The Three-fifths compromise was designed to block northern majorities

Evidence

To protect slavery, Southerners fought for and won several provisions that all but ensured that majoritarian rule over the South would be impossible. On May 29, 1787, Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia rose and proposed that congressional representation be based on population and not the one-vote-per-state rule that had governed the Articles of Confederation. Northern and Southern delegates debated whether Black enslaved people should count toward a state’s population, until the so-called Great Compromise was proposed in July. Congress would be divided into two houses, a lower house based on population—with each enslaved Black person counting as three-fifths of a citizen—and an upper house that gave all states an equal number of votes. The Southern advantage conferred by the Three-fifths Clause was extended to the executive branch through the Electoral College, proposed by Madison, which provided each state a number of electors that aligned with its representation in the lower house of Congress. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 537

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing interest in the Wilentz letter dispute — the specific claims about the Three-fifths Clause and Electoral College are exactly the contested empirics historians argue over, distinct from the broader reframing thesis.
• SEED: The structural claim that the Electoral College exists partly to protect slavery is an angle for a piece on how origin-design choices persist in present institutions regardless of intent.