824, 1876 and 1888, that is, where one person gets the popular vote and another gets the electoral college votes, the latter wins. Black historians Robin R. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, in their recent work, "To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans," shows us how this process worked shortly after the Civil War:
In 1876, the federal government withdrew even its marginal support for Reconstruction. In the presidential election of that year, the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote over the Republican nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes. Because in some states, particularly in the South, the votes were contested with both parties declaring victory, Tilden did not gain the needed Electoral College votes.
In 1877, Congress worked out a compromise through a special election commission that decided in favor of Hayes by one vote. Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic leaders informally decided that if Southern congressmen would accept Hayes, he would withdraw federal troops from the South. Such a policy, which Hayes had favored even before the election, would allow white southerners to disenfranchise Southern Black men without federal interference. [pp. 253-254]
The Electoral College was thus a tool of white supremacy and Black oppression, under the rubric of what came to be called bipartisanship. It was, and remains, profoundly undemocratic. It is a tool by which the rulers rule, and an illusion by which the ruled are led. It is a tool of democracy in name only, and a tyranny of repression.
That is American history, which shows us a lot about our present.
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