Democracy is a Math Problem
How Did We Get Here?
It’s been a while since I last posted. And I apologize for this hiatus. It’s not that I had nothing to say. I did and do. But I’ve had the opposite of writer’s block, except coupled with a level of exhaustion that that has drained from me the energy and enthusiasm to write. That’s because we’re way beyond flooding the zone from Trump. We’re in a national nightmare that even Stephen King couldn’t conceive of in his fertile imagination. It’s a feeling, at least for me, of being caught in a room without an exit and the walls are closing in. Any way we turn there’s no escaping Trump. He’s our Golem. A monstrous creature formed from inanimate materials that is brought to life to wreak havoc wherever it goes.
On April 5 we went to the “Hands Off” rally in Chicago with more than 30,000 others. It was nice, and even fun, to hook up with friends and read the posters and march through the Loop chanting. Being there and reading about the hundreds of other like protests around the country and the world momentarily gave me a caffeine boost. But then I started to read Trump’s reactions, including the mind-bending, 25th Amendment crazy post that George Soros paid protesters everywhere $100M each to 5 million actors. I’m not good at math (more on that soon), but it’s like a Gazillion-Trillion! The worst thing about Trump’s post is that some of our best journalists actually fact checked this insanity. So, I have to admit that took some of the wind out of my post-rally sail. It’s a difficult time and I hope you’re all doing well as can be. This will end sometime. No doubt. But when and at what cost? That’s TBD. Hang tough.
Given all of this, I want to change up things a bit and write a different, and not totally original take, on how we got here at this moment in these United Sates of America. It’s a bit long as it takes on a lot of history in a compressed post.
I want to think and write about math problems. Trust me, math isn’t an easy topic for me to think and write about. In fact, early on I struggled with the most basic mathematical concepts. I remember in the first grade we were learning addition and subtraction using picture problems. I was a product of “old math” with its focus on rote memorization for solving problems without really understanding why we were doing what we were doing. The areas in my still forming brain rebelled against “old math” teaching and was active, instead, in speech and word production which, while it produced dismal math scores, allowed me to wander and engage in a little free-thinking and curiosity.
I tell this cautionary tale as I write about math and our democracy. Thankfully, you don’t have to worry about my math skills, which have improved over the years. Instead, I have relied on others to help tell the story of how throughout American history difficult math problems have been solved or reconciled often by bad compromises that have contributed in good and not so good ways to our fragile (some would say, failed) democracy. Much of what I understand about this came from reading Jill Lepore’s These Truths, the best American history I have ever read. Pleeeease read.
So, what does math have to do with democracy in America? Short answer. Everything. For one, there’s the stars and stripes. Every time a new state enters the Union we’ve sewn another star and stripe on to Old Glory. Simple addition. However, before they picked up a needle and thread our forebears struggled mightily to solve a an even more basic - for democracy - math problem.
But first, and foremost, there was the foundational constitutional debate in 1787 taking place, mostly prominently between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, on the seemingly simple question; how do we count? Simple, my eye!
Jefferson feared an all powerful president, while Adams was fine with that because he trembled at the idea of an all too powerful legislature of landed aristocrats. Adams wrote, “In every society where property exists, there will be a struggle between rich and poor. Mixed in one assembly, equal laws can never be expected. They will either be made by numbers, to plunder the few who are rich, or by influence, to fleece the many who are poor.” Jefferson was more of a grand dreamer and shaped by the early ideals of the French Revolution where he was minister, and before the later Reign of Terror. He was less cynical than Adams who grew up in the rough and tumble of Boston and the mercantile northeast. Jefferson believed the new democracy would “shew [sic] by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs and the will of the majority, the Natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man.” Majority will versus a constrained majority. But for all their flowery writing, Lepore writes: “Government by the people and for the people is, in the end, a math problem. Who votes? How much does each vote count?”
Until the constitutional convention in Philadelphia there had never been a method for electing a president. And this is where it got interesting. And fateful to the strength and permanence of democracy and the Union. It was first proposed that the people directly elect the president. Sounds good, right? Majority will. But James Madison, a revered figure in American history with many cities and streets named after him, objected to majority will as counted only by those with the right to vote; white men. It’s not that Madison’s objection was based on a desire to expand suffrage beyond white men. You can bet your powdered wig he wanted no such thing. Instead, Madison argued, “the right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States …. the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”
Having Black slaves do all the difficult, dirty work made unnecessary a white labor force that expected to be paid. And, as a result the white male population of the South was much smaller than in the North. The problem Madison easily recognized was if only the votes of white men were counted, which seemed reasonable since they were the only one’s who could vote, the South “could have no influence in the election.” Talk about hoisted by one’s own petard! But Madison wasn’t easily discouraged. Instead, this math problem was solved by a perverse compromise that protected the white southern man who enslaved millions of “Negroes” to do their work at the taste of the lash so they could rest in the shade of their plantation verandas sipping mint juleps. Doing the math, the North had more white men than the South, and counting only enfranchised white men wouldn’t be fair, and the idea of majority will in the convention lost 12 states to 1.
