Democracy in America? — How Do You Win an Election?
The 2016 American Presidential Election was a close one, but not extraordinarily so. Nearly 3 million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump, making up around 2% of voters. It probably isn’t a shocking revelation to anyone, but rather than 4 more years of the Clinton family in the white house, Americans got four years of the objectively less popular presidential candidate.
It is a well-known fact — though it still bears repeating — that the candidate who gets the most votes doesn’t necessarily win. That is how half the presidents I have lived under first came into office. To put it a bit less dramatically, two of the last six presidential elections have been won by the person that got the second-most votes, and the same has happened three other times throughout history. This is simply the definition of undemocratic, and it is enabled by the winner-take-all system that most state elections use, where the entirety of the electoral votes from the states — the votes that actually determine the winner of the election — go to the winner of that state, even if they only won by a slim margin. Furthermore, a state’s electoral votes are not even proportional to its population. Electoral votes are granted based on the number of Representatives and Senators a state has in Congress, and while seats in the House of Representatives are granted proportionally to a state’s population, each state is guaranteed two senators and thus two electoral votes. This gives a strong advantage to smaller states, meaning that a voter in a presidential election has 3.6 times more voting power if they live in Wyoming than if they live in California, for example.
The presidency is not the only American political office that allows minority rule, though. The federal government has three branches: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. The legislative branch has the same antidemocratic attributes as the presidency.
In fact, the Senate — the upper house of Congress — is even worse. State electoral votes are calculated by a proportional distribution plus two votes each, but seats in the senate are the same for every state. As of the 2020 census, there were 330,759,736 people living in the 50 states. However, thanks to the way the Senate is organized, just 53,483,310 people have as much power there as the other 277,276,426, alongside the 4,313,440 people with no influence on the Senate at all. That’s less than 16% of the country with half the power in one of the three federal institutions we can actually vote on.
There are no elections for the Judicial branch, but in theory, the democratic legitimacy of leaders in the other two branches is passed on to supreme court justices when they are selected. The process of appointing a new Justice to the Supreme Court requires only two groups: the president and the Senate. In other words, the judicial branch of government is comprised of a group selected by a potentially unpopular executive and a minoritarian body. Even when one ignores the fact that Supreme Court Justices can hold power for decades after they join the court, the claim that they represent the American people in any way is dubious at best.
The House of Representatives is, fittingly, the most representative of these institutions, but it is not without its own problems. The most prominent issue is gerrymandering. This process allows political parties to win more power, not by convincing voters, but by organizing congressional districts in ways that help them win elections. Gerrymandering exists in state legislatures — which generally draw the districts for themselves and their national counterparts — and other elected bodies as well.
The effects of these systems are actually measurable. As mentioned above, we have had several presidents in recent years come into power without winning the popular vote, and this has happened for five of the nation’s 46 presidents. Gerrymandering was found to have shifted an average of 59 seats per election in some years, with a net effect of shifting 19 seats from Democrats to Republicans. Combined with the minority control of the Senate, these three sets of elections account for the totality of the voters’ influence on the federal government.
These skewed processes do not randomly assign more or less political power to people. In a presidential election, the average black voter has 5% fewer electoral votes than a white person, the average Asian-American voter has 7% fewer, and the average Hispanic voter has 9% fewer. As mentioned above, the inequities of the electoral college system are even larger in the Senate, with the average black American having 75% of the average white American’s representation in the Senate, the average Asian American having 72%, and the average Hispanic American having just 55% of a white American’s representation in the Senate.
Were these systems created with this specific outcome in mind? It’s hard to say, and in many cases, we can quite definitively say “no.” Nevertheless, this is the real, measurable outcome of these systems, and their continued use to select political leaders is itself a political decision, one made by politicians elected through these processes if not even more undemocratic ones.
In judging American democracy, we must also take into account the continued existence of voter suppression and intimidation. Though they have never been as bad as under the Jim Crow regimes that ruled southern states for decades, they persist and often target the same groups of people who are also disenfranchised by other means. There are a number of obstacles that can be placed in your way to vote, especially if you are poor, do not speak English, or have a disability. States like Texas and Georgia have closed hundreds of polling places before elections, often publishing no information about the changes in Spanish and specifically targeting polling stations that are relied on most heavily by nonwhite voters. Very little transparency in these decisions is required. Having to travel to vote especially affects people with lower access to transportation. In America, transportation usually means a car, which you are more likely to have if you can afford one and if you are white. In fact, 18% of black households do not have a vehicle, compared to around 12% of other people of color and just 6% of white people. Native Americans face special obstacles to voting as well. Many Native Americans — as well as other poor Americans — live in rural areas without residential addresses or access to infrastructure, internet, and Postal Services. This means less access to the electoral system. All of this can make it harder to get information on elections and acquire voter IDs that many states now require. Sometimes just getting to a polling station is a challenge, as some people living on reservations have had to drive up to 150 miles just to vote. Poll watchers and other tactics of intimidation are relevant today as well.
These issues help explain why there are such wide gaps in voting by race, income, and level of education, and why American voter turnout is generally quite low. Only about 60% of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 2016 general election. If “I didn’t vote” was a presidential candidate, they would have beaten both Trump and Clinton.
As shown in the previous article in this series, around 12% of the voting-age people living in the United States are completely legally disenfranchised, and these people are disproportionately nonwhite and poor. More potential voters will be filtered out by electoral systems, which similarly hit nonwhite, non-English speaking, and poor Americans the hardest. Even if one is able to vote, the votes themselves are often weighted differently, and white voters generally get the votes that count more. Even if votes are equally weighted, those with the power to draw districts can organize voters for their own purposes, creating continuous political regimes that elect themselves and their chosen successors. For nearly any political outcome to be achieved, only a minority of the population must support it, while the majority of voters can be ignored. The electoral system structurally reinforces white supremacy, politically privileges the wealthy, and subjects the vast majority of us to state power outside our control.
