There has eternally existed in the legislated dynamics of our Nation’s avowed democracy, an inescapable cognitive dissonance relative to its foundational principle of universal citizen equality. The trope: “A Nation by, and for the People,” and the latter’s implementing dynamic “One man, one vote,” are, both logically and empirically, at factual and philosophical odds with the disparate existence of the constitutionally established, intervening undemocratic filter designated as, “The Electoral College.”
American history relates that the institution of the Electoral College resulted from a compromise between the concept of the election of an American President by Congressional vote and his election by popular vote. The impact of the provision has the insincere result such that when a citizen votes for his choice of President he, misleadingly, is voting for the candidate’s State’s Elector. The undemocratic result is that the candidate, empirically, receiving the most votes (the legitimate choice of the Nation’s franchise) may nevertheless lose, by virtue of the arbitrarily assigned quantum of State electors.
Nor is the observation of this undemocratic flaw a conceptual or theoretical issue. The historical record reveals no less than five instances in which a Presidential candidate concededly won the popular vote, i.e., the expressed will of the people but lost because of the arithmetic configuration of State Electors: (1) Andrew Jackson over Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden, (2) Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland, (3) Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland, (4) George Bush over Al Gore, and (5) Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton.
N.B. [As an intriguing aside, one might wistfully imagine the absence of the currently presenting egregious and hazardous threat to our democracy, if the popular vote, in the case of “(5)” were, appropriately determinative].
We would, appropriately and energetically, award the highest kudos to all citizens and public-spirited organizations, taxed with the admirable effort to establish an effective and definitional democracy, by opposing election denial, gerrymandering, voter interference, and voter exclusion. Nevertheless, consistent with the definitional dynamics and moral conception of “Democracy,” we would recommend an existentially needed, constitutional amendment, eliminating, at long last, the Electoral College, an unnecessary, and unjust roadblock to true representative democracy.
-p.
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