A Blog Posting by Ben Price of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, from November 19, 2016.
In the still early years of the twenty-first century, two presidents have been selected – not elected – without the assenting vote of the majority. How this could happen in a so-called democracy is the question of the day following Donald Trump’s successful clinching of the 2016 presidential contest. He didn’t win it by getting more people to vote for him. Instead, he prevailed by winning the votes of a magic number of Electoral College (EC) delegates.
In 2012 Trump called the EC “phony” when it seemed possible Mitt Romney might win the popular vote but not the EC. Now that the popular vote has gone against him and the EC is set to select him as the next president anyway, Trump is quoted as saying, “The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play.”
It’s a case of states’ rights trumping the actual vote count. Does it make sense? No, not if “one person – one vote” means anything. But the states that use a “winner-take-all” method of assigning EC delegates to presidential candidates exert a degree of sovereignty that would be lost in a nationwide system that respected the popular vote. Only Maine and Nebraska assign delegates proportionally.
The election of 2000 was the last time the biggest vote-getter lost the presidency to the EC. In a nail-biter of a popular vote finish, the votes of Florida’s EC delegates were given to George W. Bush when the U.S. Supreme Court halted a vote recount in the state. Al Gore, who won the popular vote nationally, went home to make a movie about climate change instead of moving into the White House. George W. Bush went on to invade and kill a million people in Iraq and blow three trillion dollars on the false pretense of protecting the U.S. from weapons the Iraqis never had. So yes, the EC’s dominance of U.S. presidential elections has consequences.
Hillary Clinton took the majority of the popular vote this year by a smallish but real majority, and Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. There is consternation throughout the land that this undemocratic outcome will be at least as consequential as was the elevation of George W. Bush above the will of the people. “What gives?” You might ask. “Why do we have an EC at all?”
The answer isn’t pretty. It exposes the “founding fathers” who wrote the current US Constitution for the undemocratic, racist, misogynist counter-revolutionaries that they were. In 1789 when the US Constitution was ratified, it included provisions that protected the property rights of slave owners against any claim that their human chattel had legal and civil rights. It institutionalized slavery as a constitutionally protected right of the owners of human “property.” Those “founders” made sure that no future generation could diminish the property “rights” of slave masters by electing abolitionists to high offices in government. The protection of privileges attached to ownership of property of all sorts, not just slaves, was the prime motivator for crafting the U.S. Constitution. They worked diligently and invented many novel mechanisms to insulate the unequal privileges of wealth from the challenge that an emergence of inalienable rights through democratic public governance might pose. …
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