In response to Donald Trump’s unexpected triumph over Hillary Clinton, in which he won the electoral yet lost the popular vote, many have taken to denouncing the electoral college as undemocratic. The frustration ranges from the New Republic’s fuming “How the Terrible, Skewed, Anachronistic Electoral College Gave Us Trump” to Vox’s petulant “Why the Electoral College is the Absolute Worst.” On the surface, this indignation makes sense. Indeed, intuitively it seems to go without saying that when it comes to an election, whoever gets the most votes should win. End of story. And yet, somehow, this wasn’t the case.
The knee-jerk reaction is of course to condemn the institution, to write it off as but another antiquated vestige dreamt up by powdered wig-wearers of another era. To insist that it has no relevance to contemporary politics, and that we should replace it with a more modern system, one that’s inherently more democratic and insures the integrity of the Presidency against populist whims and reckless demagoguery. However, to do so would be unnecessary. As it turns out, those wily wig wearers spent a great deal of time worrying about this very issue and, like with many contemporary problems, devised a system to account for it centuries ago. This system, is of course, the Electoral College.
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