A law school professor called for “vote reparations” for black people to make elections fairer by giving them twice the voting power of other citizens.
“Vote reparations would empower us to replace oppressive institutions with life-affirming structures of economic, social, and political equality,” Brandon Hasbrouck, an assistant professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, wrote in the Nation last week. “And if our elected representatives did not prioritize this transformational work, we could vote them out.”
Hasbrouck, who teaches race relations law and a class on critical race theory, argued that the “core problem” of the United States’s election system is the Electoral College. The professor pointed out that Wyoming and its 580,000 residents are 93% white, but the state gets “three electors because of its two senators and one representative in the House.”
“By comparison, Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District — which includes Atlanta, has 710,000 residents, and is 58 percent Black — has no dedicated electors or senators and can only occasionally overcome the mostly white and conservative votes from elsewhere in the state,” Hasbrouck wrote.
The professor argued the current system devalues black voters and ignores black lives but that it was done this way “by design” to allow for the “endurance of slavery” by the Constitution’s framers.
Hasbrouck said the way to remedy this injustice is with “vote reparations,” which would work “by double-counting ballots cast by all Black residents.”
“Vote reparations should also extend to Native Americans,” Hasbrouck continued. “Slavery is rightly called America’s original sin, but so too was the United States’ genocidal seizure of land from its original inhabitants.”
Hasbrouck said the goal of vote reparations would be to create institutions with “life-affirming structures of economic, social, and political equality,” and he added that politicians who “did not prioritize this transformational work” could more easily be voted out of office.
“Because white votes currently count more than Black ones, double-counting Black votes would restore electoral balance,” Hasbrouck said. “Vote reparations would be a giant step toward remedying our nation’s long history of denying and devaluing Black votes.”
He added: “Even if vote reparations aren’t instituted, Black voters will keep tirelessly dragging our states toward a more perfect union. But just imagine our country if our votes counted twice.”
Washington and Lee University told the Washington Examiner of the post: “Washington and Lee’s faculty are individuals who hold and express a variety of opinions, and the university is committed to upholding their right to freedom of expression. Professor Hasbrouck’s piece on voting reparations in The Nation was published as part of ‘The Argument,’ which the publication identifies as ‘a column where writers and thinkers propose a provocative idea that may not be politically realizable in the short term but that pushes one to think broader about a pressing issue of public importance.'”
Hasbrouck did not immediately respond to a Washington Examiner request for comment on the article.
