Rep. John Conyers: ‘The Electoral College Is Rooted in Slavery’
(CNSNews.com) – Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) held a forum Tuesday on the future of the Electoral College, which he claimed was “rooted in slavery.”
“We also must face up to the cold reality that the Electoral College is rooted in slavery,” Conyers said in his opening statement.
Conyers referenced a claim by one of the witnesses, Yale Law professor Akhil Amar, that “states opposed direct elections for the president, because in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves could not vote, but the Electoral College instead let each southern state count its slaves, although with a two-fifths discount, they counted for three-fifths of a person in computing its share of the overall count.”
Conyers’ claim was backed up by a comment from Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) that the Electoral College was “designed to enhance the power of slave states.”
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