The compromise finally reached was, you guessed it; the Electoral College. But this, too, was a math problem that needed to be solved while protecting white male southerners. How were the electors from each state to be elected? Our glorified Founding Fathers settled on the devil’s compromise, that perpetuated America’s unrepaired original sin until today. The Three-Fifths Compromise. The number of a state’s electoral delegates was based was based on their representation in the House. Every ten years the Constitution called for a national census to count in each state the number of “free persons” and “all other persons” (excluding “Indians not taxed”) which determined the number of representatives in the House, a ratio first set at one for every 40,000 people. The first census in 1790 came up with 3.9 million people, including 700,000 slaves who were counted for the census at a ratio of three out of every five slaves, thereby padding the southern states’ House representation and electoral numbers in a way that some would say is, well, unfair.
This compromise was from the start a terrible and immoral deal and one that has plagued America to date. It gave the the slave states a huge advantage by including the number of slaves in determining the number of electors in the Electoral College, while denying those same persons any right to vote. Madison claimed a direct election was unfair, but managed to usher in the first of many gerrymandered voting schemes that since 1787 have continued to disenfranchise Blacks even after their constitutional enfranchisement in 1868 with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment which gave the right to vote to “whole persons.” Women and Native Americans would still have to wait to become a “whole person” until 1920 and 1924, respectively.
As an immediate result, the devil’s math worked beautifully for the South. For example, Pennsylvania and Virginia had roughly the same number of free persons, but because of the compromise Virginia was constitutionally permitted to count its population of chained persons entitling them to three more House representatives and three more delegates to the Electoral College. Doing the math, four of the first five presidents were from slave owning Virginia. John Adams was the only northern exception, and while Washington was a Virginian his terms were not contested and soiled by the compromise.
Eventually, and after a bloody Civil War, the Constitution changed its math rules in 1868, which during Reconstruction allowed South Carolina, and the first state to secede, to elect the only majority Black legislature. The individual states since then have managed to get around the pesky math problem of allowing all persons to vote under the Constitution under the guise of and protection of another constitutional compromise. The Framers wrote into the Constitution Article I, Section 4, Clause 1:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
The Elections Clause ceded to the states the time, places and manner for holding Congressional elections with the supposed guardrail that Congress can step in and “alter” by legislation the offending state rules. This last part critically takes away from the courts the role of referee over the states’s election rules unless they violate another constitutional provision. This all sounds benign and perfectly reasonable until you solve for the math problem which includes a bit of geographical geometry and also begins with the letter “G” for gerrymandering.1
“Gerrymandering describes the intentional manipulation of district boundaries to discriminate against a group of voters on the basis of their political views or race.”2 Gerrymandering generally happens after the latest census has been completed and the once every 10-year redistricting occurs and congressional districts are redrawn often into truly bizarre shapes like jigsaw puzzle pieces. It’s been going on a long time.
The Brennan Center wrote, “Gerrymandering is a political tactic nearly as old as the United States. In designing Virginia’s very first congressional map, Patrick Henry attempted to draw district boundaries that would block his rival, James Madison, from winning a seat.” Later, in 1812 Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed into law a redistricting plan that included a district that looked like a salamander.3 This was contrary to John Adams’ view that redistricting was to ensure the new map would be an “exact portrait, a miniature” of the people as a whole. These are old examples of partisan gerrymandering by redistricting boundaries to ensure a grip on an incumbent’s and a party’s political power. While undemocratic, partisan gerrymandering is not illegal. However, gerrymandering based on race is illegal and has had a long wake of discriminatorily disenfranchising millions of Black voters since Reconstruction.
During Reconstruction, which lasted from 1865 to 18774, Congress passed the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The 15th Amendment ratified in 1870 barred states from depriving citizens of the right to vote based on race. As a result, more than a half million Black men voted throughout the South to elect around 2,000 Black men to public office. With the end of Reconstruction southern states enacted laws that bypassed the 15th Amendment and suppressed Black votes while pretending to be race neutral.
Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of I877, an agreement that resolved the presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel L. Tilden where neither candidate won enough electoral votes. After an Electoral Commission awarded all the disputed votes to Hayes there was fear of violence in the South challenging the legitimacy of Hayes as president. In exchange for removing all of the Federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction, southern politicians agreed to end their challenges to Hayes and the potential for political violence. Sound familiar? Again, compromise that ushered in a post-Reconstruction era of violence and disenfranchisement against Blacks represented the seemingly irrevocable reestablishment of white supremacy a few years after the end of the Civil War that killed more than 700,000 Americans, or the equivalent of 7,000,000 deaths today. Their lives were lost in vain as white southerners freed from Federal control murderously engaged in a reign of racial terror and legal disenfranchisement that lasted nearly a century.
Thomas Rice was a popular comic entertainer in the mid-1800s who dressed in blackface as a minstrel that mocked Black slaves. The character’s name was Jim Crow. How that moniker became the shorthand for the laws and era that led to Black disenfranchisement in southern states is not completely understood. But Jim Crow heralded in state voting laws requiring poll taxes, literacy tests, and all white primaries, all designed to prevent Black men from voting. The southern politicians who pressed for these laws did not hide from the real intent of Jim Crow.
Before the 1890 Mississippi state convention that codified voter suppression based on race, James Vardaman, who would later became governor, said: “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro. . . . When that device fails, we will resort to something else.” The impact of Jim Crow was soon obvious as by 1898 in Mississippi, Black voter participation dropped to 2%.5 Jim Crow was and would remain the law of the land for nearly a century until it was banished with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
Congress finally became activated to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after the violence by Alabama state troopers against peaceful Black and White marchers at the Edmund Pettis Bridge into Selma in March 1964. More than a year later, and after months of legislative debates, the bill passed the last hurdle on August 4, 1965 with Senate approval. President Johnson signed it into law the Act on August 6 thereby finally providing for enforcement of the 15th Amendment 95 years after its ratification.
Section 2, which tracked the 15th Amendment prohibited states and their political subdivisions from imposing or applying qualifications, standards, practices, or procedures to deny or interfere with the right to vote on account of race or color. Section 4 established a formula by which specific states and counties were “covered” and subject to federal oversight based on the a state or county’s registration and voting statistics where literacy tests, or a similar “test or device,” was used as a prerequisite to voting; ie. good moral character, knowledge of any particular subject. Initially, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and 39 counties in North Carolina, Arizona and Hawaii were “covered” jurisdictions.6
Importantly, Section 5 of the Act required covered jurisdictions to obtain "preclearance" from either the District Court for the District of Columbia or the U.S. Attorney General for any new voting practices and procedures that might be discriminatory based on race. In the first decade of the 21st Century most voting changes were submitted for review to the Attorney General, who received 14,000 to 24,000 submissions of voting changes per year.7 The Act was initially set to expire after five years but has been reauthorized and amended five times. The impact of the Act on registration and voting was immediate. By the end of 1965 a quarter of a million new Black voters had been registered, one-third by federal examiners. By the end of 1966, only four out of 13 southern states had fewer than 50 percent of African Americans registered to vote.8
From its inception there were lawsuits seeking to overturn or otherwise challenge the Act’s provisions, particularly the preclearance requirement where the challengers often argued that their new practice was race neutral. Nonetheless, “[b]etween 1965 and 1969, the Supreme Court issued several key decisions upholding the constitutionality of Section 5 and affirming the broad range of voting practices for which preclearance was required. [See South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 327-28 (1966) and Allen v. State Board of Elections, 393 U.S. 544 (1969)].”9 Jim Crow was dead and the right of Black Americans to vote free from terror and illegal voting practices was a thing of the horrible past. Or so it seemed.
In Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder the suit challenged the constitutionality of the Sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act arguing that the preclearance formula for covered jurisdictions no longer applied because it was based on outdated voting statistics that evidenced long ago discriminatory voting practices and, thereby, deprived the then covered jurisdictions of equal sovereignty under the law because the 2006 reauthorization of the Act was based on 40 year old voting statistics. On June 25, 2013, in a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court agreed and found unconstitutional Section 4 which made unenforceable Section 5 banning Jim Crow-like voting practices.
In what should have been an obvious nod to the success and import of Section 4, the Court majority authored by Chief Justice Roberts claimed that there is no longer a need for preclearance because unlawful voting practices no longer existed. This should have emitted a collective, DUH! because preclearance made it difficult to next to impossible to enact discriminatory voting practices. Instead, Roberts acted like years of preclearance magically cured the covered jurisdictions and their politicians of more than a hundred years of racist discriminatory voting practices to suppress the Black vote. Generations of racist politicians were no longer. But if they were not so cured of the malignancy of white supremacy, there was not a damn thing the federal courts could do to restore the voting protections secured under the Voting Rights Act.
