If the Electoral College is a racist relic, why has it endured?

The one constant in the history of voting rights in America, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Alex Keyssar says, is that no law has ever been passed to restrict the voting rights of upper-middle-class white men. Other than that, he says, the history of access to suffrage has been a very mixed bag. This November, issues of voter disenfranchisement will once again occupy center stage: including voter list purges, attacks on voting by mail, and physical barriers to the polls, ones both man-made and pandemic-related. And looming over it all is the 230-year-old institution of the Electoral College. The title of Professor Keyssar’s new book asks the obvious question: “Why Do We Still Have an Electoral College?” The answer, he says, is complex — a mix of partisan politics, constitutional law, and structural racism.