Around the country, emotions are running high whether it’s from the jubilation of the Trumpeters or the sorrow of Clintonites.
There are plenty of reasons for the result to upset or elate people, but what distraught me most wasn’t the actual winner.
No, I am most distraught by the electoral college. What? Someone else may not want Trump in office based on his policies or scandals, but that’s not my biggest issue.
It’s that he lost the popular vote by over 200,000 last I checked. Now I’m not suggesting we don’t accept the electoral vote, the one that counts, because that is our system and the 2016 election is over.
In no way am I advocating for anyone to take actions against the result. Like or not, it’s our system, and Trump is our president-elect. With that in mind, this isn’t the first time, but it should damn sure be the last.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, it’s actually the fourth. The fourth.
That’s a seven percent failure rate. It’s not just Al Gore. Samuel J. Tilden lost to Rutherford B. Hayes by one electoral vote after beating him by over 250,000 votes in 1876.
One. Electoral. Vote.
In 1888, Benjamin Harrison won the electoral college after Grover Cleveland won by more than 90,000 votes. The one we all remember is Al Gore’s loss to George Bush in 2000, despite a 540,000 lead in the popular vote.
And now Hillary Clinton has joined the club in 2016, the first woman to do so. Historical, right?
I’m not whining out of any particular sympathy to Clinton because I harbor no particular fondness for her either. I guess you could say my sense of democracy is offended.
America is over 239 years old; old enough to make its own stupid decisions.
If we had decided the “Bad Spray Tan Extraordinaire” and the “Homophobic Woman-Hater” were the best option we could come up with, then mazel tov to them. Happy presidency. I’ll start a whiny blog or sign a petition or something.
But that’s not what we chose. I believe deeply and sincerely in democracy, and it’s heartbreaking, worrisome and embittering when it doesn’t work.
When New Jersey got weird about my absentee ballot, I decided to vote in person. Frost, traffic, pick-up trucks, train repairs, track repairs, gerrymandering, polling hours, parking, I-95 and voter registration issues all got in my way but couldn’t stop me. I believe in democracy and in America. I traveled over 1,500 miles by train, car and Uber to vote. So, to see that the big pile of votes wasn’t the winner makes me sick. It’s not about who I wanted to win; it’s about the collective will of the people not resulting in our president.
What about “we the people?” We the people, collectively, of those who cared to vote, didn’t want this.
Some people may be arguing the seven percent failure rate is a small price to pay for the fair representation of non-urban areas. Well friends, that simply doesn’t work.
It’s irrelevant if it’s a small price or not because politicians already have to pander to the rural areas. The ten largest cities in the USA are only 7.9 percent of our population. You can’t win on that. Even with the 100 largest cities in the US, you’d only have 19.4 percent of the population.
However, you can win on significantly less than 51 percent; one pundit actually calculated that about 22 percent could work with the correct states. All of this is because a vote from Rhode Island resident is worth more than a California resident. A Wyoming resident’s opinion matters, mathematically, more than a Texan. Both the state I physically live in and the state hosting my legal home address are screwed by this system, and odds are yours is too.
Plus, if a state has millions of people, and a candidate wins the state by a handful of votes, millions of votes count for the one they didn’t want. The system may be the cause of some people who don’t vote because the live in a solidly blue or red state, like the Republican Californian and the Democratic Vermonter have a point here.
I’m not necessarily advocating abolishing the electoral college, but the way we do it now is simply unacceptable. We don’t need this nonsense a fifth time.
