As unique as Trump’s campaign was, it wasn’t the first election in which white supremacy played a significant role. White dominance is enshrined in the very laws that dictate how elections are run. A handful of constitutional scholars believe the electoral college was established hundreds of years ago in order to protect slavery.

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Writing for PBS, Kamala Kelkar noted: “When the founders of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 considered whether America should let the people elect their president through a popular vote, James Madison [the fourth President of the U.S.A.] said that ‘Negroes’ in the South presented a ‘difficulty … of a serious nature.’ During that same speech on Thursday, July 19, Madison instead proposed a prototype for the same Electoral College system the country uses today.”

Madison owned slaves in Virginia and was concerned that the more populous North would outvote the South, where the economy relied on the labor of 500,000 captive slaves. So in 1787, a provision was added to U.S. Constitution called the “three-fifths clause,” decreeing that black people were worth three-fifths of a person in population and taxation counts. This provision was rolled back in 1856, but the underlying ideology may not have been abolished. Juan F. Perea, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, believes that the Constitution is pro-slavery.

A key legislative gain during the Civil Rights movement — documented in the 2015 film JFK & LBJ: A Time for Greatness — was the ratification of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, protecting the voting rights of nonwhites. But in 2013 the Supreme Court overturned the Voting Rights Act, “freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval.”

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The result? In 2016, a federal judge ruled that North Carolina had imposed voting restrictions that “target African Americans with almost surgical precision,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the panel’s ruling. The Brennan Center for Justice tracked new provisions introduced in 15 states for the 2016 election, suggesting that the new rules are “part of a broader movement to curtail voting rights, which began after the 2010 election, when state lawmakers nationwide started introducing hundreds of harsh measures making it harder to vote.”