Opinion | The Electoral College Is 'the Exploding Cigar of American ... - The New York Times

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Hey, it’s election season! Think about it: A year from now, we should know who the next president is going to be and …

Stop beating your head against the wall. Before we start obsessing over the candidates, let’s spend just a few minutes mulling the big picture. Really big. Today, we’re going to moan about the Electoral College.

Yes! That … system we have for actually choosing a president. The one that makes who got the most votes more or less irrelevant. “The exploding cigar of American politics,” as Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice called it over the phone.

Whoever gets the most electoral votes wins the White House. And the electoral votes are equal to the number of representatives and senators each state has in Washington. Right now that means — as I never tire of saying — around 193,000 people in Wyoming get the same clout as around 715,000 people in California.

It’s possible the system was quietly hatched as a canny plot by the plantation-owning Southerners to cut back on the power of the cities. Or it’s possible the founders just had a lot on their minds and threw the system together at the last minute. At the time, Waldman noted, everybody was mainly concerned with making sure George Washington was the first president.

Confession: I was hoping to blame the whole Electoral College thing on Thomas Jefferson, who’s possibly my least favorite founding father. You know — states’ rights and Sally Hemings. Not to mention a letter he once wrote to his daughter, reminding her to wear a bonnet when she went outside because any hint of the sun on her face would “make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.” But Jefferson was someplace in France while all this Electoral College stuff was going on, so I’m afraid it’s not his fault.

Anyway, no matter how it originally came together, we’ve now put the loser of the popular vote in office five times. Three of those elections were more than a century ago. One involved the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who won in 1876 even though the electoral vote was virtually tied and Samuel Tilden easily won the popular vote. But the Republicans made a deal with Southern Democrats to throw the election Hayes’s way in return for a withdrawal of federal troops from the South, which meant an end to Reconstruction and another century of disenfranchisement for Black voters in the South.

Really, every time I get ticked off about the way things are going in our country, I keep reminding myself that Samuel Tilden had it worse. Not to mention the Black voters, of course.

Here’s the real, immediate worry: Our current century is not even a quarter over and we’ve already had the wrong person in the White House twice. George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 — many of you will remember the manic counting and recounting in Florida, which was the tipping point state. (Gore lost Florida by 537 votes, in part thanks to Ralph Nader’s presence on the ballot. If you happen to see Robert Kennedy Jr. anytime soon, remind him of what hopeless third-party contenders can do to screw up an election.)

And then Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump decisively in the popular vote — by about 2.8 million votes, coming out ahead by 30 percentage points in California and 22.5 percentage points in New York. But none of that mattered when Trump managed to eke out wins by 0.7-point margins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, not to mention his 0.3-point victory in Michigan.

By the way, does anybody remember what Clinton did when she got this horrible news? Expressed her dismay, then obeyed the rules and conceded. Try to imagine how Trump would behave under similar circumstances.

OK, don’t. Spare yourselves.

Sure, every vote counts. But it’s hard not to notice that every vote seems to count a whole lot more if you happen to be registered in someplace like Michigan, where the margin between the two parties is pretty narrow. After her loss, Clinton did wonder how much difference it might have made if she’d taken “a few more trips to Saginaw.”

On the other side of the equation, Wyoming is the most Republican state, with nearly 60 percent of residents identifying with the G.O.P. and just about a quarter saying they’re Democrats. Nobody is holding their breath to see which way Wyoming goes on election night.

But if you’re feeling wounded, Wyoming, remember that presidential-election-wise, every citizen of Wyoming is worth almost four times as much as a Californian.

We are not even going to stop to discuss representation in the U.S. Senate, but gee whiz, Wyoming. You could at least show a little gratitude.

Nothing is going to happen to fix the Electoral College. Can you imagine trying to get a change in the Constitution that enormous? It was a long haul just to pass an amendment to prohibit members of Congress from raising their own pay between elections.

But we do at least deserve a chance to groan about it once in a while.

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