The latest tabulation of the popular vote shows that Hillary Clinton received in excess of one million votes more than Trump, and her lead is expected to grow.
John Nichols writes:
“Hillary Clinton now leads the national popular vote for president by roughly one million votes, and her victory margin is expanding rapidly. That margin could easily double before the end of an arduous process of counting ballots, reviewing results, and reconciling numbers for an official total.
“But one thing is certain: Clinton’s win is unprecedented in the modern history of American presidential politics. And the numbers should focus attention on the democratic dysfunction that has been exposed.
“When a candidate who wins the popular vote does not take office, when a loser is instead installed in the White House, that is an issue. And it raises questions that must be addressed.”
Yes. Clinton has already won the popular vote by a dramatically larger number of ballots than anyone in history who did not go on to be inaugurated as president…
Clinton’s popular-vote margin over that of Trump is now greater than that of Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and that of John Kennedy over Nixon in 1960.
Clinton is now winning roughly 47.8 percent of the vote, according to David Wasserman’s count for the Cook report. That’s a little less than the level reached by Gore in 2000. As Clinton’s popular-vote margin increases, so, too, will her percentage. It is possible that she will win the popular vote with the highest percentage of anyone who has not taken office.
But the percentage that matters is Trump’s. The Republican nominee will become president with less popular support than a number of major-party candidates who lost races for the presidency. Trump is now at 47.0 percent of the popular vote, according to the Cook count. That is a lower percentage than were won by Mitt Romney in 2012, John Kerry in 2004, Gore in 2000, or Gerald Ford in 1976.
IS THIS ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON AND DONALD TRUMP?
No. Supporters of Clinton and critics of Clinton can kvetch about the virtues of her candidacy, and about what remains of the Democratic Party, for as long as their voices hold out. And Trump supporters can certainly announce that “the rules are the rules.” But this is about a higher principle than partisanship, and about something that matters more than personalities. This is about democracy itself. When the winner of an election does not take office, and when the loser does, we have evidence of a system that is structurally rigged. Those who favor a rigged system can defend it—and make empty arguments about small states versus big states that neglect the fact that many of the country’s smallest states (Delaware, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) backed the popular-vote winner. But those who favor democracy ought to join their voices in support of reform.
There are national movements to address the mess that is made when the Electoral College trumps democracy. There are petitions that call for abolishing the Electoral College. California Senator Barbara Boxer this week proposed a constitutional amendment to do just that, saying: “This is the only office in the land where you can get more votes and still lose the presidency. The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it needs to change immediately.”
There is also the bipartisan National Popular Vote initiative. Promoted by the reform group FairVote, it commits states to respect the national popular vote (as part of a multi-state compact in which states with a majority of electoral votes commit to assign them to the candidate who gets the most votes) and to ending the absurdity of elections in which losers can become presidents.
IF SOMEONE TELLS ME I SHOULD “GET OVER IT,” HOW SHOULD I RESPOND?
Just tell them that you agree with Donald Trump, who in 2012 described the Electoral College a “disaster for democracy.” On Sunday, he told CBS’s 60 Minutes that he still agrees with himself—even if he is not prepared to defer to the will of the people in this instance. “I would rather see it where you went with simple votes,” Trump explained. “You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.”
Blogger G.F. Brandenburg wrote that the electoral college is antiquated and obsolete, like “quill pens, buggy whips, powdered hair, and slavery.”
Just how perverse is the Electoral College? Beyond your wildest dreams.
I have just calculated that one party could WIN the presidency with only 31% of the total popular vote, while their opponents could LOSE the presidential election with 69% of the popular vote.
I am neither kidding nor exaggerating.
It comes from the fact that small states and voting territories like WY, DC, VT, ND, AK are wildly over-represented in the Electoral College. In Wyoming, each Elector represents a total population of about 177,000 people. In DC, each one represents 197,000 people. In Vermont, it’s 207,000 people per Elector.
But in large states like TX, FL, and CA, the population is grossly under-represented in the EC. In Texas, there are about 715,000 people per Elector – over FOUR TIMES as many as in Wyoming. In Florida, there are 679,000 people per Elector, and in California there are about 668,000 people per Elector.
The difference mostly comes from the fact that each state has two Senators, regardless of population.
So, if one party is able to win a whole bunch of smaller-population states with 51% of the vote in each one, and the other one wins the rest of the relatively-few larger-population states with a lopsided 90% of the vote in each one, it is possible for the first party to get to 285 electoral votes by only getting 37 million votes, while the opposition could get 83 million votes but lose the election because they only got 253 electoral college votes.
In a country with about 330 million people, the winners could get by with the votes of only TWELVE PERCENT of the population!!!
