e, and Hillary Clinton all have in common besides the fact that each of them won the popular vote and someone else became president. It is that every one of them was a Democrat.
So let’s put it this way. Yes, Donald Trump is right about at least one thing. The system is rigged. It was rigged in Trump’s favor when he was born white, male, heterosexual, and incredibly wealthy. It was rigged in his favor every time his father bailed out one of his business failures. It was rigged every time his wealth and power allowed him to get away with his sexually abusive behavior. The system has been rigged in Donald Trump’s favor all of his life in so many ways that I won’t bore you with the details. And yes, this year our dysfunctional election process rigged the system to favor Donald Trump.
Why do we even have an Electoral College? Remember, when we wrote our Constitution, this was something no one had ever done before! How would we organize this new thing, a representative government? We decided to have a House of Representatives, elected by the people, which meant white men who in some states also had to be property owners.
And we decided to have a Senate elected, not by the people, but by state legislatures. And it remained that way for about 100 years before we decided to let the people elect their Senators.
And what will we call our king who will not be a king? We decided that he is the one who presides so he will be the president. And in his wisdom, George Washington said he did not want to be called, “Your Highness,” or “Your Majesty.” “Mr. President” will do just fine.
Then how should we elect the president? Certainly we can’t just let the people vote! The people, even an all male electorate, were thought to be a rabble. Maybe Congress should elect him, the Founding Fathers said. But Congress might be too political, and may contain special interests and factions, so a second Congress was created, and it was called the Electoral College. And it has only
one job, electing a president.
And how would we elect the Electoral College? It was to be elected, like the Senate, by state legislatures. They would elect proper gentlemen to be Electors, and the Electors would elect a most proper gentleman to be president. So when George Washington was elected, there was no national election as we know it. The state legislatures selected their Electors, and the Electors selected George Washington. It was later that, state by state, we started letting the voters elect the Electoral College. And the Electoral College, by its nature, gave extra weight to white voters in the slave states, because slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person but could not vote. And after the Civil War it again favored the whites in the Southern states, because black people were disenfranchised, but were counted toward the Electoral College votes. And it still favors more rural and conservative states today. So many people don’t want to change the system, and it is difficult to change, so we haven’t done it.
This year the voters selected Hillary Clinton by a very narrow margin. I take solace and strength from that. It was close, but more people voted for Hillary than any other candidate. In any other nation in the world, that would be a win. However, the Electoral College will choose Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States. We can complain that the system is rigged, but that isn’t going to change the fact that Mr. Trump will be our next president.
I say it was planned by a woman named Kay (Que). “Que sera, sera. What will be will be.” So, what now? I know that many of us are disappointed. I’m disappointed. Trump’s Electoral College victory seems to legitimize anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim prejudice. It gives encouragement to conspiracy theorists, crazy “birthers,” racists of all kinds, and the most vile kind of sexism. It puts the power of the presidency into the hands of a con artist, someone who has never served his country or sacrificed in any way up until now, who has no governmental experience, who has only a passing knowledge of worl