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The EC was created to protect slave states, not small states. It just so happened that those states had smaller populations because they only counted slaves as
by jedberg 2y ago
The EC was created to protect slave states, not small states. It just so happened that those states had smaller populations because they only counted slaves as 3/5 of a person.
And furthermore, because the House is capped at 435, it throws everything off. If we kept following the original algorithm outlined in the constitution, which was very similar to the square root rule, the house would have 1600 members and the EC would still match the popular vote every time.
This is all broken because of the artificial cap on the house that makes each member represent far too many people.
- sickofparadox 2y ago"Slave states" and "Free states" did not exist at the time of the constitution's ratification - slavery was legal and practiced in all 13 of them. And while south Carolina and Georgia were amongst the bottom half of the stack population wise, they weren't significantly smaller than the other small states. The EC was Explicitly laid out in the federalist papers (68 to be specific) to exist for the purpose of protecting the smaller states from those like Massachusetts and Virginia.