Back in the day when the 13 colonies were being cobbled together into the United States a strange issue of slavery became an overriding issue for the Southern States. The population growth was in the New England States down through New York and the Southern States were fearful that they would be outvoted on the issue of slavery which was the backbone of their economy. The compromise that settled the issue was the called the 3/5 rule.
Article one, section two of the Constitution of the United States declared that any person who was not free would be counted as three-fifths of a free individual for the purposes of determining congressional representation. The “Three-Fifths Clause” thus increased the political power of slaveholding states. Just as today electors in total represent the representatives in the House and the Senators. Today that is 538 with Washington, D.C.’s, three electors included in the total. The total electors are then apportioned among the states according to their population.
In the beginning for population count threefifths of the slave population was counted in the total, even though they had no citizenship rights but were included as owned assets just like cattle today. This allowed the South, primarily Virginia, to dominate the early selections of the Presidency and protect slavery up to the Civil War. Afterward, Jim Crow laws, enacted across South allowed black citizens to be included in census counts but kept from the voting booth.
