The “Electoral College” is an American anachronism, a process and not a place, just a body of people representing the states of the US, who formally cast votes for the election of the president and vice president. As a result, a US President can be elected without the support of the majority, which was the case when the last two Republican presidents were elected. That means that the majority of the US voters do not want Republican administrations, and for very good reasons.
20/20 hindsight is easier than foresight. Nevertheless, let’s imagine the country without Electoral College controlling the US presidential election. In 2000, Al Gore would have won, instead of George Bush, who was even helped by the Supreme Court, a mistake justice Sandra Day O’Conner later regretted. First of all, it is possible that 9/11 could have been prevented, considering President Clinton’s warning about Osama bin Laden and other suspicious signs. As soon as Bush was selected with the help of the Supreme Court, he wasted no time firing American students at the Monterey Institute of foreign languages, who were busy translating intercepted documents later found to contain clues to the pending 9/11 terrorist attacks. His reason? They happened to be gay! Even with 9/11, it is unlikely that Gore would have attacked Afghanistan and lied us into an Iraq war, which set a bad example for the rest of the world.
If majority vote had elected the president in 2016, Donald Trump would have been kept out of an office he was neither educated, nor mentally or morally equipped for. We wouldn’t have had a naïve, lying Trumputin that the Russian dictator took advantage of, perhaps even received national secrets from. Putin wouldn’t have been praised for attacking another country and called a smart genius for such a heinous, destructive act. And, we wouldn’t have had a WH occupant so absorbed with his own ego and so afraid of losing presidential protection, that he would try to bribe the Ukrainian president into digging up dirt about his opposition, while holding up much needed military support, later found critical for that country’s survival. Nor would a competent and for us useful ambassador to Ukraine be fired, just before a major world crisis.
Thanks to incompetence, mismanagement and lack of meaningful, practical programs, the last two EC-selected Republican administrations left a mess, that it took Democratic administrations to clean up, made even more difficult by the compact obstruction offered by the losing Republican administration. What happened to old fashioned cooperation, for the common good?
World respect and moral leadership suffered immensely under both EC-elected presidents! We could have been a much better model for a safer world! So, the answer has to be that the Electoral College has been extremely costly, and in all likelihood done irreparable damage, the extent of which may never be understood! Imagine how much better off we, and the rest of the world, would have been without the utterly stupid Electoral College, and instead let the majority elect the US President!
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Hello, Jorg
On November 14, 2018, you published in “The Progressive Opinion Express” the following… “About time to abolish the outdated Electoral College and let the majority decide, which means that every vote counts equally.” The type of winner-takes-all elections you are promoting are known as First Past the Post (FPTP) voting. While you claim such elections will let the majority decide who will be elected, it wouldn’t quite work out that way. Your FPTP formula of 50% + 1 could lead to some very undemocratic results.
Two problems…
First, a winner takes all scenario can lead to our president routinely being elected with a plurality. When a candidate wins with a plurality, he or she wins with a minority of votes cast, and that smaller number of voters controls the majority. That’s exactly what happened when Bill Clinton was first elected. He received 43% of all votes cast for president. That means more Americans voted for someone other than Bill Clinton, but he still won. Wait, what?! How did that happen? Easy… Bill Clinton won the Electoral College vote. FPTP elections may lead to more candidates running for presidents and at the same time it can lead to more presidents being elected with a plurality. The problem with elections decided by results based on pluralities is that the president would not have a mandate to press forward with his or her particular vision for America.
Secondly, a winner takes all scenario can lead to a successful candidate’s party establishing itself as the dominant political party. With a single party system in place, voting for a candidate from any other party would be pointless. Why? Well, the FPTP system can essentially reward one political party with control over the entire government, and that can be a recipe for disaster. Do we have one party rule anywhere? Just look at the supermajority veto proof single party system in place in California. In 2018, in response to your earlier call to abolish the Electoral College, I asked how will the Democrats single party rule deal with huge increases in poverty, low performing schools, crumbling infrastructure, high gas prices, and high taxes. Since then, how have they done? A reasonable conclusion could be they have not very well. Those same issues were at the heart of a recall election just over four months ago.
I think we can agree that the Electoral College is not perfect. Yet, it does provide a way that voters in all states can have a say in the outcome of presidential elections.
Ray: You refer to Bill Clinton winning due to having the most Electoral College votes, but you seem to forget that he also had more direct votes than anyone! So, he would have won anyway, without the EC.
However, you don’t seem to understand the main point in my post, namely the high cost of the Electoral College, due to which we got both George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump into office way over their heads and education. Books have been written about all the damage those administrations caused, so I’ll only mention the unnecessary, unwinnable, and extremely costly wars caused by Bush, and the horrible example Trump set, destroying the world respect that President Obama restored after Bush, kissing up to Putin, and surrounding himself with criminals and incompetents. I could go on and on. Instead, take a look at my previous posts as a history lesson.
Finally, I don’t grasp the logic behind the thought that a democracy would be better off if a minority elects the president, instead of the majority! The smaller states are already favored by having as many senators as the larger, while their House representation reflects their population.
Let me add, that we may never know how much Putin was emboldened by Trump, who so foolishly kissed up to and praised him, nor will we ever know how much more difficult Trump made it for Ukraine by his childish, selfish, and utterly unpresidential actions against that country and its president, – all because of the EC.
Finally, how fair is it in a democracy, that Republican votes in blue states are discarded whenever a Democrat wins the presidency because of the EC, or for Democrats in red states to be ignored if a Republican wins the presidency, only due to the EC, like in the 2000, 2004 and 2016 “elections”?