The Electoral College has delivered an accidental president to the US, writes Garth le Pere.
The election of Donald Trump took me back to a term paper I had written on the problems with the American Electoral College system while an undergraduate at Rutgers University. The paper helped me decipher whether Clinton’s loss is really a failure of this system?
By last count, she led the popular vote by more than 1 million votes, which could easily double after the laborious process of ballot counting, results reviews, numbers reconciliation and certification is completed since the 50 states and their county structures differ markedly in their electoral rules and practices.
For example, as of November 11, more than a million mostly mailed ballots in Los Angeles County were yet to be counted.
This is because US does not have the equivalent of South Africa’s statutory Independent Electoral Commission with standard norms and procedures for the entire country. However, it is eloquent testimony to the dysfunctional nature of American democracy that Donald Trump will become the 45th president of the US because he got more than the requisite 270 Electoral College votes yet lost the popular vote.
There are arresting reviews about how Trump tapped into the visceral fears and anxieties of a disenchanted white working class.
Yet below the radar and largely ignored is how the Electoral College has become something of an anachronism and aberration since it does not, for example, take account of changing demographic and electoral realities.
And even though Trump has become an unthinkable and bizarre beneficiary of the system, it is ironic that in 2012 he described the Electoral College as a “disaster for democracy”.
The last time something similar happened was in 2000 when Democrat Al Gore was denied the Presidency by the Electoral College in favour of George W Bush.
Even though Gore beat Bush by more than 540 000 votes nationally, Bush got 271 electoral votes, compared to 266 for Gore.
This makes Clinton’s loss by such a wide margin even more egregious, especially since her margin is bigger than that which assured both John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon’s paths to the White House. But the cold reality is that she only got 232 electoral votes to Trump’s 306.
The moral of the story is that any candidate who does not win an outright majority of the popular vote (as is the case with Trump and Clinton) will be left to the vagaries of the Electoral College.
The personal animus which Trump and Clinton bore against each other to the detriment of serious policy issues certainly helped the Libertarian Gary Johnson, the Green Jill Stein, and Independent Evan McMullin garner more than 1 million votes.
This says much for President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories which he won by clear popular majorities.
Hence the reason the Electoral College remains highly contentious since it is grounded in an early historical process which the US Founding Fathers put in place to ensure a balanced outcome in presidential elections to offset the popular domination of electoral outcomes by bigger states with large voting populations.
The imperative was to strike a balance between a union of people and a union of states.
As a union of states, the Electoral College is made up of 538 electors based on party representation and strength in the US Congress: each state gets one elector in the House of Representatives of 438 members and two from the Senate of 100 members.
So what are some of the problems with this process that saw Trump beat the odds? There is extensive academic and popular literature which has examined its deficits but there is broad consensus on some critical issues:
In any presidential election, there are about 40 states which a candidate from either party knows for sure they cannot win or lose. An example would be California which Trump hardly bothered with since Clinton had it sewn up by 62 to 33 percent. These states are typically ignored as campaign stops in favour of “battleground” or “swing” states such as Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming.
These are states where candi-dates will devote great campaign energy and resources even if they need to play to established sectarian and parochial interests.
Florida is a case in point with a large population of retired voters, Cuban-Americans and orange-growing estates.
Any presidential hopeful who wishes to extend an olive branch to Cuba faces the prospect of losing Florida even though the US has had a long history of normal diplomatic relations with the former commu-nist Soviet Union and China.
The electoral arithmetic of 538 electoral votes is also said to be hostile to the very essence of the democratic one-person-one-vote principle since the electoral votes do not conform to the population distributions.
As a consequence, small states which are over-represented in the College could easily become part of the axis of “battleground” or “swing” states and hence exert inordinate influence on the outcomes of presidential elections.
This phenomenon clearly favoured Trump more than it did Clinton: it is brought into stark relief where a rural voter in Wyoming with a population of 584 000 exercises more than three times the electoral weight of an urban voter in California with a population of 39 million.
This problem is compounded by the arithmetic for apportioning electoral votes which is firmly embedded in the US Constitution and any attempt to amend it to the contrary will be fiercely contested.
These are simply snap-shot considerations of a much more complex electoral landscape but they are often ignored in the media frenzy to focus on the unlikely winner in this case.
Moreover, the critical normative question about Hillary Clinton representing the will of the Ameri-can people is also lost.
Ultimately and after re-reading my term paper, it seems to me that the inherent conundrums of Electoral College “capture” has delivered an “accidental president” called Donald Trump.
* Dr Le Pere is a visiting professor at the University of Pretoria.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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