Toppling the big one

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root . . . — Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

Our biggest historical monument, built at the birth of the nation, bridging the north and southern sections of the newly conceived and named United States, is the Electoral College. Crafted as a political deal to gain southern votes to pass the Constitution, it is our most visible heritage of racism hiding in plain sight.

Our Founding Fathers were politicians, first and last. In their time, they agreed to – and placed in the Constitution – the counting of our enslaved ancestors as three-fifths a person each. Reread that sentence. Black, enslaved people were defined as 60 percent human. They were counted in every census, bulking up southern states’ populations, yet they were not allowed to vote. Were they considered citizens? I don’t know.

And Indians? They were named in the Constitution, but only those who paid taxes were counted. When we can pay up we are counted.

So yes, our American heritage of racism is built into the founding of our Republic.

The Electoral College’s purpose is to have state electors elect the president. Each state gets electors based on a formula that is not democratic or equal. Washington, with 7.5 million people, has 12 electoral votes, one for each 634,575 residents. Wyoming has 580,000 people and three electoral votes, one per 193,000 citizens. Mississippi has three million people and six electoral votes, one per 500,000 citizens. And so it goes throughout our least populous states: Vermont, but also Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Arkansas and Louisiana.

There is nothing structurally fair about this. We cannot say rural people, or their states, must have extra value or be protected. Why game the system toward them? People in downtown Seattle, in the ghettos of New York and Chicago, in Los Angeles’ and El Paso’s barrios are equal individuals, have votes that must have the same worth. Yet they are not. That Wyoming voter has three times the weight as a Washington voter. Those Mississippi votes are 25 percent heftier than Washington’s.

All that can be said is that the game has been rigged for 231 years, since the Bill of Rights completed the Constitution in 1789. Northerners made a deal in order to birth our country, offering a bridge between two cultures.

That bridge was never philosophically or ethically sound.

It is past time to tear this historical monument, the Electoral College, down, remove it from the Constitution by amending the document.

This is incredibly difficult: 67 Senators, two-thirds, and 67 percent of House members have to vote a Constitutional amendment into existence. Then 34 states have to ratify an amendment. We are not in a period where we get 67 percent of our fellow citizens to agree that the Earth is round or the sun rises in the east.

We are in a time, however, as every time is, to be aspirational, to name what is right – as well as what is needed – to shape our dreams and work them into existence.

Abolishing the Electoral College is the right cause to embrace, now and for our nation’s just future.