That is just plain perverse: Party A gets outvoted by a TWO-TO-ONE margin and still wins the presidency!?!?!?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I could not agree more. The Electoral College should have been repealed, abolished, cremated, flushed and liquidated ages ago. But it’s a heavy lift and especially with the GOP in control of everything and most states under GOP control. The repeal of the EC is dead on arrival. That does not mean that we shouldn’t work to have it abolished; we should protest and work to have it abolished.
Perhaps you want to get rid of the US Senate as well?
The Senate is strictly “One Regiion, One Vote”. The House is closer to “One Person One Vote”. The Electoral College is somewhere in between, I think.
Pure Democracy was tried in Athens. It failed, in part because no one wanted to be responsible (just as Hillary supporters who foisted upon us a flawed candidate, perhaps the only person on Earth who could lose to Trump, are shifting the blame today).
To assume pure democracy caused the Athenians to crumble is quite a leap. We could easily say the Roman Senate caused the fall of Rome, or Christianity caused the Dark Ages and argue to outlaw senators and churches.
So you are stating we have two representative bodies – Senate and Electoral College – that are equally bad as reason to not to improve the outcomes? I suspect if the results were reversed, we’d be hearing a different, more threatening, tune from the Trump zealots. Plus the Electoral College selects the President, while the Senate is legislative. Two very different purposes, if not branches. A representative to handle the daily drudgery of lawmaking is reasonable. Representatives to elect the most powerful person in the world very four years is archaic and perverse.
If the Electoral College were repealed, it would favor the larger, urban cities. The candidates would never even go to states where there were not enough “people” to make a difference in the vote. It would become caterer to the populations and likely lead to more abuses of economic “rewards” forwarded to those candidates willing to “help” those larger populations. The electoral college was created to make all states count, whether you like it or not. HRC’s additional popular votes are all coming from states that she already won, mostly NY & CA, so that would lend itself even more to what I stated, candidates forgetting about those state with minimal populations and focusing on those with large populations. Making hypocrites of all those who call for fair and equal voting opportunities in the USA!
“The candidates would never even go to states where there were not enough “people” to make a difference in the vote. ”
Do they go now?
The main effect of EC is that it gives all votes in a state to one candidate. The effect of the votes being “heavier” in some states is not so significant. If the EC votes were distributed as popular votes in each state, Clinton would have won.
Leave the electoral college alone. It is still fulfilling its purpose. Hillary lost- get over it!
Would you same the same if Trump won almost a million more votes but lost in the Electoral College?
She may have won a million more votes; however, it has been discovered that over three million votes were cast by illegal immigrants who are not permitted to vote by law. Who do you think most of those people voted for? Add in the liberal States (almost all of the NE US) that do not require any form of ID to vote at all and you have a recipe for a Trump popular vote win by a landslide. I need an ID to buy a pack of cigarettes at my local gas station but I don’t need one to vote? C’mon now get over it she lost and she lost big because she is dishonest self serving and people saw right through her both Dem’s and Repub’s included.
The Real One
Take the tin foil off ..
Joel, I was just going to say something very similar, except you were way more polite than I would have been.
Perhaps we can take up a collection to send The Real One a few cases of Reynold’s Wrap. 😉
It will end up being a Clinton popular vote win of between 2 and 2.5 million votes.
Meanwhile Trump is appointing Neanderthals to important government positions.
The history books will not be kind.
@ Real Dude, you are unreal.
http://www.snopes.com/three-million-votes-in-presidential-election-cast-by-illegal-aliens/
And if Clinton got the least votes, and then got the presidency – the complaints would come from another source – ho ho
Keep laughing. Will you be laughing when trump & Co. deregulate the banks, repeal Dodd-Frank and Warren’s Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Maybe you are in the 1% and don’t care if we have another mini depression?
Do some research and step out of your Hillary bubble for a minute. As for the tinfoil save it for your pie crusts its going to be a long four years of baking for you. Stop crying. Hillary lost. Now tuck your tails between your legs and man up for four years and stop whining. Should coulda woulda if you guys didn’t run a self serving crook and crony.
You forgot to take population growth into consideration in an unusually awkward attempt to usurp the constitution by suggesting California, where these votes were cast, should decide all of our presidential elections.
Texas is no small player.
Correct on all fronts. Hey let’s just let California decide everything. Shoot why not just cancel elections everywhere except for California. Look at any election map and tell me how you can argue a Hillary win almost 85% of the Country is colored red with a few specs of blue here and there.
Because grass doesn’t vote?
Neither do cows.
Who elects the electors? NO ONE! Do you know who your electors are off the top of your head?
It is past time for “one man (or woman), one vote.
