Akhil Reed Amar, teaching Yale's America's Written Constitution course, argues that the usual explanations for the Electoral College, framer distrust of democracy or a large-state/small-state compromise, miss the real driver: slavery and the Three-Fifths Clause, which let Virginia outvote a more populous Pennsylvania. He first reads Article II's eligibility rules as surprisingly democratic, noting no property qualification and no religious test at a time when most state constitutions had both, and traces the natural-born citizen clause to fears of a foreign aristocrat buying the presidency rather than hostility to immigrants, citing seven foreign-born framers and a third of the early Supreme Court. The age-35 rule gets read as an anti-dynastic guard, modeled against Britain's William Pitt the Younger. The lecture closes with a close reading of the 1796 Washington family portrait, finding Article II's themes in the uniform, the globe, and the enslaved Billy Lee standing beside the frame.