Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice president, recently said that he thinks that the Electoral College “needs to go” and that the president should be chosen by a national popular vote.

Walz quickly backtracked, but there’s been a decades-long drumbeat against the Electoral College. My esteemed colleague, Advance Executive Editor Brian Laline, laid out the anti-Electoral College case last week.

The chatter always amps up when a Republican wins the White House via the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, as we saw in 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

One of the shibboleths of the anti-Electoral College argument is that the institution was created solely out of racism and to boost slaveholders in the South.

That’s due to the notorious “Three-Fifths Clause,” which for purposes of congressional apportionment counted each of the enslaved as three-fifths of a person.

That did benefit the Southern states, who gained more representation in Congress and more pull in the Electoral College, the votes of which........

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