How to improve the US electoral system?

There is global interest in the US Presidential elections, so much so that once President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania had remarked that the rest of the world should be allowed to vote in the US Presidential elections because of the constant barrage of information and updates by the media.

On November 3, US citizens cast their votes at the polling booths but millions had sent their votes through the mail according to a stipulated schedule. Till the writing of this opinion piece, the current incumbent in the office of the president has not conceded defeat and continues to find legal lacunae to contest the results.

Elections 2020 held more interest not just for the US voters but for the rest of the world too because of the mercurial nature of President Donald Trump, the massive havoc wreaked by the pandemic COVID-19, the recent divisive events like “Black Lives Matter” and the challenges to democratic norms. The US has never been as divisive as today perhaps that is the reason why the voter turnout and casting of votes has been one of the highest in contemporary history.

There were concerns over armed right-wing militias mobilizing if things don’t go their way on election day. It constrained the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, to rule out military involvement in any election dispute. Luckily there were no riots but tempers have been high on both sides of the divide.

US election system is complex and fraught with complications, which boggle the mind but necessitates revisiting since it is archaic and was adopted two centuries ago. There must be more capable legal minds than mine to examine its intricacies and recommend steps to improve the structure but here is my two cents’ worth.

A bird’s eye view of the electoral process reveals that elections in the US are held for government officials at the federal, state, and local levels. At the federal level, the nation’s head of state, the president, is elected indirectly by the people of each state, through an Electoral College. The anomaly rises over the weightage of the Electoral College over the popular vote.

The United States Electoral College is the group of presidential electors required by the Constitution to form every four years for the sole purpose of electing the president and vice president.

Each state appoints electors according to its legislature, equal in number to its congressional delegation but federal office holders cannot be electors. Of the current 538 electors, an absolute majority of 270 or more electoral votes is required to elect the president and vice president. If no candidate achieves an absolute majority there, a contingent election is held by the U.S. Congress to elect the president and vice president. Currently, the states and the District of Columbia use a statewide popular vote on Election Day in November to choose electors based upon how they have pledged to vote for president and vice president, with some state laws against faithless electors.

All jurisdictions use a winner-take-all method to choose their electors, except for Maine and Nebraska. They choose one elector per district and two electors for the ticket with the highest statewide vote. The electors meet and vote in December and the inauguration of the president and vice president takes place in January.

There was already a debate on the appropriateness of the Electoral College system. The supporters argue that it is a fundamental component of American federalism by preserving the Constitutional role of the states in presidential elections.

Since the USA comprises fifty states, each with its own system, it is the implementation by the states that leave it open to criticism; winner-take-all systems, especially in populous states, which do not follow the principle of “one person, one vote”.

Thus, a president may be elected who did not win the national popular vote, as occurred in 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. Critics object to the inequity that due to the distribution of electors, individual citizens in states with smaller populations have proportionately more voting power than those in larger states.

This is because the number of electors each state appoints is equal in number to its congressional delegation; so each state is entitled to at least three regardless of population, and the apportionment of the statutorily fixed number of the rest is only roughly proportional. In addition, faithless electors may not vote in accord with their pledge. Another criticism is that instead of spending equally on each voter in the nation, candidates focus their campaigns on just a few swing states. Statistics of polling preferences according to a survey conducted by the PEW Research Center in March 2020 indicates that a direct popular vote for presidential elections is consistently favored by a majority, while the popularity of the Electoral College has hovered between 35 and 44% in the 21st Century.

When the system was envisaged by the founding fathers of the US, it was aimed at providing equality for the country. However, in the over 200 years since its creation, the demography of the states has undergone a change. Take the example of the Senate, where each state gets the same number of Senators. California with a population of 40 million is represented by two senators, as is Kansas with a population of 3 million, or Oklahoma with 4 million. And it is this skewed Senate which confirms nominees to the Supreme Court.

A grave issue, which has gained prominence in the past few years, is that the Constitution was written and composed when slavery prevailed. The diverse multi-ethnic citizens of the US comprise white settlers, who came first and then brought slaves to their agricultural tasks. The original ethnic race residing in the US was the Red Indians.

When the Constitution was formulated at the end of the 18th Century, the Electoral College inadvertently started with the bias of racism.

At that time, the Southern states primarily advocated for the electoral college system to preserve their political influence while maintaining the system of slavery. A large percentage of the South’s population was made up of (non-voting) enslaved people, which would have caused them to lose most presidential elections to the Northern states, which had a relatively equal population in numbers but a higher voting population.

The Electoral College, through its three-fifths compromise, enabled the Southerners to include slaves in its population without actually giving them the right to vote. It is noteworthy that a poor Indian peasant got the right to vote in 1950, before the black man did in the US in 1964.Among other apparent discrepancies, which give a tilt to white supremacy is the disproportionate representation of voters.

For example, under the Electoral College, voters in Wyoming have approximately one elector for every 200,000 citizens, while in California 700,000 voters share one elector. This means that the vote of a person in Wyoming is worth about 3.5 times as much as a person in California. This fact alone is concerning enough, but the racial makeup of each state must be considered as well. Approximately 92% of people in Wyoming are white, compared to only 37% in California. Through many different avenues, the Electoral College continues to disproportionately represent the population and give unfair weight to white voters.

Since elections 2020 came in the wake of the Pandemic COVID-19, a majority of voters opted to cast their ballots through mail. Because each state has a different time frame of deadline for the acceptance of the votes cast, it allowed President Donald Trump’s legal team to cast doubts and ask for recounts.

This is not the first time that elections “fraud” or “stolen elections” have been alleged. The 1876 presidential elections between Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes created a major rift, with each side claiming victory and accusing the other of fraud. Congressman Henry Watterson of Kentucky declared that an army of 100,000 men was prepared to march on Washington unless Tilden was declared President.

Since 1800, over 700 proposals to reform or eliminate the system have been introduced in Congress.

Proponents of these proposals argued that the electoral college system does not provide for direct democratic election, affords less-populous states an advantage, and allows a candidate to win the presidency without winning the most votes. None of these proposals have received the approval of two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states required to amend the Constitution.

The time now appears ripe to revisit the election system and the formulation of the Electoral College, as well as adopt a uniform code of conduct of elections for all states, if the US is to maintain its repute of being a champion of democracy.