Electoral College: Why The Popular Vote Doesn’t Win The U.S. Presidential Election
The Electoral College that was put in place by America’s Founding Fathers is getting quite a bit of attention at the moment. The reason for this is because Donald Trump, president-elect of the 2016 election, beat his competition, Hillary Clinton, easily with the Electoral College system, despite Clinton winning the popular vote, meaning she received more overall votes than Trump.
Most of the time, the popular vote and votes cast by the Electoral College method go hand-in-hand in granting a candidate the U.S. presidential victory.
USA Today reports that there have been only five times in American history when a candidate won the election without winning the popular vote. Trump is obviously the most recent case, followed by George W. Bush in 2000, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and John Quincy Adams in 1824. All of these instances, despite what the Democrats are now saying, are legitimate wins under the system the Founding Fathers put in place: the system of the Electoral College.
Why does the Electoral College exist if it can’t even take into account the popular vote 100 percent of the time? It’s a legitimate question that involves a bit of history to understand.
According to History Central, there are two reasons the U.S. voting system is different from other similarly governed countries.
“The first purpose was to create a buffer between population and the selection of a President. The second as part of the structure of the government that gave extra power to the smaller states.”
It all centers around the states in relation to the country as a whole. Some states have a bigger population than others. The lifestyle of the people living in one state might be completely different from the way people choose to live in a neighboring state, and these are the types of things that were taken into consideration when the Electoral College was established.
America’s founders did not want to be ruled by a corrupt government, which is largely why they decided to leave their home countries and find better lives on a different land. Simply put, they wanted to be free, which is why they did everything in their power to stay away from creating a tyrannical governmental power, and part of their strategy in preventing such a system was implementing the Electoral College.
The Founding Fathers saw that electors would act as a buffer zone between the people and the candidates and help to eliminate the threat of fraud and/or any rigging. They wanted to avoid giving Americans the ability to directly choose their president, and the Electoral College did this by giving the outcome of the popular vote zero importance.
So, if you were to ask the men who formed the building blocks of the government Americans know today about Donald Trump’s win, they would no doubt say the winner of the popular vote is inconsequential, as it was purposely discounted when building the framework for presidential elections.
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The Electoral College ensures that each state gets a fair say in who wins the presidency. The number of Congress representatives in a given state is equal to the number of electoral votes that state is granted. If your state elects three members to Congress, it supplies three electoral votes in the election.
In theory, if the U.S. declared the winner as whoever wins the popular vote, citizens living in states with the largest populations would play a huge part in electing the winner, which isn’t fair to the rest of the country, and this unfairness was something the Founding Fathers wanted to avoid.
Some of the people who are angry about Donald Trump winning are arguing that it’s not “democratic” to allow the loser of the popular vote to win the election, but America isn’t a democracy. It’s a republic, and there’s a difference.
That’s why, during the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance we say, “and to the Republic, for which it stands,” instead of, “and to the Democracy, for which it stands.”
A democracy is all about “majority rule,” according to albatrus.org. Where there is straight democracy, there can be no liberty unless laws are in place to preserve the rights of an individual.
“Whatever the majority says goes! A lynch mob is an example of pure democracy in action. There is only one dissenting vote, and that is cast by the person at the end of the rope.”
Specifically, the United States is a constitutional Republic, as there is a written constitution that acts as the law of the land and functions as a way to prevent the government from having too much power while putting the individual citizen’s rights above the will of the majority. Hence, the example given of a “lynch mob” cannot legally occur in a republic society.
In a republic, you as a single person have more rights than the whole of the population that lives around you. If you’re suspected of a crime and everyone thinks you did it, the fact that the majority believes you’re guilty does not mean you will be put in prison, as you, the individual, have the right to a free trial.
The electoral college was constructed with the aspects of a constitutional republic, where the majority do not rule, in mind, and that’s why the popular vote matters not in the United States presidential election. It’s a system that was designed to work exactly as it did work when Donald Trump won the presidential election on November 8, 2016.
[Featured Image by Mark Makela/Getty Images]