I dont like the idea of tinkering with the U.S. Constitution in order to win elections. I prefer to win with ideas and positions that will put people back to work and bring our country together. Democrats have a lot of work to do in the next four years.
What’s the matter with one person one vote. It works for all the other offices. Before 1913, US senators were selected by state legislatures and the governors, not a popular vote. The 17th amendment established the popular vote for senators. Libertarians want to repeal the 17th amendment; that figures because libertarians hate democracy.
The problem, Joe, is that a ‘majority’ in a large area would dictate to a minority to their own advantage. It would be virtual slavery for those who had no voice. New Yorkers (and other ‘cosmopolitans’) like the think they know it all, however they can’t even feed, or cloth, or warm themselves without extracting the wealth that people in other regions produce or sit on top of. LA has no moral right to drain the Colorado River to the detriment of people who live beside it, yet they do. This is unfair.
Just as the Congress places a ‘buffer’ between the whims of a fickle People and political action, just as our founders understood the necessity to create a slowly changing bicameral Congress, so too does the Electoral College serve that purpose.
While it’s true that the more populous states do, in fact, drain resources from some of the less populated areas, and this needs to change because it is leading to an environmental catastrophe (but that’s a subject for another day), it’s also true that the larger states pay way more in taxes, and receive less back from the federal government, than the smaller states.
Many of the traditionally “red states,” in fact, get back from the Feds more than they pay in taxes.
Is it fair for the larger states to provide “welfare” for a lot of the other states?
I happen to believe that the money should go where the greatest need is. But I don’t think it’s fair to criticize the larger states for draining natural resources, when many other states are “draining” the tax dollars of those in the larger states.
John Wund: the fickle people are good enough to elect all the other offices without a buffer. The electoral college was created in the 18th century as a sop to the slave states, in no small part. It’s an anachronism that has outlived its dubious usefulness.
Reblogged this on BLOGGYWOCKY and commented:
Yes, I would love to see this change.
Unfortunately, it would require a Constitutional amendment, and those are very difficult to pass.
You need 2/3 of the House and Senate to approve the proposed amendment, then it is sent to the states for a vote, and 3/4 of the state’s must vote to approve it.
With the House and Senate under Republican control, and well over half the states under Republican control (never mind that they don’t hold the majority of the citizens of this country, it’s a state by state vote), this is simply not going to happen any time soon.
The only other way to amend the Constitution is for 2/3 of the state legislatures to call for a Constitutional Convention. This isn’t going to happen, either.
The less populous states are very protective of the fact that they have a disproportionate influence, in the Senate, in the Electoral College, and regarding any Constitutional amendments. They are just not going to vote for anything that gives them less influence.
Instead, we have the blind leading the clueless.
I get all the valid points you are making but how do they have less influence? That comment is aimed at the less populous states not you. They get to vote like every other eligible voter. They have 2 senators and reps. The EC does not guarantee much of anything for these smaller states.
All states receive Electoral votes based on their number of Congressional Representatives, plus their two Senators. So right there, you give a certain advantage to the less populous states.
Let’s say that the forty least populated states vote for Candidate A, and the ten most populated states vote for Candidate B. Right there, just based on their Senators, those forty states get 80 extra electors, while those largest states get twenty extra electors. A sixty vote advantage for the less populous states.
Sixty Electoral votes can certainly make the difference between a win and a loss.
“Trump to meet this weekend with Gen. James Mattis, education activist Michelle Rhee”
Moskowitz met with Ivanka this morning and now Rhee jumps onboard.
So much for ed reform rejecting Donald Trump. He’s on the “right” side as far as privatization and anti-labor, so they’ll join up.
Such a shame for kids that we will have 3 Presidents in a row who are opposed to public schools. It’s really a betrayal.
They’re all dutifully taking these stupid tests and submitting data and all of these adults are working as hard as they can to destroy the schools they’re sitting in.
They should be ashamed.
Ed reformers are really warming up to the Trump Privatization Plan.
Moskowitz met with Ivanka Trump today and Rhee is meeting with Trump this weekend.
Will charter-mania in DC give way to voucher-mania in DC? Stay tuned!
Such a shame that none of these people can spare a moment for the unfashionable public sector schools.
I think that there should be some updates to the rules for the EC. A consistent ratio for all states should be established. If one EC representative in Vermont represents 250,000 people then one EC representative in Texas should equal 250,000 people.
Fixing this part is not that complicated.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar, so I have no idea if this would require an amendment, but it’s an excellent suggestion.
Thank you. I am not a Constitutional scholar either but do know it is worth finding out.
I don’t know this for sure, but the requirements for the Electoral College are pretty specific in the Constitution (I teach it every year to my 8th graders). I think it would require an amendment.
