Keeping American democracy at bay

Public opinion polls in the United States consistently have President Donald Trump trailing Democratic challenger Joe Biden by an average of four per cent, in some cases as high as seven — so everything points to a change of Government in November. Right?

Wrong.

This is not to say that Biden won’t win, but simply polling the voting choices of individual Americans is not the way to predict the outcome of this election.

Trump could still be four points, even seven points behind in the popular vote on Election Day and still retain the presidency by a handy margin.

The reason lies in one of the strangest indirect systems of choosing a leader that has been devised — the Electoral College.

Americans may think they are voting for either Trump or Biden, but in fact they are voting for a member of this Electoral College in their State who may, in turn, vote for their choice — or not.

These electors, equalling the number of seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives for their particular State, will meet about a month later and their votes, and their votes alone, decide the presidency.

It would not be so bad if their voting pattern reflected that of the electorate at large, but sometimes it doesn’t. This is because no matter how close the race is in their state they cast all their votes for the candidate that finished ahead.

Whether that margin was just by a handful of votes, or by a landslide, it does not matter. In all but two of the states, the votes of the Electoral College are delivered on a winner-takes-all basis.

So it is easy to see how a candidate that won a plurality by small majorities in a significant number of States can defeat the candidate that won other States by big margins that puts them ahead on the overall national vote.

It happened in 2016 when Hillary Clinton gained 65.8 million votes to Trump’s 62.9 million, and was still beaten, quite handily in the Electoral College 304-227.

It has been argued countless times since about how the pollsters got it wrong. They didn’t. Their predictions were spot on.

The problem was that they were asking individuals how they would vote when the election was going to be decided by other means. They were comparing apples with oranges.

How has this potentially undemocratic way of choosing a leader in what is supposed to be the world’s greatest democracy come about?

To understand it we need to look back at the nation’s Founding Fathers who drew up the country’s Constitution in the wake of the successful war of Independence against the British.

History has tended to romanticise this group as champions of democracy and the rights of man. They were anything but.

They were aristocrats; many were slave owners and having expelled the British ruling class were intent on filling the void.

As men of property, they considered that unrestrained democracy would be as bad as the tyranny they had just ousted; that giving equal votes to all would threaten their standing, their possessions, even their lives.

So putting men of discernment between themselves and the mob would mitigate their greatest fear of pure democracy — that the uneducated and unsophisticated masses might elect a demagogue who would sweep away their wealth and privileges.

Given the complicated processes needed to effect a change in the US Constitution it is hard to see anything different happening soon, but agitation will and should continue to abolish this antiquated system with its roots in factors that have no relevance to the citizenry of a powerful world state in the 21^st century.