Transcript for Your Wasted Vote

Few governmental structures are more maligned – and misunderstood – than the electoral college – probably because it does not have a football team. The matter is clouded further by political parties that exploit those misunderstandings when it advances their cause to do so.

In recent decades, pundits have confounded the issue by citing how many times a president has won a deciding number of electoral college votes but lost the popular vote, suggesting that the process is undemocratic, while ignoring the fact that the popular vote does not have a constitutional bearing on the election of the president.

If you have been paying attention, you would notice that the folks pushing the elimination of the electoral college are Democrats or presumed Democrats. This does not mean that Democrats are evil or are hatching a secret plot to take over the country. Well, the second part might be true, but not more so for Democrats than Republicans. Each party demonstrates collective narcissistic psychopathy in turn.

Back to the point: It is advantageous for Democrats to advocate for the elimination of the electoral college because the numbers work in their favor. Historically, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans. Choosing a president from a national popular vote would nearly guarantee that a Republican does not see the oval office again. Thus it makes sense that Democrats lobby against the electoral college, decrying it as ‘undemocratic’ and the Republicans lobby for the electoral college, citing its constitutionality. You can be sure if the numbers were reversed, so would be their positions.

In 2000, the Democrats were preparing a campaign to advocate for the electoral college system when it appeared that Al Gore would win the electoral college vote and lose the popular vote. Then Al did something stupid and Dubya squeaked by on the hair of his chinny-chin-chin, and a little help from the U.S. Supreme Court.

The electoral college is not the problem. It is an ingenious solution to amplify the voice of sparsely populated states, and if you resided in one and were a member of a minority party, then you would see its advantages more clearly – and is not the zeitgeist to amplify the voices of the minority?

The problem with the current electoral system is not the so-called electoral college, it is the unbalanced apportionment of electoral votes. Of course, I do not need to tell you that, you were just thinking it.

As you are now well aware, forty-eight states employ the winner-take-all system: the candidate who receives the majority of votes, even if by a single vote, will be awarded all of the state’s delegates at the actual election for the president in December, thus rendering moot, pointless, and a complete waste of time the casting of ballots by voters in states where they represent a minority interest.

The forty percent of voters in California who vote Republican and the forty percent of voters in Florida who vote Democrat may as well skip the polling place and use that time to go fishing, play golf, or join the French Foreign Legion.

As you might expect, the winner-take-all system was implemented by politicians for the sake of expediency and advantage. To gain the maximum number of electoral votes for a state, one need only get more votes than the second place winner, rather than sharing the spoils with one’s competition.

Most states have used the winner-take-all system since 1824, when John Quincy Adams was advanced to the presidency despite not capturing the requisite electoral votes, or even the popular vote.

With the exception of Abraham Lincoln, the person in the role of president in the nineteenth century was entirely inconsequential to the lives of average Americans. The federal government had a minimal budget, only constitutionally mandated departments, and interfered little with the affairs of the several states, not counting that little kerfuffle in 1861.

The president’s primary responsibility was foreign policy; negotiating treaties, securing lines of credit from European banks, and fighting strategically unnecessary but profitable-for-somebody wars. The more things change.

Today’s federal government has intruded upon the lives of citizens more than the founders could have imagined, and the several nation-states have become little more than administrative districts of a central government. Subsequently, the role of president, though constitutionally unchanged since 1789, has grown to that of a nineteenth century European monarch, receiving the credit or blame for the happiness – or lack of thereof – for the 340,000,000 occupants of the country.

If we are to have a de facto monarchy, perhaps we could at least strive for a democratically elected monarchy that does not ignore the will of forty-nine percent of the voters.

The good news is that the winner-take-all system is not controlled by the petty, inefficient, organization of grown children we call the Congress. It is controlled by the states.

And that is the bad news. A serious, well-funded campaign must be undertaken in forty-eight states to evolve the selection of president to a democratic process from a mathematical step-function.

To award candidates a proportion of delegates based upon the popular vote would open the door to a legitimate third party option. If a candidate such as 1992’s Ross Perot or this year’s Bobby Kennedy Jr. were to win more than say, two percent of a state’s popular vote, then they would be awarded one or more electoral delegates. If this happened in multiple states, then a third party could begin to chip away at the major party candidates, and voters would start to see a third party as a viable option, instead of feeling forced to vote for the candidate who scares them the least.

But the residents of each state – Republican, Democrat, and otherwise, or as my brother calls them: Americans – must act and they must act with one voice. They must pressure their state legislators to recognize and realize – to make real – proper democracy and not the establishment façade their predecessors installed two hundred years ago.

2020 and 2024 are examples of what can happen when the population chooses to act. In 2020, eighty-one million people stood up and said, “No more!” to the frenetic and abusive presidency of Donald Trump. Fifteen million more people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 than for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

That unprecedented twenty-three percent increase in voters for a single candidate caused many people to suspect – and many still believe – massive voter fraud must have occurred. That could be a reasonable suspicion, if taken in a vacuum.

But something else occurred in 2020 that people overlook – the Republican candidate saw an eighteen percent increase in voters – also a record. If the Democrats instituted a voter fraud scheme, it was so prescient that it anticipated a record number of voters for the Republican candidate. If not, the margin of victory would have been so large that even the most skeptical observers would have suspected foul play.

Which is more likely? A fifty state voter fraud scheme generated tens of millions of fraudulent ballots and handed the presidency to Joe Biden or that the first Trump presidency was such a polarizing experience that an additional twenty-seven million people stood up to be counted, nearly half of whom voted for Donald Trump?

Presuming the latter, 2024 showed a dissipation of the animosity toward Donald Trump. He maintained his voting base and added one point five million people to his supporters. In contrast, the Democrat candidate dropped nearly nine million votes from the 2020 election.

Lacking a detailed analysis of voter behavior, the numbers in aggregate suggest that the people who showed up in 2020 to deliver a pink slip to Donald Trump stayed home in 2024 and let the chips fall where they may, not wanting to choose between Trump 2.0 and a historically weak Democrat candidate who could not muster a platform that would improve the four years of Joe Biden’s economic malaise. Additionally, Republicans flipped the Senate and held control of the House of Representatives.

The object lesson here is that when the people are motivated they can produce real and dramatic change. Never in history has the political pendulum ricocheted like it has during the last three elections. The secondary lesson, especially for political machinations, is that when the chips are down, the ability to provide for one’s family trumps contrived idealism.