And NOWADAYS, the Electoral College heavily favors states with high prison populations for exactly the same reasons.
This is literally why the 3/5ths compromise was created.
Well, this and seats in Congress. Yes.
I’m trying to figure out how to check the second part of this premise. I guess I gotta look at prison populations by state and then cross check to electoral seats.
That prison is used as a way to disenfranchise people of color is a fact, but I had thought that because seats were awarded based on population, more densely populated states, tending to be more urban, tend to be more Democratic. And I had figured that prison populations tended to follow the general population numbers. Time to research.
shit, so much math…I got a list of incarceration per population and a list of electoral seats. I think where I’m getting lost is the proportion of seats per population, which is what I need to compare incarceration rates against.
Yeah, I’m not seeing much correlation between rate of incarceration and proportion of electoral seats. But maybe I’m missing the point somewhere?
Within states of high incarceration, prisoners count as part of the population(and thus, more electoral points for that state) but CAN NOT VOTE, thus the power of all the other votes is raised.
oh, now I see what I missed in the comparison. Effectively white voters count more in high incarceration states. The proportion of electoral seats is already odd depending on population and further skewed by voter disenfranchisement compounded by disproportionately incarcerating people of color. It’s not so much an issue of how the electoral seats are awarded on the federal level (which is what I was thinking about) but how voter disenfranchisement by states affects federal level elections.
So Alabama, with its high incarceration rate, although it looks on the electoral map to be fairly balanced, is actually very imbalanced because the number of people eligible to vote doesn’t match the population number that determined the number of electoral seats.
Exactly, yes. The point distribution by population looks…ok (smaller states do get more points proportionally) but voter disenfranchisement through incarceration and other means can skew that really badly within a state (like slavery did with the 3/5 compromise.)
I knew all these facts individually – the 3/5 compromise, electoral college votes determined by population, people convicted of felonies lose voting rights, black people are imprisoned at a higher rate than whites – but I never put all those together to realize what they meant.
ugh 