The American people elected Hillary Clinton president this Tuesday, but the bloated, archaic shadow land called the Electoral College will meet next month to elect Donald Trump president instead.
This sad subversion of the will of the voters should be far more than a footnote in history, but what else can it be in a system that takes the direct will of the people away from them and hands it to a small, separate political body, something we do only, incredibly, when filling the highest office in the free world?
The absurdity of such a willful miscarriage of democracy is made all the more odious when it’s the second such occurrence in 16 years. That means that two of the last five presidential elections will have been decided by the Electoral College in defiance of the greatest number of voters. Before 2000, it had happened only twice — in 1876 and 1888 (although a couple of other earlier elections might be disputed in that regard). In any event, it hadn’t happened for 112 years until 2000, and it’s happened twice since.
What a shame to feel compelled to quote Vladimir Putin (who is celebrating Trump’s “victory”) on the electoral college, about which he commented recently. “What kind of democracy is that?” he asked.
Are enough Americans asking that question? Is anyone in America asking why Putin would be asking that question in a year in which his government has been blamed for computer hacking bent on affecting the outcome of an American presidential election? Is it not curious at the least, almost as curious as the numbers from late-reporting precincts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that added to Trump’s lead in those states as the night waned into Wednesday?
Sure, there could be defectors. Two who were pledged to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1980 cast their ballots for Ronald Reagan instead, and a scattered handful of lone defectors peppered the EC’s history here and there over the decades. But that’s about it defection-wise in the history of the politically primed shadow people who elect our presidents.
With all the Republican defection from the ticket this year, all the dire warnings — from Republicans — that this guy is bad news, he’s a demagogue, he’s a bigot, he’s a megalomaniacal thug, he’s an immature, clueless huckster — might there be hope for defectors? Perhaps, but it would take an historic electoral college revolt to align the official result with the will of the voters.
Mediavenger personally wrote to every Republican elector in 2000, when Al Gore won the vote of the people but not the puzzle points necessary on the map of our country to be president. One Republican elector in 2000, notably, was Joe Arpaio, then the famous and infamous sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.
I pleaded with all the electors to honor the will of the people, and to Arpaio, I additionally appealed to his law enforcement principles. Come on, Joe, you don’t really want a coke-snorting, draft-dodging drunk driver to be president, do ya? Of course he did, as long as it was a member of his party. I got an appreciative phone call from a group of Arpaio’s deputies who promised they would personally make certain he saw the letter. Arpaio today is another celebrant of the Trump “win.” According to news reports in Arizona, he’s looking for a favor from the incoming president to make his racial profiling lawsuits go away.
That call from Arpaio’s deputies was the only response I got from my letter. And of course, not one of the electors cared enough about the will of the voters to change his or her vote any more than any of them had the simple decency to fire off a quick reply to someone who had bothered to write them a heart-felt letter about a pressing issue of great importance to their country.
Election day? One person, one vote?
In this election that has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, too few will remember, too few are aware, and too few likely will ever care that most American voters didn’t do that.