Ben Jacobs’s article on the US electoral college misses the point entirely about its founding and its profoundly undemocratic nature (How does the electoral college vote work – and can it stop Trump?, theguardian.com, 18 December). The electoral college originated at the 1787 constitutional convention, a time when only some white men could vote. In a direct popular election, the northern states would have outnumbered the southern slave-holding states, whose slaves could not vote. However, a compromise allowed the southern states to count each of their non-voting slaves as three-fifths of a person in order to increase the number of their electors. The more slaves, the more electors. After the civil war, the freed slaves won the right to vote through the 15th constitutional amendment.

The electoral college should have been disbanded at this time. Instead, white southerners imposed local and state barriers impeding African Americans from voting. The 1965 Voting Rights Act overturned those barriers, but the act was gutted in 2013. Unsurprisingly, the 2016 presidential election was characterised by heavy voter suppression. It is the second time in 16 years that the popular presidential vote has been ignored. The electoral college should be abolished and the Voting Rights Act reinstated, but achieving this in a country where many democratic institutions have been badly eroded will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. To describe the electoral college as “wacky” and “unique, albeit convoluted” is to trivialise the profound lack of democracy in the US and the heavy costs that democratic activists will bear.

Allison Drew

Honorary professor, University of Cape Town; professor emerita, University of York

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