The very fact that America got a civics lesson this year on the Electoral College – and how pointless it is since it doesn’t work as it was designed – is just further proof that this outdated mechanism should go away.
State by state and in the District of Columbia, electors gathered Monday to officially decide who will be the next president. Yet in about half of those jurisdictions, state law already overrides the original intent of the framers who dreamed up the Electoral College to keep ordinary voters from making a mistake and electing a unfit demagogue (or, in the framers’ time, from electing abolitionists). In half of the states – count Tennessee as one – electors are bound by state law to vote for the candidate whose party carried the state.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton won the popular ballot – the ordinary people vote – by nearly 3 million votes. By the way, that made Trump the worst-performing winner in the popular vote since 1876, according to both CNN and Fox News. But it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter because the Electoral College – a cruel anachronism for a time when fake news fanned by a white nationalist candidate whose only truth was and is what he wants it to be, along with Russian election interference – handed the election to the very kind of demagogue that Alexander Hamilton so presciently foresaw.
Raucous protesters at many statehouses Monday braved the brutal cold that grips the country, putting exclamation points on the deep divisions that emerged during the campaign. And though those protesters didn’t make the difference in the election, they did make a difference.