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Donald Trump may be the last loser to win through the Electoral College. Two of the last three presidencies, Trump’s included, have gone to the candidate who lost the popular vote. In 2000, the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount, handing the election to George W. Bush. It was later determined that Vice President Al Gore actually won the election by half a million votes. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but Trump still won. These victories, where the loser wins, were made possible through the Electoral College, one of the U.S. Constitution’s key anti-democratic provisions.
The 55 wealthy white men who drafted the Constitution in 1787, many of whom were slaveholders, envisioned a democracy, but they didn’t trust the masses to choose the right president. So they created the Electoral College. Now, more than 230 years later, a mass movement is building to elect the president through a national popular vote.
In December 2000, while the U.S. Supreme Court was deciding on the Florida recount in the Bush v. Gore case, the late, legendary historian Howard Zinn appeared on the Democracy Now! news hour, to shed some light on this little-understood entity, the Electoral College. He described the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia:
“When they came to the question of how to elect a president...Read More →
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