After the 2016 presidential election, CNN’s headline read, “It’s official: Clinton swamps Trump in popular vote.” Clinton won 48.6% versus Trump’s 46.1%. Yet Trump won where it mattered: in the Electoral College process. Election fraud? Meet the Electoral College. Former Senator Barbara Boxer lamented at the time, “This is the only office in the land where you get more votes and still lose the presidency.” We are the only democracy in the world that does not hold direct elections for president. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden won Pennsylvania by a 1.17% margin, yet all 19 electoral votes were cast for Biden. Welcome to the presidential elections, brought to you by the Electoral College, where, in 48 winner-take-all states, your vote may not count. In Pennsylvania, the 48% who did not vote for Biden? Sorry! All the electoral votes went to Biden. In 2016, 2.9 million more people voted for Clinton than Trump, but where it mattered, in the Electoral College process, Clinton lost, 304 to 227. Now that’s a steal.
Both the Trump and Harris campaigns know that the presidential playing field is not level, it is why Trump and his minions were pressuring Nebraska, as one of only two states that do not award all of its electoral votes to the plurality winner, to change to winner-take-all. It is why they both are campaigning in the swing states whose electoral votes are so crucial. Our individual votes may not count, but our state electoral votes are of paramount importance. Trump capitalized on this Electoral College process in 2016, and one assumes the Harris campaign learned from Clinton’s 2016 hard electoral lesson. This legal, constitutional system effectively disenfranchises voters, 2.9 million nationwide in 2016, millions in Pennsylvania in 2020. The Electoral College system is archaic and unequal, it is time to go. It is time to catch up to the rest of the free world and hold direct elections for president; one person, one vote. Before it’s too late. Clinton accepted the results of the Electoral College process that named Trump the winner. Can one imagine how Trump’s MAGA supporters would react should Trump win the popular vote, but Harris outfoxes him (as he outfoxed Clinton) and wins in the Electoral College? So while Trump continues to sow unfounded seeds of doubt about voter integrity, ominously warning us that any election that he loses is stolen, the irony (and travesty) is that we have an outdated constitutional electoral system in place that can do just that.