The Electoral College is a combination of the principle of equal representation (equal among states, not voters) in the Senate and proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Add up the number of Senators and Representatives that any state has, and that’s how many electors it gets. So the Electoral College is indexed to population to the extent one of the inputs is the number of Representatives each state has. What retards the proportionality of the Electoral College is the input of the number of Senators.
Another huge factor in Presidential election “game theory” is the winner-take-all structure that almost every state uses. But that’s a state issue, not a federal issue.
Thank you for educating me. It is a 240 year old system designed when communication took days rather than seconds. It does seem like it is time for an update that provides more equity between states. I believe that this is going to become more of an issue in the future.
Drext “If one EC representative in Vermont represents 250,000 people then one EC representative in Texas should equal 250,000 people.”
The main mathematical problem with the electoral college is that even if 50.1% is red vote and 49.9% is blue, the EC gives all votes to Red.
Your suggestion doesn’t solve this problem at all, and it takes away the only justification for the EC: the larger representation of small states in the presidential election.
The main philosophical problem with the EC is that in theory, a few individuals can decide the fate of the votes. I do not see in what sense this is better than saying “all men are created equal”.
So the humans need to be taken out of the EC, and replace them by a number.
States with the lowest population, like Wyoming and Vermont would get, say, the number 4, and that means each vote there is multiplied by 4. Hawaii may get the number 2, which means each vote there is multiplied by 2 and so on. Finally California or Texas probably would get only the number 1.
I realize I don’t have the answer. I only realize that the current system is broken and needs to be fixed. It will take many suggestion from many people smarter than I am.
I voted for Clinton but I had this fleeting moment of hope that Trump would do something different on education based on the fact that no one knows anything about him.
What a disappointment. He’s consulting the exact same people Bush and Obama did.
So much for “change”. What a missed opportunity. I would have given him the benefit of the doubt on something new. Instead I just get the same anti-public school agenda that is lock-step in DC and has been for more than 20 years.
The rule of 150 elite ed reformers continues. The status quo is safe.
Yes, Chiara, it boggles the mind how much these politicians and the filthy rich elites hate our public schools.
I get that there are good arguments against the Electoral College. But I don’t follow the argument that the Electoral College is “outmoded.” Like the structure of the Senate, it was always intended to give the voters in less populous states disproportionate influence. It would never have made it into the Constitution in the first place if the more populous states had their druthers. It’s just one of many compromises that the states agreed to in the Constitution.
Sorry, Flerp.
I kinda echoed you thoughts before I read this comment. Didn’t mean to step on your toes.
I guess great minds really to think in a similar manner (though, not alike). Or, perhaps, fools rush in.
Yes, a compromise with the slave states.
I’m sure that’s largely how the interests lined up on that issue. Although there was also Rhode Island and Delaware. And the 3/5 compromise is a more direct compromise among slave/free states.
The electoral college is a legitimate way to balance powers between majorities and minorities. It is a way for sparsely populated areas to have some power. Without it, rural areas would be even more invisible. Unfortunately, the intention of giving some power to agricultural areas helps now to dilute the votes of the rural supporters of a vanishing left in American politics. As that oldest of political techniques, gerrymandering, separates votes that might challenge majorities in some states, the electoral college now keeps those votes from choosing the president. A look at a strip of counties through the middle of Alabama illustrates this. These counties voted for Clinton by small majorities in the recent election. Much of the rest of rural Alabama went for trump. The latter were heard, the former might as well have stayed at home. Does this suppress voting? I hardly see how it might do otherwise. Do we really need to suppress the vote of the local minorities, whether they lean left or right? Surely all need to feel that their vote is worth something.
So I suggest so revision that might help. Electors could be required to split their vote in the case of close elections, making the electoral college more closely represent the populace. Proportional representations of more specific type might be suggested. The tie in Florida in2000 was fascinating to a mathematician. There was no way to tell who had won, so a court decided. Tie breakers exist in all other contests. Not in American politics.
Time for a compromise between the populist House and crucible Senate. The Electoral College votes become proportional per state.
Of course, none of this is working, anyways. The House is so gerrymandered that a small minority of alt-right ideologues control the agenda. The Senate seems unable to legislate and compromise as the more “deliberate” half of Congress and seems to be making up rules as they go. The approval rating of Congress is low, yet they all seem somehow unaccountable. And the Electoral College is supposed to be a check against mob rule and demagogues, yet we plan on swearing in Trump with a Cabinet of Deplorables.
Hey, remember that Constitutional Convention the conservatives insisted we needed? Guess that Constitution isn’t so broken after all, huh?
