In his rebuttal letter of Jan. 29 regarding my urging eliminating the Electoral College, in part on the basis of its racial legacy, Robert Casimiro wrote: [in the formation of the Electoral College] “There was no mention of slavery, as asserted by the writer…”

Yet there was de facto if not overt discussion of it, as detailed in The Atlantic, Nov. 19, 2019, and the list is long of distinguished figures — including James Madison — who can be quoted from on this subject. From The Atlantic:

“Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost …”

And regarding Mr. Casimiro’s argument that small states like Maine would have small say in presidential elections if a popular vote was embraced, I defer to Maine’s Sen. Edmund Muskie (this from the Congressional Record of Feb. 25, 1969):

“There are those who say, well, we ought to preserve the electoral [college] even though we don’t preserve the Presidential electors in order to preserve the integrity of the state. To that, may I say that the election of the President is the election of the President of all the states of the country and not the President of any particular state.

As a matter of fact, under the present system, the small states have less influence than they would have under a direct election system.”

Paul Baribault, Lewiston