original article from: The New Yorker
Trump’s Presidency, and the risk that it will recur despite his persistent unpopularity, reflects a deeper malignancy in our Constitution that must be addressed.
In 1961, Estes Kefauver, the crusading Democratic senator from Tennessee, denounced the Electoral College as “a loaded pistol pointed at our system of government.” Its continued existence, he said, as he opened hearings on election reform, created “a game of Russian roulette” because, at some point, the antidemocratic distortions of the College could threaten the country’s integrity. Judging from Twitter’s obsessions, at least, that hour may be approaching. The polls indicate that Donald Trump is likely to win fewer votes nationally than Joe Biden this fall, just as he won fewer than Hillary Clinton, in 2016. Yet Trump may still win reëlection, since the Electoral College favors voters in small and rural states over those in large and urban ones.
LEFT VIEWPOINTS
- The Electoral College was created as a compromise because southern slave states wouldn’t have a say in presidential elections.
- Many of the people who lived in the southern states when the country was founded were slaves. Slaves couldn’t vote. To “solve” this problem, the founding fathers adopted the three-fifths compromise, where slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of electoral representation.
- Because we still use the Electoral College we have presidential candidates only campaigning in swing states. States that are decisively red or blue are ignored.
- Because a presidential candidate can lose, despite a large majority in the popular vote, the biggest concerns that face the majority of Americans often do not get addressed.