The Electoral College Has and Will Kill Untold Thousands
Invented ostensibly to preserve democracy, the Electoral College now only serves to irreparably doom it.
Perhaps you’ve seen one of umair haque’s latest headlines over the weekend — Hello? America? Is Anyone in Charge of This Sinking Ship? Now before I answer his question, I need to address a few things — namely, that as a foreigner living in a foreign land, umair haque is an outsider looking in. He’s not privy to context and nuances that are going on — always important for understanding truth behind news, and indeed the complete failure to appreciate such context and nuance is the major reason America has fallen behind the coronavirus curve to begin with. For example, Colorado — you might even call it “America’s South Korea” — implemented a partial reopening ahead of even Trump’s May 1 mandate, confident the peak is either behind them or the curve flattened enough to handle it. It’s easy to write this off as just another Republican governor blunder — but the engineer behind the state’s “Safer at Home” strategy, the state’s Governor Jared Polis, is a Democrat. And in a gay marriage, with his husband being a major animal welfare activist. And banned the death penalty completely within the state days after ordering a statewide shutdown. Hardly sounds like a mainline GOP right-winger. Not to say that Polis hasn’t committed his fair share of pandemic blunders either, namely a delayed state-wide shutdown that has not only prolonged this eventual shutdown (the state could’ve reopened earlier in April!) but a staunch, adamant, inexplicable and all too literally fatal refusal to shutdown the ski areas, state border-hopping travel hotspots that indeed have been identified as the “patient zero” epicenter for the pandemic in the state (if only he’d ordered these ski resorts specifically to close down immediately, Colorado may very well have been virtually pandemic-free instead of a strong hotspot — which will be explored in a future article). On the other hand you have Iowa, a state that has refused to shut down at all and has paid dearly for it.
Part of the answer to umair haque’s question is that the individual states of the United States are indeed semi-autonomous, at least semi-sovereign states as not only defined by but also explicitly protected as such by the Constitution. This works both good and bad during the pandemic: Trump can’t order them to reopen early, but neither he nor anyone else can order individual states to remain shutdown or to shutdown at all. The good-and-bad isn’t just something that’s come up during the pandemic either; it’s a major contributor and root cause of the American Civil War and the perpetuation of the “institution” of slavery, and the legacy of the original, pre-Constitutional Articles of Confederation, which the Confederate States of America indeed effectively sought to restore, still endures in the form of the castration of federal powers. But that’s a partial answer, itself within a microcosm requiring more understanding of nuance and context than what’s appropriate for the scope of this article. The larger answer lies in a more or less unique institution the United States employs to choose its chief executive in the first place — the Electoral College.
An institution that has now become responsible for killing untold thousands and will continue to do so, far beyond the scope of the pandemic, until it’s finally done away with.
So what is the Electoral College, exactly? Most basically, it’s a college (or assembly) of people designated as delegates whom will pledge to vote in accordance to the recorded popular vote of their state. Sounds confusing? Good, it means you’re keeping up. Or in other words, if a state is participating in a national election, and the people who bother to show up and vote record more votes for a Democratic candidate than a Republican one, the Electoral College delegates for that state will say they will also vote for that Democratic candidate. This is an important distinction — usually the Electoral College delegates will indeed vote for whom they say they’ll pledge to vote for, and deviating is exceptionally rare (or at least according to “common knowledge”), but it has happened in the past. It has happened most prominently once in American national history, so long ago it has faded from the national memory from all but those who insist on being hardcore political history buffs (a hobby I very strongly recommend you pick up, especially now — perhaps if more people were into this hobby, we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in right now). Its occurrence at the state level or during primary elections (which while technically national affairs are usually treated and perceived as state-wide issues) is more nebulous and unclear, due in part to how spread out the primary election tends to be and how individual states hold them (the right to inconsistency is apparently one of those highest-cherished states’ rights), but also due to a simple lack of reporting and keeping tabs, in turn due simply to culturally-imbued apathy and a lack of care. It is for this reason why many cry foul over Joe Biden — who is very questionable regarding how he actually represents the best interests of the Democratic Party and its voting bloc — was declared the de facto representative of the entire party over the likes of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, each of which are much more in-line with not only what the party is supposed to stand for but the clear wishes of its actual voters.
But that is still not the most egregious sin of the Electoral College. That sin — and the definitive answer to umair haque’s question — would be foistering upon us the administration of Donald J. Trump — against the clear wishes of the majority voting public, and awarding us with a President who may very well continue to doom us all.
Explaining this sin requires explaining a bizarre quirk of how the Electoral College determines who the President is, and how the greater population doesn’t necessarily determine this, or indeed how the states with the greatest number of Electoral votes do not determine the Presidential election — by (fatal) design. The “common knowledge” explanation is that the Electoral College is the greatest defense put in place against “mob rule” — to prevent an unabashed populist who simply says the right things in order to get elected from actually being elected. The only problem is, the Electoral College has allowed exactly that, and in the process cemented the greatest argument for its own permanent banishment.
This theory comes from a long-standing theory that has woven itself into the very foundation of the government of the United States itself — that the minority needs an equal voice. Make no mistake, this is exceptionally important — when applied to literal minorities; racial minorities, sexual minorities, and yes, women, despite the fact that women traditionally make up approximately half the population by “natural” design (and by an overwhelming accounts actually make up a slim numerical majority). But the “minorities” the Electoral College is designed to protect includes none of that. These are sheer population minorities determined by state — numerically small numbers of registered inhabitants in states like: Wyoming; Kansas; Montana; the Dakotas, as so on. States that make up large swaths of geographic landmass but small numbers of actual population.