Only two states, Nebraska and Maine, have proportional Electoral College votes. But it’s actually not a true proportionality, because it is only “proportional” by Congressional district, and the popular vote winner gets the two other votes (the Senatorial ones).
So it’s not perfect, but it’s at least somewhat better than “winner take all.”
And then there is the huge problem of gerrymandering……..
My input. despite Hillary’s margin of victory Republicans declare a MANDATE to promoter their agenda.
The same kind of thing happened with Al Gore. WHAT a different country this would be had he been elected.
Probably cooler in more ways than one.
Is that different good? Is that different bad? Or is it just different different?
Gordon, you are so right. When Bush beat Kerry by not that much, he claimed he had a mandate to privatize Social Security, amongst other things. The GOPers are shameless.
The Green Party and other groups and organizations have been screaming about (and working to end) the Electoral College for a very long time. In addition, we have been doing all that we can to advocate for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) and other much more democratic voting systems that eliminate any “spoiler” worries or accusations. We attempted to introduce IRV in NYC, but guess who killed it? Bill de Blasio himself. Thank goodness Maine just passed IRV and many more cities and states will no doubt follow.
But my questions is this. Why has it taken liberals until now to begin to help in the fight to end the Electoral College? In 2000 Gore won the popular vote and only the Green Party and a few other organizations called on the Democrats to defend their candidate (Gore) and end the Electoral College. We also called on Democrats to simply demand a full counting of all votes. Yet, all we heard was a full on character assassination of Ralph Nader and a torrent of hate speech against those of us attempting to fight for true democracy.
That lack of defense of democracy since 2000 (and prior, of course) has directly caused the increased lack of democracy we are experiencing now. It didn’t just rear its head recently. Its the “use it or loose it” rule of the universe. So, I hope the new calls for getting rid of the Electoral College will not just stop there. I hope those efforts will include pushing our elected officials to get rid of ALL corruption in our electoral system. We need more voices and more choices (more parties!). We need IRV and Ranked Choice voting. We need ALL money out of politics and an end to Citizens United. We need fair and inclusive debates and fair media coverage for all candidates. We need fair ballot access laws. We need Proportional Representation. And we need voting machines and systems that are not hack-able or subject to manipulation.
As I said, if more people fought for these things back in 2000, we wouldn’t be where we are now. But its not too late!
Daniella, very well said. I hope the Dems who are screaming for repeal of the electoral college will actually act so that we can ward off Trump in 4 years. No one knows who their electors are unless they do a duckduckgo search and yet these gals/guys decide who is president. The electors are not elected.
Daniella “But my questions is this. Why has it taken liberals until now to begin to help in the fight to end the Electoral College? In 2000 Gore won the popular vote and only the Green Party and a few other organizations called on the Democrats to defend their candidate (Gore) and end the Electoral College. ”
Because the difference between the EC and popular vote in 2000 was not this outrageous: back then, both the popular and EC votes were extremely close. This year, Trump won the EC vote by 74. That’s 14% of all the 538 electoral votes. In case of popular votes, Clinton won by 1.3 million votes which is 1% of the total votes this year.
So the EC not only reversed the result of the popular vote, but it magnified the difference 14-fold, and this translates to 18 million extra votes to Trump. You know how big that 18 million is? That’s the combined total vote count of NY and CA.
Máté, it would be interesting how many little states could be used to total 18 million.
“it would be interesting how many little states could be used to total 18 million.”
Half of the number of states: 25. More precisely: rank the states by number of votes they cast this year, those with the most votes on top. When you add up the bottom 25 states’ votes, you get 18.2 million.
While this number 25 is astonishing, it also indicates why a simple popular vote is not OK, imo.
But the electoral system is also unacceptable: in a state like Tennessee, democrats have absolutely no reason to go out and bother with voting: the blue votes don’t matter one bit, since all the electoral votes go to the red candidate for sure.
Of course, in case of nonswing blue states, the red votes are those that won’t matter one bit.
This way, tens of millions of votes don’t matter. In the swing states, people do have the motivation to go and vote, but then, if their candidate loses that state even just by 0.1%, their vote will be discarded in the national presidential election.
Is there a good news here?
Thanks for doing the research. I do like the idea of awarding electoral votes proportionally within a state. I think you also mentioned something about weighting votes? Sounded sensible to me. I don’t think I really agree with eliminating the electoral college because a simple majority of the popular votes is not necessarily representative of the country. I m rather tired of politicians promising to govern for all the people. Somehow that never seems to work out well for a significant number of people. Governing for all the people doesn’t appear to mean governing well for everyone.
“I think you also mentioned something about weighting votes?”
