The counting is not quite over in the US presidential election but it looks as if Donald Trump won a comfortable majority in the Electoral College but Hillary Clinton won 200,000 or so more votes nationwide. How can this be? It’s because of how the Electoral College works.<\/p>\n
The President is not elected directly by the voters but by an Electoral College representing each state on the basis of a combination of the number of members in the Senate (two for each state regardless of size) and the number of members in the House of Representatives (roughly proportional to population). The District of Columbia, which has no voting representation in Congress, has three Electoral College votes. In effect, therefore, the Presidential election is not one election but 51.<\/p>\n
The total Electoral College vote is 538. This means that, to become President, a candidate has to win at least 270 electoral votes. The voting system awards the Electoral College votes from each state to delegates committed to vote for a certain candidate in a “winner take all” system, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska (which award their Electoral College votes according to Congressional Districts rather than for the state as a whole).<\/p>\n
This system of election means that a candidate can win the largest number of votes nationwide but fail to win the largest number of votes in the Electoral College and therefore fail to become President. Indeed, in practice, this has happened four times in US history: 1876, 1888, 2000 and now 2016.<\/p>\n
If this seems strange (at least to non-Americans), the explanation is that the ‘founding fathers’ who drafted the American Constitution did not wish to give too much power to the people and so devised a system that gives the ultimate power of electing the President to members of the Electoral College. The same Constitution, however, enables each state to determine how its members in the Electoral College are chosen and since the 1820s states have chosen their electors by a direct vote of the people. The United States is the only example in the world of an indirectly elected executive president.<\/p>\n
In the event that the Electoral College is evenly divided between two candidates or no candidate secures a majority of the votes, the constitution provides that the choice of President is made by the House of Representatives and the choice of Vice-President is made by the Senate. In the first case, the representatives of each state have to agree collectively on the allocation of a single vote. In the second case, each senator has one vote.<\/p>\n
Clearly the Electoral College is utterly inappropriate to the modern age and it has delivered the ‘wrong’ result in two of the last four elections. Opinion polls show substantial support for a direct presidential election. So the system should be changed, right? It won’t be though because a change will require an amendment to the US Constitution and, in the current divisive political situation of the USA, any substantive change to the Constitution is effectively impossible to achieve.<\/p>\n
Of course, the Constitution could be changed \u2013 but this is really difficult. First, a proposed amendment has to secure a two-thirds vote of members present in both houses of Congress. Then three-quarters of the state legislatures have to ratify the proposed change (this stage may or may not be governed by a specific time limit). Even the Equal Rights Amendment failed to meet these thresholds after a 10 year process.<\/p>\n
There have been 27 amendments to the US Constitution (although one was simply a repeal of another). The first 10 amendments \u2013 constituting the Bill of Rights \u2013 were taken together shortly after the drafting of the original Constitution. Of the other 17 (effectively 16), one was the abolition of slavery, but this took half a century and a bloody civil war. Other amendments brought about woman\u2019s suffrage (1920) and votes for those aged 18 (1971), but these were simply measures introduced about the same time in other democratic states.<\/p>\n
My proposition is that any constitutional change that is controversial \u2013 for instance, longer terms for Congressmen or strong controls on election expenditure or effective controls on gun ownership or abolition of the Electoral College\u2013 is effectively \u00a0impossible to achieve. This makes the US Constitution the oldest and most inflexible in the world and in large part explains why the US political system is dysfunctional and will remain so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The counting is not quite over in the US presidential election but it looks as if Donald Trump won a comfortable majority in the Electoral College but Hillary Clinton won 200,000 or so more votes nationwide. How can this be? It’s because of how the Electoral College works. The President is not elected directly by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20619"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20623,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20619\/revisions\/20623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}