America’s undemocratic way of electing their president

The math of fair elections is pretty simple: every vote has equal weight and the candidate with the most number of votes wins. Anyone who has experienced elections of any kind – whether it’s for school council, team captain, or a nation’s president – knows the popular vote is a basic element of democracy.

Yet anyone who has been following the election process in the United States these past few months knows that’s not how it works in America.

US voters elect their president and vice president through a process enshrined in their Constitution called the Electoral College. It’s a system that has enabled candidates to win the presidency while losing the popular vote. That’s happened twice in the last five US presidential elections, including the one that put Donald Trump in the White House in 2017 despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes. (The college in Electoral College, by the way, has nothing to do with education and refers to an organized body of colleagues.)

It’s the primary reason for the lede in a recent Vox article: “One of the biggest problems with American democracy is that it’s not democratic.”

The Electoral College is why Trump and his Democratic opponent Joseph Biden focused in their last days of campaigning on only a few states – Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, among them – while virtually ignoring California, which has by far the most number of registered voters. That is why their campaign issues and promises are often relevant only to certain states, such as the fixation in one of the presidential debates on fracking, or shale gas drilling, which is probably really important only to people dependent on that industry in western Pennsylvania.

The Electoral College is such a mind-bogglingly unfair and complicated system that no one envies the usual US diplomats who must try to explain this to outsiders every four years. It’s hard to find a good argument in favor of it, yet there’s been little effort in over 230 years to change it.

The Electoral College basically works like this: the political party that garners the most votes in a presidential election in each state gets to choose the state’s electors who will actually be the ones to cast the votes that determine the president and vice president.

The number of electors in each state generally equals the number of its representatives and senators in Congress. In general, the state electors are all foregone votes for the winner of the state’s popular vote – a winner-take-all rule that has exasperated electoral reform advocates for generations.

Haven’t gotten lost yet?

In other words, the popular vote could be really close in a state, say in Florida where it’s usually close, but the eventual winner will harvest all of the electoral college votes in that state no matter how close the outcome was of the state’s popular vote. That is how a candidate like Trump could lose big in vote-rich states like California and New York, traditionally Democratic or “blue” states, while winning the election by capturing the electoral votes in midsize states like Wisconsin and Ohio.

Hence, the candidates concentrate their time and resources on the so-called “swing” or “battleground” states where the vote plurality outcome could go either way.

Through a tactical targeting of swing states, Trump was able to cobble together a combination of electoral college votes that enabled him to defeat Clinton in 2016, despite Clinton’s resounding victory in the popular vote.

That is all counterintuitive for those of us accustomed to a simpler arithmetic of elections: if you win the popular vote, then you should win the election. That’s how it’s done in the Philippines and nearly everywhere else that has elections.

Tellingly, under the tutelage of US colonial authorities, Filipinos did not adopt anything as labyrinthine in the 1935 Constitution, which established modern presidential elections in the Philippines. It was direct election by popular vote then as it is today.

Throughout US history, there’s been a persistent American discomfort with the Electoral College system, and not only because it is patently undemocratic and puts disproportionate power in states with smaller populations.

An original intent of the Electoral College system, according to the book “Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College” by Jesse Wegman of the New York Times, was to protect slavery and the power of slave-owning states.

In framing the 1789 US Constitution, the US founding fathers had exhaustive discussions on how to elect the new country’s leaders. They did consider the simpler concept of a popular vote, but the slave-owning states wouldn’t accept it.

In the end, the framers opted to create the Electoral College in which the number of state electors would reflect state populations that included slaves who could not vote. In other words, the slaves in mostly southern states helped inflate the power of slave-owning states to choose the country’s leader. An election based on the popular vote, on the other hand, would tilt the balance towards the northern states that had more voters and few or no slaves.

With the end of slavery, and people of color empowered to vote, that primal rationale has long been invalidated. But another antiquated notion underlying the Electoral College persists: the majority of voters can’t be trusted with choosing a good president, and thus the need for a body of wise citizens comprising the Electoral College to serve as some kind of “firewall” against the rise to power of an unfit president.

The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency by virtue of the Electoral College has raised doubts about the wisdom of that argument, to put it mildly.

His victory in 2016 despite losing in the popular vote has, in fact, strengthened the firewall against abolishing the Electoral College. While many discerning Americans realize the undemocratic nature of this key feature of their elections, senators from the two major political parties have resisted efforts to abolish it and replace it with the popular vote, since the Electoral College gives certain states outsize political influence.

In recent years, the Electoral College has been seen as benefiting Republicans more, the clear evidence being two Republicans becoming president despite losing the popular vote, the other being George W. Bush in 2000.

In this pandemic election, the candidate advocating masks, Joseph Biden, is predicted to win both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote.

If Donald Trump somehow repeats his 2016 feat of overcoming defeat in the popular vote with a shocking victory in the Electoral College, that will only add fuel to the argument for abolishing it. And that would be matched by a Republican defense of how great the system is.