Making sense of the U.S. election

To many of us in Sri Lanka, born and bred in the Westminster tradition of ‘One Man One Vote’, the Electoral College system of electing the President of the United States makes little sense. The USA is a country that prides itself as the cradle of democracy, condemning other systems of elections as inferior, authoritarian, even dictatorial. Proponents of the Electoral College claim, according to a Google search, that “the nationally popular system promotes political stability, preserves the Constitutional role of the states in presidential elections; and fosters a broad-based, enduring and generally moderate political party system”.

This theory does not seem to reflect the real problems of a system which was created in a bygone era with a vastly different political and racial climate. The Electoral College is not only unique to the United States, but the system is only used to elect the presidency, and is the only election in the US in which the candidate who gets the highest number of votes does not necessarily win. They have in 90% of the elections, proponents claim. But who can forget Trump won last time round after polling nearly three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.

The origin of the system is also unique in its purpose, which was hardly democratic. It was designed to ensure that the president of the United States would come from the then largest state, Virginia, and the slave states would be able to use their slave population to influence the election of the president. The Electoral College is made up of representatives of each of the 50 states, and the District of Columbia. When the American voter casts his ballot for his choice of the president, he is really voting for a candidate of his party in the state, known as an elector. There are 538 such electors nationwide, who then cast their votes for the president on behalf of the voters in the state.

These electors are chosen on the basis of the number of congressional districts in each state, plus two additional votes representing the state’s Senate seats. Washington D.C., though not a state, is also assigned three electoral votes. The total number of electoral votes is supposed to reflect the populations of these states; however, the least populous states, like the Dakotas and the states of New England tend to be over-represented because of the mandatory minimum of three votes for each state. The most populous states, like California, Texas and Florida are under-represented in the electoral college.

Also, the Electoral College operates on a winner-take-all system, where the candidate with a majority of votes in the election in each state is awarded all of that state’s electoral votes. As an example, Donald Trump won Florida in 2016 with a margin of 2.2% over Clinton, and claimed all of Florida’s 29 Electoral College votes. Two of the four presidential elections held in this century have resulted in the candidate who won the popular vote losing the presidency; Clinton beat Trump by 2.9 million national votes and Al Gore beat Bush by approximately 500,000 votes. If the archaic Electoral College had been retired to the dustbin of history, Democrats would have very likely had consecutive presidents for the past 20 years.

The election of Donald Trump with a minority vote proved to be a tragic outcome, not only for the United States, but also for the world outside. Trump has earned universal contempt, and relinquished America’s mantle as the Leader of the Free World. Strangely, the 2020 elections which are currently in progress shows that Trump’s popularity in the United States has not been overly diminished. Biden currently has a popular vote lead of over four million votes, but Trump has also exceeded the 60 million votes he received in 2016. To paraphrase one of our regular columnists who makes no secret of his hatred for Donald Trump, the demographic composition of American society has been undergoing rapid changes, and the “brown invasion” touted by Trump has made for a large swathe of white Americans fearful of losing the white privilege they had enjoyed for centuries.

Although the official result of the election will be known only sometime next week, Biden’s success, both in terms of the popular vote and the Electoral College, have been accepted. Though not by Trump, who has been ranting and tweeting that the election was a fraud and has been rigged. He has demanded recounts in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, which Biden has won fairly comfortably. He has already filed a slew of lawsuits contesting the election in many of the battleground states, some of which have admittedly been very close. He is also inciting his “militia” of white supremacists and the alt-right Proud Boys to post-election violence, which some alarmists have predicted would end in a second civil war.

The strange concept of a Lame Duck presidency, also unique to the United States, where the defeated president remains in office, with all the awesome powers of the presidency from the date his defeat is announced to the inauguration of the newly elected president on January 21, 2021, may cause unforeseen legal problems, even violence. A hostile Republican Senate, with a pliant six/three majority in the Supreme Court, will only help Trump in his efforts to subvert and destabilize the political process. Sri Lanka has also had sporadic instances of post-election violence in the past. But the violence which could be wrought in the USA, with private militia armed to the teeth with military style weapons, will make anything we have encountered in the past seem like a walk in the park.