States that are traditionally overwhelmingly right-wing.
Not only that, but the Electoral College ends up giving disproportionate power to individual counties (for those not familiar with the United States, the geopolitical counterpart to parishes, or small political sub-divisions within states). This is how individual pockets of population can turn states like Wisconsin or Michigan “red” even though their largest population centers, namely Michigan’s Detroit, are thoroughly dyed “blue.”
The end result is a system that can only be fairly described as “completely out-of-whack” and acting in the exact opposite interests of its majority population. In trying to protect a voting minority (of sheer population that incidentally happens to be overwhelmingly white, right-wing and corporate-friendly, not a racial, sexual or gender-minority) it awards that minority a frighteningly disproportionate amount of power, and the entire nation and indeed world has paid a dire price for it. No greater evidence of the very threat that the Electoral College now represents can be found than in how a slim minority, 49% of the population, is responsible for giving the world Donald J. Trump as the leader of the United States and his continuously failing policies.
In other words, the Electoral College isn’t just obsolete, it’s very literally dangerously obsolete.
Even still with this overwhelming evidence that tens of thousands of Americans have paid for with their very lives and millions more, if not the literal entirety of the country, have paid for with their quality of life, many still continue to defend this obscene institution.
This video by CGP Grey certainly hasn’t aged well, given how it richly defends an institution now directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and will continue to do so for the duration of its very existence.
The common arguments for keeping the now deadly obscenity that is the Electoral College is as follows:
It protects the minority. Again, it protects a very specific minority that does not deserve to be protected in the first place. It very explicitly does not protect any racial, ethnic, gender or sexual minorities but rather protects a “minority” defined strictly in accordance to state population. This has allowed rich corporate interests to exploit this function to give states or individual counties disproportionate power, usually specifically to counter the fair representation of actual racial, ethnic, gender and sexual minorities; as witnessed at the state-wide level with such sparely, overwhelmingly wealthy, right-wing white-populated states as Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Kansas and Oklahoma; and at the county-level with certain counties effectively politically hijacking Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and many others, even with many “blue” states like Colorado either slowly recovering from such hijacking or states that even include California being in extreme danger of such hijacking. The extreme yet logical end result of this is the so-called “Southern Strategy;” or, how the Republican Party figured out that the path to power involves courting racism, explicit neo-Nazism, and continuously dividing the entire population of the country for gained power in accordance to that old adage, “divide and conquer”. The Electoral College protects money, the wealthy, the inherently politically influential and even outright unabashed racists and neo-Nazis, not actual minorities.
It gives all the states equal say, regardless of population. This just illustrates how the United States culturally worships states’ rights over everything else, including over those of the individual. As I just mentioned, the Electoral College not only gives disproportionate rights to low-population states (that tend to be majority white and wealthy anyway), but gives a clear means for corporate and fascist interests to exploit that population in order to gain power, at the explicit expense of the rest of the population. The Electoral College actively rewards exploitation of low-population states and counties to further the ends of not only corporate interests, but fascist interests intelligent enough to exploit this population, of which there are many in both cases.
It prevents an inherently unfit person running strictly on a populist ticket from being awarded the Presidency. No other damning evidence in contrary of this exists than the very Presidency of President Number 45, Donald J. Trump — a man who has not only doomed his nation by how he handled the COVID-19 pandemic, but advised his populace to protect themselves from this pandemic by literally injecting themselves with bleach; has explicitly taken on as a de facto cabinet member an entire news organization dedicated to a very specific brand of populism that is explicitly ethnocentric, ethnophobic and outright praising of genocidal policies, and in fact has taken on to favor a second news network even more extreme in its populist-based avocation of such ethnocentric and genocidal policies and opinions; a President who nearly started a major regional war based strictly on the belief that popularity demanded it; and a President who just thought it was a good idea to stare directly into the sun. The Electoral College may have been well-intentioned in preventing the election of a populist President exploiting said populism to get elected and spread fascism, anti-democracy and harm; but the Electoral College ended up being the very instrument of achieving exactly that, proving its own literally dangerous obsolescence and indeed it being an outright obscenity to the principal of Democracy and global welfare itself.
Therefore, the only rational conclusion possible is that the Electoral College has failed itself in allowing Donald Trump to even become President, against the explicit wishes of the majority of the voting public. There cannot be any possible refutation of the Electoral College being a dangerous obscenity of an institution; it must be done away with, for the good of the country, the world, and the entirety of the human race to ensure its very survival. Arguing for the continuation of the Electoral College is to risk the perpetuation of the very problems that doom the United States to a failed state; to outright kill democracy and its very people; to outright say that literally dangerously obsolete political traditions, the propping up of wealth and disproportionate, unfair influence and indeed even genocidal ethnocentrism and fascism are far more important than the actual institutions of democracy and the very lives of the people that democracy is meant to serve. We are currently witnessing the unfortunate logical extreme conclusions of the Electoral College play out in real time, and killing tens of thousands of Americans and democracy itself in the process.
Clearly, the only moral and democratic choice is to bring the Electoral College to a permanent end.
