Article on "hidden majorities" of women and minorities

Here's an article on "hidden majorities" of women and minorities that brings up the constitution's 3/5's compromise. The author here doesn't explicitly get the point of the compromise wrong but the way she brings it up kind of hints to me that she's the type who would get it wrong. And since it's a huge pet peeve of mine, I'm going to explain it here.

So often people bring up the 3/5's compromise as a sign of how awful our founding fathers were. "Look," these types of people say, "they were such racists that they codified into law that black people were only worth 3/5's of a white man!"

This gets the point of the compromise precisely backwards. Setting aside the fact that the constitution quite purposefully never mentions race, the argument was about how much slaves would count when apportioning representation. That is, the constitution establishes that we will have a census and that our representatives in the House of Representatives will be apportioned among the states based on their share of population.

(At least that's how it is now. Originally, of course, the plan was to just add more Reps for new population, keeping the ratio of people-to-Rep constant at around 30,000. Now, the number of Reps is fixed at 435 and only the apportionment between states is adjusted to match population shifts.)

So given that you were going to be doling out Representatives based on population, you are naturally going to have more power going to states with higher populations. So how should slaves count? Under the deluded "How racist it is not to count them as full people!" argument, you would count them as one each. But given that they are owned by other people, all you are doing is increasing the power of the slave-holders. If you count them as less than one per slave, you are decreasing that power.

This is why it was the anti-slave Northern states that were arguing for not counting slaves at all -- not because they thought slaves weren't people but because they didn't want to give all that power to the slaveholders that they opposed. On the other side, you had the slave-holding states arguing that slaves should count as full people -- not because they thought of slaves as their equals but because they wanted more power. Thus the 3/5's compromise. The reason they were counted as less than a full person was due to the anti-slavery side.

God how I wish people would get this straight. Getting it wrong betrays not only an utter lack of knowledge about the constitutional creation process but also a pretty shaky grasp of the logic of political representation.

After bringing up the 3/5's compromise, the author goes on to say this:

Women were counted as zero-fifths -- at least symbolically -- unable to vote nationwide until 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment, behind Australia
and Canada and lots of other countries.

This is just plain idiotic. Slaves weren't allowed to vote either so by this logic the 3/5's compromise was really a 0/5's compromise! Yeah! Oh wait, no. This is just the author trying to be a little more clever than she is apparently capable of being.

I also don't particularly like the snide naming of a couple of countries and the "lots of other countries" that beat us to women's suffrage. Why not point out that "lots of other countries" still don't allow women to vote? Or have other basic rights? Or you could point out that Canada is currently engaged in a debate over whether they should have the right to free speech, a right that, if you lack it, makes voting largely irrelevant.

Yes we were slower to the punch on women's suffrage than some and eons ahead of most of the globe on that and so many other issues. It's a shame we weren't born perfect but then nobody is.