By the healthy margin of 2.5 million votes the American people chose Hillary Clinton as their president. And yet, Donald Trump is our president-elect, all because our democracy continues to be encumbered by an antiquated apparatus known as the Electoral College. This quaint procedural structure is the result of deliberations of the founding fathers over the method of electing the president.
They put in play two different proposals: one, elect the president by popular vote; the other, appointment by Congress. Neither plan could achieve consensus. The result was a compromise — the Electoral College (Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.)
Apparently the Founding Fathers did not foresee the bizarre results of our 2016 presidential election, nor the one in 2000, where Al Gore won the popular vote but lost out in the Electoral College vote.
Portions of the original Electoral College provision were revised by the 12th Amendment (1804), and later by the 20th Amendment (1933), but neither amendment eliminated the possibility of the anomalies of 2016 and 2000 that have debased the democratic principle of majority rule.
Some Americans regard the Electoral College as an obsolete mechanism, an ill-conceived compromise, that should be discarded in favor of the popular vote. Others argue for its retention.
The states with small populations want to hold onto it because any one of them, or a few together, could determine the outcome of presidential elections.
The Republican Party embraces the Electoral College as a vehicle that can carry their nefarious composite of gerrymandering and voter suppression to political victory.
The Founding Fathers’ rejection of the proposal to elect the president by popular vote reflected their distrust of the common people. The same distrust was behind their decision to have our senators chosen by state legislatures, the method that remained in force until it was overturned by the 17th Amendment in 1913.
Our Constitution in its original form did not establish a fully democratic republic. As a society, for over 200 years we have been slowly, painfully, working towards inclusiveness, with liberty and justice for all.
Denton May
Delores
