Hillary Clinton won the election by more than one million votes, but she lost the presidency because Donald Trump, who relentlessly ridiculed anything "establishment," won the electoral vote - a vote that could not possibly be any more of an elitist, establishment tradition.
The Electoral College is as old as the Constitution, but unlike many other things in the Constitution that have been updated with amendments - like amendments that allow women and blacks to vote - the Electoral College remains hopelessly outdated.
Wait - you say the electors are decided by a state's population? Wrong. If that was true, California with a population of 39 million would have given Clinton 199 electoral votes rather than 55, and she would be President-elect Clinton today.
Can we say rigged? No, actually it's not rigged. It's just antiquated and useless in today's democracy. And it makes an absolute mockery of America's one-person, one-vote belief system.
To understand just how much the Electoral College needs to be changed or dropped, we need to reflect a bit on how and why it was first made part of our democracy during the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
Alexander Hamilton, who with James Madison designed the Electoral College, described the framers' view: "A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated [tasks]."
A small number of persons most likely to possess the information and discernment
In other words, the Electoral College was created for a time when America's common people couldn't read. When blacks and women couldn't vote. When in most states only men who owned property could vote - in other words - the "elite" who did not trust the common people.
So on Election Day then, the people - even the more common people who could vote - did not have a presidential candidate's name on the ballot. Instead they voted for their local, elite elector, whom they must trust later to cast "a responsible" vote for president.
In that time, the only officials of the federal government who were elected by the people - the voters - were members of the House of Representatives. The Constitution even said members of the Senate would be elected by state legislators, and this wasn't changed until 1913. After the electors' election, those electors would meet on "the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December" to vote for a president.
If we're to be kind, we would believe that Hamilton and Madison would be horrified at how the Electoral College operates today - to thwart the will of a now educated and aware democracy. In fact, Hamilton became unhappy with how it worked even during his lifetime. He tried to correct it by writing an amendment that never passed.
And for all the times around the world that our democracy and Constitution have been used as models for fledgling countries, an electoral college was never built into any of those nations' frameworks. In every other democracy in the world, the popular vote elects the president. It's not called the popular vote in those countries. It's just called the vote.
Now that clinging to our outdated custom has twice in 16 years given us a president that we the people did not elect, there again are calls to update our system.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., introduced legislation last week to abolish the Electoral College and have presidential elections decided on the popular vote.
"In my lifetime, I have seen two elections where the winner of the general election did not win the popular vote," she said, referring to Clinton's Electoral College loss last week and Al Gore's Electoral College loss to George W. Bush in 2000. Both Clinton and Gore won the popular vote.
"The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it needs to change immediately," Boxer said. "Every American should be guaranteed that their vote counts."
Since the Electoral College system is enshrined in the Constitution, it could be all but impossible to eliminate. But the Constitution does give the states the right to allot delegates how they see fit, and to create the matrix by which those delegates vote. So, another way to make the Electoral College more democratic is at the state level, by changing the demands that each state puts on its delegates.
The National Popular Vote Bill already has been passed in enough states to represent 165 electoral delegates of the college, but to work it must be passed in enough states to warrant an Electoral College majority of 270 votes. That would make Alexander's and Madison's Electoral College irrelevant because the states' majority delegates would be bound to vote the way the nation did and therefore always reflect the popular vote.
But Change.org has still another idea - one more immediate. It is offering a petition that the electors of the 2016 Electoral College cast their ballots on this upcoming "first Monday after the second Wednesday in December" (Dec. 19) as they choose and vote for Clinton - even in the 24 states that prohibit "faithless electors."
"We are calling on the Electors to ignore their states' votes (because) Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his (impulsiveness), bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic. Secretary Clinton won the popular vote and should be President."
Regardless of what happens this December, the Electoral College's time to go is here.