What if the electoral college robs us of democracy again?

As I’m writing this, it’s 3am on the East Coast of the United States. Donald Trump just went on television to falsely declare an entirely premature, baseless victory, falsely claiming that his side was “winning everything” until something was mysteriously “called off”. He’s doing what he’s been telling us he would do for weeks: disrupting the election and standing in the way of the democratic process. And what tool do we have at our disposal to fight back? On what thin ice does American democracy rest on?

The useless, sinfully flawed, common-sense-defying electoral college. 

Currently, 65,814,940 votes have been cast in favour of Joe Biden, according to The New York Times’s real-time tracker, versus 64,157,530 votes for Trump. That means Biden currently has over a million more than Trump, and yet his potential path to victory looks fragile.

Why? Because the US is not a democracy. It doesn’t even try to look like one.

The phrase “silent majority” is most often used in the US to refer to conservatives who aren’t represented in the public discourse, and – the implication goes – in the country’s political life. We owe the term to Richard Nixon, who used it in 1969 to urge Americans to support the war effort in Vietnam. It has since been revived in the context of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and of course, Trump’s. Its meaning has been slightly amended to fit the times, but at its core, it still points to the same idea: that of a quiet, mostly white, mostly rural conservative group, always in the background while a minority of vocal progressives claim they represent everyone.

Since the 2016 election results, Trump supporters have often referred to themselves as the “silent majority”. This, despite the fact that they weren’t a majority (Trump lost the popular count by 2.8 million), nor silent (huge flags with the words “F**k Your Feelings” printed in large white letters didn’t exactly qualify as “silent”).

But that doesn’t mean we should retire the term entirely. There is a silent majority in the US. It’s just not the one we keep hearing about. The real silent majority is made up of the 60 to 70 percent of Americans who hold progressive stances on core issues such as reproductive rights, gun ownership, and the minimum wage – and who keep getting erased by none other than the electoral college.

In case you need a refresher on the electoral college, here are the basics: The US president is picked not based on how many votes they get in total across the country (the “popular vote”) but on how many “electoral votes” a candidate gets. Each state gets a different number of electoral votes. There are 538 votes in total across the 50 states, and the magic number – how many electoral votes a candidate needs in order to become president – is 270. (Watch cable news on election night and those numbers will be burnt onto your retinae forever.) Five times in American history, and twice in the 2000s, a president has been elected despite losing the popular vote.

But here’s the thing about the US: It is, by and large and mostly secretly, a progressive country. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the numbers. Seventy-one percent of Americans believe Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court decision making abortion legal across the US, shouldn’t be overturned, according to a 2018 poll by NBC news and The Wall Street Journal. Sixty-three percent of American adults favor making tuition at public colleges free as of February 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. Seventy-three percent support an energy policy focusing on alternative sources such as solar and wind power. Two thirds want to raise the federal minimum wage. A whopping 70 percent support Medicare for All. Sixty-two percent approve of labor unions, 78 percent don’t own a gun, and 75 percent believe immigration is a good thing for the country.

In other words, most Americans want to live in a country that doesn’t resemble a bad South Park episode. They’re just not getting heard.

And why is that? Well, a long, long time ago – in 1787, to be exact – a group of men gathered in Philadelphia and made a bunch of decisions that make little sense in today’s world. The way the story goes, the idea behind the electoral college was for the president and vice president to be chosen by the better informed, relatively independent electors. Slavery played an important part in shaping the system.

Two centuries later, the US has yet to get rid of the electoral college, despite the fact that it serves no purpose in the modern world. Voters certainly have more information available on their presidential candidates now than they did in the 18th century. It turns out that decisions made in 1787 don’t really hold up 233 long years later.

More than half of the world’s democracies pick their leader through a popular vote. But the US has yet to move away from an antiquated system which often prevents the person who most people in the country voted for from becoming their leader. This is mainly because doing so would require a Constitutional amendment — which would have to be a bipartisan effort. And why would conservatives, who largely benefit from the current, less democratic system, move to change it?

And so the circus returns every four years, and Florida, Texas, and other battleground states become central to an election which is supposed to represent the whole country. Another world is possible. We just can’t access it because the system keeps circling back in on itself, trapping us further away from true democracy. Haven’t you heard? It’s 2020. We can’t have anything nice.