Yes, so it’s one thing to say that the electors should distribute their votes in proportion to the popular vote in their state, it’s another thing that this requirement cannot be met.
The unresolvable mathematical problem with this is that electors cannot mimic the exact proportion of the votes. For example, take a state with 45% blue votes, 50% red votes and 5% green votes. How would you fairly distribute the state’s 3 electoral votes among the 3 candidates?
On the other hand, the problem can be completely resolved if each state would get a weight which is between 1 and 4. Wyoming would get the weight 4, and that means, each vote there (irrespective whether it was cast for a red, blue or green candidate) would be counted as 4 votes in the national vote count. Hawaii would get the weight 2 which means each vote there would be counted as 2 votes in the national count. Texas would get the weight 1, California would get the weight 1.01, etc.
These weights would mimic the extra weight each vote in less populous states gets via the electoral college. They are easy to calculate, and they are easy to use, since all you have to do is multiply the state’s vote count by the weight.
So if Hawaii has 200K blue votes, 100K red votes, 10K green votes, then in the national count each number would double, so Hawaii would contribute 400K blue votes, 200K red votes, and 20K green ones.
I think people would part with the electoral system easier if it was replaced by this: this is completely fair to voters in a given state, and it gives the same extra voice to states with small population as they get with the EC.
I remark that the effect of these extra weights is not too significant—since most states would have a weight close to 1—and Clinton would have won with this system.
Mate,
You have just explained why the electoral college and winner-takes-all makes no sense. I live in New York. It is so solidly blue that I might as well have stayed home.
The only election that makes sense and is democratic is one-person-one-vote. Whoever gets the most votes wins. If we elected governors as we elect the president, people would be outraged that a candidate could lose the vote and be elected.
Well, the “winner takes all” doesn’t stop with the electoral college: the winner appoints the whole cabinet. That should also be revised, shouldn’t it?
In fact, if the loser side would also have a saying whom to appoint to the cabinet, people would warm up to the one-person one-vote idea easier. Till then, it’s not clear how the states with small populations would agree to it. How could people in Wyoming accept that a few metropolitan areas would elect their president?
The usual concept of democracy takes only the needs of the majority of the people into consideration. But the majority of the population doesn’t take care of the majority of the land.
And states like TX and CA have less power in the Senate than they should by both population and geographic area. Rhode Island has way more power in the Senate than NYC. State boundaries are a somewhat arbitrary construct, and the power of the Senate reflects that.
It really is beginning to sound like people are lobbying for a parlaimentary form of government. Am I correct that there has never been a pure democracy? Have there not always been restrictions on voting that restricted voters to a ruling class? Would it not be more correct to call them oligarchies? I’m talking off the top of my head.
“And states like TX and CA have less power in the Senate than they should by both population and geographic area. ”
While true and problematic, that is a separate problem from the presidential election.
It’s unfortunate that the electoral college is tied to the number of representatives and senators
I really have trouble understanding the argument about states’ populations being underrepresented in the Senate. Since the Senate was meant to represent each state as an entity, population is neither here nor there. Each state as a coequal member of the federation has equal representation.
“Each state as a coequal member of the federation has equal representation.”
So states have equal representation in the Senate because this is a confederacy, and it’s the House which serves as the democratic representation of all the people. Hard to argue with that. Then the founding parents made the presidency the mixture of the two by establishing the EC.
This idea of mixing makes sense, but the execution was poor from the start. As I indicated before, it’s mathematically impossible to make a state’s EC represent democratically its own state’s votes.
We can safely say, it’s impossible to make the EC democratic even at the state level.
Of course, the whole thing is made worse with the winner-takes-all practice in the casting of the electoral votes and in the president’s appointing the whole cabinet.
So let’s do this mixing right for our kids: establish the weighting of the states’ votes, and make sure the cabinet is appointed in proportion of the parties received (weighted) votes.
What’s the next math problem we need to solve? 🙂
“…make sure the cabinet is appointed in proportion of the parties received (weighted) votes.”
Stop and think about that for a moment. Forget for the moment that Trump appears to be choosing a less than stellar cast of advisors. The President is forced to choose his/her cabinet on bipartisan lines to do what? S/He is under no obligation to listen to those who might then quite logically be going to espouse a position not in line with the President’s agenda. We would actually be trying to cripple the formation of a plan and are making the legislative task of the Congress that much harder. Then there is the task of deciding where to put those advisors who may be out of line with the President. S/He is under no obligation to assign them to positions of significant importance to him/her. Our system has worked fairly well in the past. The checks and balances have probably served to prevent us from going too far down one road or another. We have had fairly predictable shifts in leadership. Now we will have to work a little harder to prevent falling into fascism. How ever much we might disagree with someone’s politics, few of us are really looking for another fascist era. I am just ruminating my way through this post, but I think I am heading in the direction of figuring out how to best use the system we have for the benefit of the country. We have some clue how to accomplish that; politicians . After all, isn’t that their job?
