Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb traveled over to Comedy Central and The Daily Show on Wednesday to promote his new PBS documentary on the Electoral College. As Donald Trump may win the election despite losing the popular vote, Cobb and weekly host Michael Kosta probably felt it was important to delegitimize such a possible outcome.
Kosta asked, “Why do we have it? What’s one of the big reasons we have it?”
Cobb replied by giving the correct answer, “So, one of the reasons that we have it, a really fundamental reason we have it is to balance out the political power of large states and smaller states.”
However, for Cobb, “that is a generic answer,” because “the real answer is that it was a means by which slaveholders would be able to use the bodies of the people they were holding in slavery to count in the census in order to…