The impact of the decision should have been obvious, even to the fantastical legal mind of John Roberts. According to The Brennan Center :
“Since Shelby County was decided, at least 29 states have passed 94 restrictive voting laws. While a few of these have been blocked by courts or repealed, most are still in effect, and at least one continues to operate in each of the 29 states. …… The restrictive laws passed in the last 10 years target every aspect of voting, including making voter registration more difficult, curtailing early voting opportunities, closing polling places, and limiting voter assistance.”10
According to The Brennan Center, “Apart from 2018, the white-Black turnout gap increased each year from 2012 through 2022. During last year’s election, the white-Black gap was 9 points — triple the size of the gap only a decade ago. Put differently, some 90,000 more Black voters would have participated in Alabama last year if Black turnout had reached parity with white turnout.”11
Democracy is indeed a math problem that doesn’t follow the normal rules that dictate the order of operations in mathematical expressions. Instead, since the founding days math problems concerning how best to effectuate our democratic republic have been solved by compromise and legal obfuscation designed to ensure the continued empowerment of white supremacy, and mostly white male supremacy.
In a powerful Substack posted on April 9, 2025, Heather Cox Richardson chronicled a brief history of the perversion of the declaration that “All men are created equal.” She argued that southern politicians hated this founding idea written no less than by a southerner, Thomas Jefferson, along with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Instead, as the slaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857: “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” To slavers like Fitzhugh, in solving for another math problem of 1,200 white persons governing 18,000 in his Virginia county, “But we twelve hundred … never asked and never intend to ask the consent” of the thousands they governed.
On another April 9, 165 years earlier, Richardson wrote that General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S.Grant at Appomattox ending the Civil War. Instead of arresting Lee and his officers as traitors, trying them and likely hanging them, Lincoln and Grant were so confident in the justice of their military victory that the rebels and their leaders were allowed to leave iwith their horses and sidearms. Never, they believed, would Americans again rise up in arms against the United States. Peace, democracy and comity would reign forever and ever.
Lincoln and Grant made the mistake of believing that reestablishing the Union by force of a larger and more powerful army, and at the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands men and boys, would solve the unsolvable. To those who have listened to my rants before Substack, I’ve argued that Lincoln should never have fought the war. Instead, he should have let the southern states secede. Possibly, he could have embargoed the South to economic death while arming the millions of slaves to rise up in rebellion which might have ended white supremacy then and there forever. But it is now more than ever clear that the union of our disparate states is a failed project that has never embraced the ideals that all people are created equal.
It may be time, especially now, to rethink the commitment to this dysfunctional union. More on that in following posts.
There are many more seemingly benign election laws intended as obstacles to voting and would require an entire book, or at least a law review article, to thoroughly discuss and are far too many for even a mention in this footnote. Thankfully, the Brennan Center For Justice has compiled a ballotography of ballot initiatives, both good and bad, that is worth reading. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-september-2024. My new favorite baddy is the ban in places like Georgia of giving water and snacks to voters standing in long lines, known as “line warming” bans. This particular piece of Elections Clause democracy was immortalized in the last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm when hapless but kind Larry was arrested for giving water to a voter standing in the heat of a long Georgia voting line. Funny, not funny. In real life, these laws are directed at minority voters who because of another bit of devilmaking have limited places to cast their ballots which cause long, long lines.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerrymandering-explained.
The term “gerry-mander” was a portmanteau of Governor Elbridge Gerry and the salamander shape of the district. It failed in this case as Madison won. https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/what-we-know-about-redistricting-and-redistricting-reform/where-we-have-been-the-history-of-gerrymandering-in-america.
Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of I877, an agreement that resolved the presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel L. Tilden where neither candidate won enough electoral votes. After an Electoral Commission awarded all the disputed votes to Hayes there was fear of violence in the South challenging the legitimacy of Hayes as president. In exchange for removing all of the Federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction, southern politicians agreed to end their challenges to Hayes and the potential for political violence. sound familiar?
https://www.history.com/articles/jim-crow-laws-black-vote.
By 2013 the “covered” jurisdictions were nine states were wholly covered (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) and six more were covered in part (California, Florida, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, and South Dakota). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R43626.
Id.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/voting-rights-act
Id.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/states-have-added-nearly-100-restrictive-laws-scotus-gutted-voting-rights.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/10-years-after-scotus-gutted-voting-rights-act-alabama-turnout-gap-worse.