All posts tagged: electoral college

Op-ed: Fix the Electoral College and Let the People Decide

This is absurd. This is an outrage. For the second time in only five elections we are about to inaugurate a president who received fewer votes than his principle adversary. And the second time is going to be much worse than the first. In 2000, Al Gore’s popular vote margin over George Bush was about 500,000 votes — not insignificant, but still only about 0.5 percent of the total votes cast. In 2016, on the other hand, once all the votes are in from notoriously slow-to-count states like California and Washington (mostly from mailed ballots), Hillary Clinton is expected to have at least 2,000,000 more votes, or 2 percent of the total cast, than Donald Trump. That’s a larger gap in both the popular vote and percentage margin of victory over her opponent than John Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968, and Jimmy Carter in 1976. But they all won their races. Imagine how different our world would be if they had not. And even when the popular vote winner has won the Electoral …