When the United States was in its infancy, the men who wrote the Constitution had to put enough political sausage into it to gain support from all 13 former colonies, each of which thought itself a new country. To appease Southern states, black slaves were included in the census, but to placate Northern free states, those slaves were counted as fractions of people.
To gain buy-in from the less populous states, the Founding Founders invented the electoral college, a poison pill for direct democracy that to this very day tortures our nation.
