The Electoral College Is Not “Anti-Democratic”
Maybe you don’t like the Electoral College, which is the system that the United States has used since 1788 to select its chief executive. That’s fine. But to say “I dislike this system” shouldn’t be the same as saying “This system is anti-democratic.” A system is not anti-democratic because it happened to produce an outcome that you dislike this time around.
Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 with just 43% of the popular vote. Was he therefore ushered into office on a wave of “un-democratic” treachery? No, he was the victor in a democratic electoral process, where the national popular vote is not the determinant of the outcome.
Apparently lots of people skipped social studies class, so let’s review. The United States does not run a national popular vote contest. If it did, its presidential campaigns would be conducted exceedingly differently. Instead, because the United States is a federal republic, it holds 51 separate elections on the same day, per a compact between the states and Washington, DC. The day is prescribed by the Constitution: the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Other than that requirement, basically everything is left up to the states. Some states allow robust early voting (North Carolina, Florida); some states do not (Pennsylvania, New Hampshire). Some states vote entirely by mail (Oregon). Some states take absolutely forever to count votes because their county election systems make no sense (California).
When you’re tallying up official election results, you’re not going to a federal government database. You’re going to a state government database: these results are tabulated by town clerks and county clerks (the titles vary across the country) who then report them to the state Secretary of State. That’s why you go to a state website to view the results.
Electors are chosen by popular vote in every state/district but two, Nebraska and Maine. In Nebraska and Maine, electors are allocated by popular vote in each congressional district, in addition to the overall statewide popular vote. That’s relevant this year because Trump won Maine’s second congressional district, which entitles him to one additional electoral vote. (Likewise, Obama won the second congressional district of Nebraska in 2008, allotting him one additional electoral vote.) That Maine and Nebraska award their electoral votes this way is because of action taken by the Maine and Nebraska state legislatures, which govern their presidential election electoral-vote allocation procedures. (This year is the first time in history that Maine has split its electoral votes.) Maine and Nebraska didn’t have to seek approval from the federal government to construct their rules as such.
This is the system that the country has used for hundreds of years. You may not like it. But don’t say it’s “anti-democratic.” An “anti-democratic” system is a system where the popular will has no bearing whatever on how citizens are ruled. Countries where this could be said to be the case include North Korea and Saudi Arabia. In those countries, “anti-democratic” means the people are not consulted at all in determining how they are governed. In the United States, we have 51 popular vote contests to determine which candidate is awarded electors, and then the person with the majority of electors becomes president. Is that “anti-democratic”? No. Maybe it’s a bit arcane. But it’s not “anti-democratic” because you don’t like it.
Is the United Kingdom also a fundamentally “anti-democratic” nation? In 2015, the Conservative Party won a decisive victory and a commanding majority in Parliament despite garnering only 36.9% of the popular vote. That’s because the UK doesn’t hold a single nationwide popular vote contest to determine who becomes its prime minister. It holds 650 elections in each of its parliamentary constituencies, the outcomes of which determine the composition of Parliament, and then the governing party internally selects its prime minister. Arcane system? Maybe. (There have been moves to reform it.) But “anti-democratic”? No.
I continue to think that the Democrats would have been better off if Hillary just lost the popular vote, because they’ll continue to cling to that hollow victory as somehow evidence that they don’t need to reform. They may have lost almost half of union voters, they may have completely ceded the rural vote to Trump, and they may be mired in their self-congratulatory, self-destructive pathologies, but because they won the national popular vote, they’ll take this as proof that they really “won” overall. They didn’t. They lost. Badly. Get over it.
