The Electoral College didn’t make sense to me when my 6th-grade social studies teacher explained it to a room of 11-year-olds in preparation for a mock election between incumbent Gerald Ford and challenger Jimmy Carter in the fall of 1976. Still at odds with our Founders’ system, forty years later — eight months before the November election — I wrote a piece (Fixing How We Elect a President) advocating for the abolition of the Electoral College. I had no idea in March that my candidate of choice in November would achieve a solid win from the American people — by 2.85 million votes at last count — yet fail to gather the 270 electoral votes required to secure the presidency.
This lopsided outcome has thrown the Electoral College back into public debate. Over the last few weeks dozens of essays about this arcane process, both pro- and anti-EC, have been published. I’ve read many of them and have had at least a dozen Facebook conversations on the topic. For me, however, this byzantine mechanism will never amount to anything more than a stillborn scheme originally designed to bolster slave state power and corral the democratic ideal, thereby occasionally depriving the people of their voice in electing the most powerful person on earth.
We just survived a tortuous election only to have our collective wisdom overlooked. We suffered through 18 agonizing months of political gamesmanship. We watched 22 potential presidents — 17 Republican and 5 Democratic — jostle one another to gain their party’s coronation and win the highest office in the land. Once the field was cleared, we scrutinized Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton while they presented their cases to the American people. We read their policy statements. We studied the platforms of their respective parties. We tuned in to speech after speech. We watched three debates starring the two of them.
We listened to hundreds of pundits pontificate and prophecy and we nearly went blind looking at campaign ads and polling data. We heard about Clinton’s email and the Clinton Foundation until we couldn’t take it anymore; and we learned about Donald Trump’s failed “university,” his cozy relationship with the Russians, and his penchant for grabbing women by the pu**y. (Someone who also — ironically and prophetically — in 2012 called the Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy.”)
We did our due diligence in vetting the candidates and on November 8 just over 136 million Americans cast a ballot. Libertarian Gary Johnson, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and a few other minor candidates earned the support of 7.65 million citizens. Donald Trump convinced 62.90 million Americans to trust him with the nuclear codes. But Hillary Clinton was the people’s choice, with 65.75 million votes. The people preferred her “Stronger Together” theme over Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”
But four times prior to this election (1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000), the presidency was yanked from the winner of the people’s (popular) vote by the vicissitudes of the Electoral College. And next week, 538 unknown Americans will once again legally and constitutionally thwart the popular will of the American people. The ballots of 136.3 million Americans will mean little and only indirectly determine the winner of the presidency.
Instead, a small group of awfully powerful Americans will elect Donald Trump the 45th president of the United States. He will be the (Electoral College) president and he must be accepted as such. But we are not required to deny or forget that on November 8 America also picked a people’s president — and her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton.
—Rodney Wilson teaches American Political Systems at a community college in Missouri.