Professor calls for African-Americans' votes to be counted twice

An assistant professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia published an article in The Nation on Thursday calling for the votes of African-Americans to be counted twice as "a simple, low-cost way to begin to make amends" to achieve "a racially just society."

"The Constitution’s framers set up the Electoral College to protect the interests of slave states," writes assistant Law professor Brandon Hasbrouck. "Abolishing this system would mean that ballots cast by Black voters—or any voters, for that matter—would count the same."

The electoral college is designed to protect smaller states from larger states at the federal level. Each state in the United States is allotted an electoral college vote equivalent to the number of senators the state has, which is two across the board, plus the number of congressional districts in the state, which are largely distributed by population.

Such a system prevents what John Stuart Mill termed the "tyranny of the majority," whereby less populated areas of a nation are forced to comply with the wishes of the most populated parts of the nation, which may not have the interests of less populated areas in mind. Small states, both free and slave, benefited from this system since the early days of the republic.

Throughout most of American history, Hasbrouck writes, the majority of the country's black population was disenfranchised, first by a constitutional limit of the franchise to white people only, and later by Jim Crow laws in the South which allowed the majority white population to suppress the vote of the black population. During much of the 20th century, the nation's African-American population has moved into major urban centres in what historians have termed "the Great Northward Migration." As a result, African-Americans primarily reside in large states which are disadvantaged by the Electoral College today.

According to Hasbrouck, this leads to a system where "white votes currently count more than Black ones." He does not mention that the votes of white people living in these states also count less than the votes of white people living in other states, nor does he mention that the votes of black people in Wyoming, the state where a single vote is worth the most in the Electoral College, are worth just the same as their white counterparts in the state. He also does not mention that seven of the ten states with the highest proportion of the population being black are overrepresented in the Electoral College.

Hasbrouck bills his proposal as both an alternative to monetary reparations, which he describes as impractical, and to abolishing the Electoral College. "Vote reparations would create possibilities to build what W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy,” or the practice of achieving a racially just society," he writes. According to Hasbrouck, "[vote] reparations would empower us to replace oppressive institutions with life-affirming structures of economic, social, and political equality. And if our elected representatives did not prioritize this transformational work, we could vote them out."

"Because white votes currently count more than Black ones, double-counting Black votes would restore electoral balance," Hasbrouck asserts. Hasbrouck does not offer any mathematical basis for this conclusion, nor does he address how responding to historical disenfranchisement with modern disenfranchisement would quell racial tension.

Hasbrouck does not stop with advocating that the votes of African-Americans be counted twice, arguing "we should include in vote reparations others who have suffered similar disenfranchisement," specifically Native Americans.

Hasbrouck finishes his article by telling the reader to "just imagine our country if our votes counted twice."