First, my bad! I mixed up 13 and 14 -- I meant the 13th amendment. So first, the 3/5 compromise: When the constitution was being drafted, there was a disagree

First, my bad! I mixed up 13 and 14 -- I meant the 13th amendment. So first, the 3/5 compromise: When the constitution was being drafted, there was a disagreement between the free and slave states (actually, I'm not sure if there were any free states, or if at the time the North was just not reliant on slave labor and essentially winding it down). The north wanted slaves to not count towards your state's population for the purposes of apportioning house representatives. Since slaves could not vote, they argued, they shouldn't count towards your representation in the federal government. The south, on the other hand, wanted slaves to count towards the state's population for apportioning house representatives. Since slaves still required the same resources to survive as non-slaves, they argued, they should be counted. This ultimately led to the "3/5 compromise": slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of apportioning house representatives. Now, fast forward to the federal abolishment of slavery, the 13th amendment. It explicitly says "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." So it is very squarely placing prisoners in the same historical context as slaves, and they were thought of and reasoned about as such. So in the end, it seems straightforward to me that the state of slavery and prisons in America deliberately reduces the representation of black people. This is by design. While it does effectively increase the representation of women, there's far less of an argument to be made that it's an intentional feature of the system. NOTE: In checking these sources, I discovered that the 14th amendment (actually the 14th this time) says that voters who have become ineligible to vote shouldn't be counted towards your representation. Maybe it was superceded by a later amendment? SECOND NOTE: Here's an NPR article mentioning the prisons-count-as-population-for-representation concept: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806/your-body-being-used-where-prisoners-who-can-t-vote-fill-voting-districts https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806...