The Electoral College Has Met It's Match: Saturday Political Soap Box 147

1,265,379

Update:  Final Margin is 2,864,974

That is the current lead that Hillary Clinton has in the popular vote over Donald Trump.  It will change in the next few days, as some states are still counting votes.  Most of them are in states that Clinton handily won, so the margin should go up.

In 1960, Kennedy won the popular vote by 118,574.  In 1968, Nixon won the popular vote by 510,314.  Both also won clear victories in the Electoral college.  Both received a smaller margin than Hillary Clinton will.

In 2000, Gore won a smaller margin than Ms. Clinton, 537,179.  Gore lost the election, though, in the narrowest Electoral College vote we've had, with everything being determined by the outcome in Florida, a state where the opposing candidate's brother was Governor, and a U.S. Supreme Court,controlled by the opposing candidate's father (via nominees put in place while his father was Vice-President and then President) put a halt to recounts and anointed his son President of the United States.  

In 2004, George W. Bush won a decisive victory in the popular vote (3,012,166) and a closer victory in the popular vote.  If Ohio, where there was some very strange results compared to exit polling, had flipped we might have been looking at a President Kerry, even with a decisive loss in the popular vote.  I'm sure the Republicans would have been complacent in accepting that result as Gore was in 2000.

What we thought for awhile was just an archaic device to accentuate the popular vote winner's results has now to turned into a defier of democratic intent.  

It's supposed to give equal attention to smaller states?  Not really.  It narrow-focuses the election on a handful of swing states.  I only see political commercials and rallies because I get some o my television from the Florida market.  Unless your state has been close in the past, you may not get much of anything.  And it will be the bigger electoral states, like Florida and Ohio that will get all the attention.

It defies the democratic ideal of one man one vote.  Wyoming voters have substantially more impact than California voters.  Broken down by votes per elector, Wyoming voters have about 3 and a half times more punch than Californians.

One of the major reasons for the Electoral College compromise was to assuage slave states, and to make sure they didn't feel dis-empowered (like many of those in their states who couldn't vote due to the color of their skin).  Virginia, the California of it's time, helped so that many of our first Presidents were from that slave state. It took a four-way split in 1860 to break that control (don't feel too bad; based on our current election - those states got much of their mojo back).

Yes, it's too late to help poor Ms. Clinton.  There may be some faithless electors, as there is almost every Electoral College, but nowhere near enough to make up the difference between the two.  It would take some huge scandal on the part of Trump to change it up.  Wait...never mind.  Trump is nothing but one huge scandal, and it doesn't seem to matter.  Oh, well.

There is an effort to try to change this without a constitutional amendment,  States can determine how they select electors any way they want.  Heck, they don't even have to have a popular vote at all, if they don't want.   What some states are doing is to pledge to cast their electors to the national popular vote winner regardless of who wins their states. They have passed their pledge in such a way that it will not become effective until the pledged states represents a majority of the electoral votes, 270 or more.

Yeah.  This'll work until a close election goes against a state that voted clearly the other way, and the political apparatus is controlled by the party that lost the national popular vote.  You'll hear pledges snap all over the land.

Another state-based solution is to break up the votes by Congressional district.  That's a lousy solution because that leaves us at the mercy of the gerrymandered Congressional districts.  It's bad enough we have to live with a heavily gerrymandered House of Representatives, I'd hate to live with a gerrymandered President as well.

Some have suggested proportional assignment based on popular vote percentage in states. A state like California, based on current results would split it's 55 votes 34 for Clinton, 18 for Trump, 2 for Johnson and 1 for Stein.  Most states, however, would be like Pennsylvania, splitting it's 20 evenly, 10 for each of the major candidates.  This would still leave Wyoming more powerful than California, and would still not insure that the popular vote winner would be the over-all winner.  And you'd have to have every single state agree to do it, or it wouldn't work.

My ideal solution would be a popular vote winner, but only a popular vote winner that had won a majority of votes.  This could be done either through an instant run-off system, or a second round of voting between the top two candidates, as is done in Georgia. This would insure that the President of the United States is endorsed by a majority of people.  You wouldn't just win your base - you would have to win over independents or those who first voted for a third party.  A President, more than any other office, should be a leader of all the people, not just one political faction.

To assuage the Trump voters, I'm not sure that if this system was in place that Clinton would have been the winner.  I think many of the Johnson voters would have selected Trump as their second choice in instant run-off, and if we had the true run-off scenario - well, frankly, Democrats are not the greatest repeat voters on the planet.

This system would require a Constitutional Amendment, which makes it highly unlikely.  Nevertheless, I honestly believe that in a perfect world, it is the best solution.  And not to be too partisan, but I know exactly when it will happen.

When?

Well, let's just say that if Kerry had won Ohio in 2004, this system would already be in place.