Half a century ago, the famed presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns voiced this warning about the Electoral College: “It’s a game of Russian roulette, and one of these days we are going to blow our brains out.” We’ve since done that twice. Popular vote loser George W.
Bush marched us into a disastrous war in Iraq, based on lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. But he was just the appetizer. The execrable entree was popular vote loser Donald Trump, who’s still wreaking havoc and plotting an authoritarian restoration.
I’m well aware it’s a waste of time to rail against the insipid way we pick our presidents – we’re obviously stuck with a process that was rightly denounced by the American Bar Association decades ago as “archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous” – but this is my quadrennial complaint. And it’s been stoked anew by all the reminders that the Harris-Trump contest will be decided by a mere seven of the 50 states. If life was fair and democracy was real, all votes would be created equal.
That’s how it works in most western nations, where the candidate with the most votes wins. What a simple concept. Instead we have this ridiculous contrivance, a remnant of the racist powdered-wig era, which currently gives the voters of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina more clout than all other voters everywhere else.
At last check, 65 percent of Americans feel t.
