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Comment by undersuit | Hacker News Reader

>the electoral college was intended to give smaller states more power than they would have as a result of their population size alone.

Thanks to the 3/5's compromise...

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Would you have preferred 0/5ths or 5/5ths?

I'd have preferred we not have slaves.

I'd also have preferred no slaves.

But "0/5ths" for slaves would have been consistent with them being slaves. It's not like they were 60% free.

The Three Fifths Compromise had nothing to do with the Electoral College. Slave states gained more power in the Electoral College from the extra 3/5 votes, but a) the compromise itself had nothing to do with the Electoral College's creation or design, and b) 3/5 of a vote gave less power to slave states than their preference, a full vote for each slave.

>the compromise itself had nothing to do with the Electoral College's creation or design

Then what were they compromising on? The formation and continuation of the US Government. Without the compromise there is no Electoral College.

That's not true at all. The 3/5s compromise affected the resulting balance of power, but the system itself was about preventing any one state from dominating the federal government. (New York was the concern at the time.)

Even if slavery didn't exist, the small state / big state dynamic still required a mechanism to balance the voting power between states. (This is often referred to as the Connecticut compromise.)

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