Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

I abhor the Electoral College, and I am not alone. Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination have called for its abolition.15 Editorials from the Washington Post and articles in the Atlantic decry its origins16 and its current purpose.17 The process is an antiquated, racist, and classist gerrymandering of the nation’s elections. Proposed as a compromise between the slaveholding South and the classist North, the Electoral College has long skewed elections away from active engagement of the nation. At the time of its conception in 1787, the North and South had roughly equal populations, but in the North, more of the nation’s inhabitants had the right to vote. Southern legislators wanted to count the bodies of slaves for political power but refused to recognize their humanity or grant them suffrage. In the North, leaders fretted about whether immigrants and the uneducated should have a voice in selecting the nation’s chief executive. Mimicking what had become the three-fifths compromise for the treatment of Blacks held as slaves, the Electoral College offered the South a version of what had been delivered for congressional seats: the benefit of a population count without the need to grant freedom to the enslaved.