There
are those who offer defenses of the current system of presidential elections
that they believe disclose some kind of deep, pure motivation by the drafters
of the Constitution. And the centerpiece
of their disclosure is that those putting together the first workable version
of a democratic republic wanted to guard against certain dangers. The claim is that a truly, pure democratic
election needed to be protected from itself.
While people claimed to desire democratically elected leaders, they
really only wanted only certain types of truly democratically elected leaders,
those who agreed with them.
The
earliest cited fears were that the power office of the total nation could be
captured by those beholden to “regional factionalism”. And where would such factionalism arise? It
would be in the cities, the urban centers of the more populous states. The gentlemen farmers like Jefferson and
Washington could count. They knew that there were more people, and thus more
voters
packed
into the crowded neighborhoods of Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Richmond
than resided on the plantations and farms of Maryland and New Hampshire. And yet when they studied maps they could see
(as do today’s patriots) that our vast nation covered much, much more landmass
than the actual acreage that housed those cities of the day. And this realization produced the initial
fear and desire that those city people not be allowed to render judgments which
might be different than what the plantation owners knew was best policy for the
new land. Rural people did not want to
be dictated to by city folk.
And
the Great Compromise which had shaped the bicameral Congress with the small
states having equal representation in the Senate ended up bleeding over into a
similar small state advantage (read that “rural” advantage) for presidential elections. And in the early
years the agrarian advantage was even more pronounced since there wasn’t that
great a difference between the electoral votes of larger states to the smaller
ones. But added together the smaller states totaled quite a few more votes in
proportion when the votes counted in the Electoral College.
All
of this brings us to contemporary times. Defenders of the status quo electoral
system still love to point to the map, color every county that had a Republican
plurality red and counties with Democratic pluralities blue and smugly declare
that any idiot can see how much red covers the nation. And that seems to fuel
their belief and assertion that hordes of voters packed into urban areas like
Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle did not possess votes as worthy as
voters from smaller towns and rural areas. So even though Mr. Trump lost the
overall popular vote, those in charge of current rules are quite comfortable
allowing Republicans to believe and claim legitimacy since the existing rules declared
them the winner.
There
is another, separate issue that most citizens and observers simply don’t
understand or don’t credit with enough importance. That is the fact that the Constitution and
the Electoral College do NOT require
states to employ the “unit rule” whereby states seek to maximize the impact of
their votes by assigning all their electoral votes to the winner of the mere
plurality in their state. This allowed
all 38 electoral votes available in Texas to go to Republican Trump even though
47.4% of Texas voters picked other candidates. Such an inequity exists for 48
of the nation’s 50 states. On both sides. A more egregious example of the
distortion for Trump would be Pennsylvania where a mere 68,000 voters out of 6
million, little over one percent, threw all 20 PA electoral votes to the
president elect. And, of course, similar corresponding examples of Democrat
Clinton winning a closely contested state could be cited, but this isn’t a
lengthy grad school treatise on the topic, merely a lament. And it is noteworthy that the two states that
do allow their electoral vote to be divided (NE and ME) are small and pretty
inconsequential, at least in the presidential election arena.
But
this whole side issue merely avoids the bigger point. Elections using the
Electoral College, with or without the “unit rule”, are simply undemocratic,
pure and simple. The idea that a person’s
vote is devalued for choosing to reside in an urban area is wrong. All votes
should be of relatively equal value. Owners of broad swatches of countryside
should not have weightier votes than those living in a four story walkup tenement.
Newer voters, be they recent immigrants or young people attaining voting age, should
not be discounted merely because they happen to live in cities.
This,
I believe, is closer to the democratic ideal and understanding that infused the
work of our nation’s framers than an approach that denies equal voice to some
based on where they live and work.
I
do believe Donald Trump’s assertions that had the rules been different, had he
needed to win the popular vote in order to win the presidency, that he would
have run a significantly different campaign and might have indeed pulled off a
popular vote win. I have no idea why this is true or possible. But I don’t
discount it. Had Trump done campaign rallies in Los Angeles, Chicago, and
Boston in addition to where he did rallies, he well might have pulled some
disinterested voters his way and eaten into Clinton’s urban advantage. But regardless, I do wish we simply used the
popular vote to settle on our national leader. We deserve to be assured that
the winner, the leader for four years indeed has a mandate.