2old2teach ” Forget for the moment that Trump appears to be choosing a less than stellar cast of advisors.”
But how can I forget that? And why should I forget that? Let’s just jump into the middle of a John Oliver piece about this
When you say
” Our system has worked fairly well in the past.”
you could have said the same thing about the electoral college “The EC has worked well in the past”. But it didn’t this time. The system has failed big time. No, it was not similar to the failure of the elections in 2000 when both the EC and popular votes were close. This time there is a 14% difference between the two votes, and an 80% possible difference is lurking in the future.
A good system prevents such failure. If it doesn’t, it’s not a good system.
Let’s see how the system will work out? How has it worked out with Duncan in office? So then how is it going to work with a Rhee- or Moscowitz-type nut as education secretary?
For the very reasons you say, namely “how could the poor president accomplish his agenda if some of the secretaries do not support him 100%”, Trump shouldn’t have the opportunity to appoint his entire cabinet. So that he won’t be able to carry out his agenda.
Let’s not normalize Trump. He is not normal.
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/14/theres-no-normalizing-president-elect-trump-or-least-there-shouldnt-be
For Trump being in power is the very system to blame which elected him and which will let him do who knows what. The system needs to change. The checks and balances don’t work well, and I don’t want to look on as a Gates-like experiment with the whole population is carried out to see if they’d work out this time.
I would really like to see the system you would design to choose a cabinet. A President would go to great lengths to find people of the opposing party who held similar beliefs to his/hers. Not at all an impossible task. All of the more important posts would likely be filled by members of the same party. Then of course we need a mechanism that makes the President follow policy suggestions put forth by cabinet members. The president would basically have to be taken out of it and a commission formed. If the President was removed, I am not sure who would be on this commission or how they would be chosen in a timely fashion. Would cabinet choices still have to be confirmed by the Senate?
This is beginning to sound like what reform minded people in the education sector want to do to educators. Hamstring them with so many regulations and mandates that they cannot move. Do we want to micromanage the system for every president or just the ones enough people think are incompetent? I suspect that any system you could design could be manipulated to someone’s advantage. The lesson to be learned is that we cannot afford to be complaisant or ignorant of what is going on around us.
“I would really like to see the system you would design to choose a cabinet.”
Well, many (most?) of the countries work this way; exactly because otherwise the president would have too much power. I bet the US could do it too. But I guess other countries don’t trust a single person that much with power.
Yeah, they would argue much more up there. So? At least they would not be able to implement sweeping changes quickly.
I of course am not in this business, so I wouldn’t get into the details. Choosing secretaries is hardly micromanaging. After all, these secretaries affect the whole country, and in some instances the whole world. Hence I would not compare this to giving teachers or schools autonomy.
Just the basic principle is not clear to me: you want the people’s voice to select the president, but then the winning half will continue dictating with the whole cabinet to the other 160 million people as well. This makes the presidential election a race which will have winners and losers, instead of having gold and silver medal winners.
No wonder emotions run high during elections: the stakes are much higher than they should be.
No, Máté, I can’t say that I am willing to throw out a system that has functioned fairy well over time. Europeans seem enamored with parliamentary forms of government and that’s fine. We were hardly going to adopt a system like Great Britain’s; monarchy did not agree with us. Our system obviously has its own kinks tied to our history, but, like Gr. Britain, we are not going to throw out our system because it has hit some snags. They will survive Brexit, whatever that might mean, and we will survive Trump. If we are lucky, we will get to evolve over time. All the suggested disruption is beginning to sound like a corporate turnaround strategy. Eliminate the Senate. End with the Electoral College. “Parlaimentarisize” the cabinet.
Trump has already begun to waffle on some of his more extreme propositions. Since he had obviously done no deep thinking on policy before he was elected, I take it as a positive sign that he is willing to change direction. He comes from a very narrow (narcissistic) parochial world that thinks it is so cosmopolitan because it jets from one lavish venue to another. Perhaps some of his constituents will actually be able to introduce him to the rest of us. I got a little tired of hearing parts of my world referred to as “terrible,” (shades of “failing”?) not a nuanced view leading to coherent policy decisions. We know how to fight from within the system. That’s not to say it is easy, which may be part of the problem. We all what government to just take care of us or leave us alone depending upon what we need or want at the time. We don’t want to be bothered with any messy details. If we can just get enough different voices in government then they can haggle it out and we can go do our thing.
