One “Man,” One Vote

It's been a while since the presidential elections. There have been many news cycles and the issue is quiet now, so it's a good time to address it. Donald Trump was elected president. But Hillary Clinton got more votes than he did. Neither got a majority. Neither had the trust of the American people. Yet the election and its results were the source of more passion than we have experienced in recent years. There have been protests and riots by Clinton supporters who refuse to accept Trump as their president. Assorted “hate-crimes” have been attributed to those who voted for Trump, and they're viewed as racists.

The media have echoed many of these accusations, and press coverage has often paralleled that during the campaign, with those who oppose the new administration continuing to find fault with the new president and his transition team. Despite the fact that it is moving faster than some of the previous administrations, they have accused it of failure to act and of poor performance and disunity in general. They made no such accusations when those they supported had been elected, and they didn't use the post-election period then as a time to sow discord among the electorate. That's not really much of a surprise in view of the idea that the first thing that a party (and its partisans) must do following an election I to begin preparations for the next election.

There's an important additional issue that the election has raised. Though the situation is not unique, there is much angst about a minority president. On four previous occasions (and this makes five although the vote discrepancy is the greatest now) we have elected a minority president (in this instance a “minority president” is defined as a candidate who has fewer votes than another candidate – there have been others in which the winner had a minority of the votes but had a plurality – Abraham Lincoln, for example, received only 39 percent of the popular vote in 1860 but nearly 60% of the electoral votes), although this happens for no other office. It results from the existence of the Electoral College, which occupies a disproportional part of the Constitution, and which was altered by the Twelfth Amendment. And while it interposes “electors” between the voters and the candidates, within each state the slate of electors is chosen by majority vote. The electors are free to vote for candidates other than those they claimed to support, but that has not happened. The system certainly puts the voter closer to the choice for leader than what exists in many other democracies – a selection by members of the winning party.

It's important to remember how we arrived at this system, and the history of our country tells us. We have a federal government (courtesy of the Federalists naturally) that represented the union of several pre-existing states that feared the loss of their significance when the new country was formed. Their advocates wanted assurance that the states would remain the representatives of their people and their territory. They believed that many decisions were best made locally. They didn't agree that “one size fits all.” James Madison's Electoral College was one of the mechanisms by which they retained authority locally – perhaps for the better. Were we to declare now that popular vote should be the decisor of presidential elections, the strength of the states would be significantly weakened, and large parts of the country would have little chance to meet with the candidates (and, indeed, the candidates would have little interest in most of the country) since their primary involvement would be in the large cities. The majority would be of much greater concern then the minority.

And that raises another question: What is our responsibility to minorities? We certainly emphasize the view that the majority should not be able to impose its will on those minorities in which we find ourselves, or with which we identify. We're sensitive to cultural and economic differences – even if we deny any differences among our “majority” citizens. We've even ascribed “minority” status to women, who are in the majority. The term, and the concept of protection of minorities, have come to be more issues of politics than anything else. And in the process we have chosen to take our stand for majority “rights” on a political issue – a constitutional one – as we reject it otherwise. We favor minority rights as long as they are beneficial to us or to our philosophy.

As I noted, in all likelihood by the time this essay is published the Electoral College will not be among the most important matters we're considering. There won't be many Google^® searches for it. However if the concept is wrong, it is wrong even between election cycles, and it is worthy of debate before it becomes an point of contention once again. But if we decide to eliminate it, with the consequent strengthening of the federal system and the weakening or elimination of any significance of individual states, we should consider the results of such an act. A nation in which a dirt farmer and a banker, a Hollywood movie star and a Detroit mechanic, a retiree in Florida and an entrepreneur in Alaska, are all treated identically and with indistinguishable expectations and obligations, may not be the answer to our problems.

One man one vote is sacrosanct, but in many ways it's insufficient.




November 17, 2016