My thoughts are running away with me. My turkey needs attention, and I have to whip some cream for the pumpkin pie. Redesigning our government is going to have to wait. Happy Thanksgiving.
“When the winner of an election does not take office, and when the loser does, we have evidence of a system that is structurally rigged.” <– Exactly what happened when Bernie beat Hillary, and got less delegates because of the supers. It was not the “will of the people” when Clinton got more booty than Sanders when he won.
Everybody wants an argument that proves they have been wronged.
So typical of the whiny Democrats to focus on “maybe we can change the electoral college in the future.”
Guess what? When Obama won BOTH the popular vote and the electoral college. And he also had the House and Senate. And instead of focusing on the future, the Republicans used what they had NOW to block legislation.
The FILIBUSTER. Everything. Every single thing. Obama’s policies like the ACA had to be approved by moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe who basically kowtowed to the hard liners and said “nope” to anything that wasn’t a conservative policy.
The Democrats need to use the filibuster every single time. For everything except acceptable infrastructure repair. They need to stand firm and punish the wimps who are afraid of looking “obstructionist”. As if that hurt the Republicans.
Sure the Republicans will then say they will get rid of the filibuster. Let them try. Let it be on them. If the Democrats won’t use the filibuster like the Republicans do, there’s no advantage to having it.
Here’s a question for constitutional scholars: In view of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, is the vote of the Electoral College still constitutional?
In round numbers, California has a population of 39,000,000, and its citizens have 55 electoral votes, which means that each California electoral vote represents 700,000 citizens.
Wyoming has a population of about 600,000, and its citizens have three electoral votes, which means that each Wyoming electoral vote represents 200,000 citizens
That means that each Wyoming citizen’s vote counts for three times the vote of each California citizen, which is greatly unequal.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Bolling v. Sharp decision ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause applies to federal matters through the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Therefore, doesn’t that make the Electoral College unconstitutional as currently configured and that the Electoral College cannot validly vote for a President until the inequality is remedied by equalizing the value of all citizen’s electoral representation by adjusting the number of electors from each state so that no elector represents more than 200,000 citizens?
“That means that each Wyoming citizen’s vote counts for three times the vote of each California citizen, which is greatly unequal.”
Actually, if you do not round the population numbers, you would come up with more like “four times” not “three times”. The exact number is 3.7.
“by adjusting the number of electors from each state so that no elector represents more than 200,000 citizens?”
That doesn’t help the main mathematical problem with the EC, namely that even in close votes in a state, all the EC votes go to one candidate. This is the practice which creates the difference between the popular and EC votes—which presently is 14-fold!!
In the sates which really decide the election, each vote counts close to one vote; at most 1.2 votes.
In round numbers: in Texas (which is worse off than California, btw) each EC vote represents 700,000. When you look at the national EC representation (so you divide the total population of 320 million by the total number of electors of 538) you get 600,000.
This 700K is 1.2 times the 600K.
If the ECs would have distributed their votes between Clinton and Trump according to the popular votes in their states, Clinton would have won.
“This is the practice which creates the difference between the popular and EC votes—which presently is 14-fold!!”
14 fold means 1,400%.
“As Clinton’s popular-vote margin increases, so, too, will her percentage.”
Presently, this “margin” is over 1.3 million which gives an easy to remember percentage: this 1.3 million is full 1% of the total votes, which is about 130 million.
I’ve long viewed the British parliamentary system as much superior to the American system. In the UK, the legislative and executive powers are joined; the House of Commons, i.e. the majority party, selects the Prime Minister and other executive officers. Members of Parliament run on a platform that can be enacted if their party wins a majority. The majority cannot be obstructed by the minority on legislative matters, and the majority is fully accountable for the results of their policies – no fingerpointing.
If I were designing a better American system, I would apportion seats in the House/parliament by population, plus two seats per state to give smaller states some protection against larger states, while eliminating the Senate. The House would then elect the President, so the majority party would have power to enact its agenda and be responsible for what the President does. I know – it will never happen, so we’re doomed to endless gridlock and partisan charges of obstructionism.
Some things about the vote totals aren’t adding up, one journalist says. http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/youre-not-just-imagining-it-the-hillary-clinton-vs-donald-trump-vote-totals-do-look-rigged/104/
BREAKING NEWS: Chicago Cubs are being forced to give up their World Series title.
Cleveland Indians fans have rioted across the country in protest of the 2016 World Series. Despite knowing the rules of the game prior to playing, they were unhappy that they lost and demanded the outcome to be changed. They could be heard chanting #NotMyWorldSeriesChampion all across America.
Even though the Cubs won 4 games and the Indians only won 3, since both teams scored 27 total runs throughout all 7 games, they are being declared co-world champions.