WHY DO THE LOSERS WIN?
In 2000, Al Gore got 500,000+ more votes than did George Bush, and in 2016, Hillary Clinton got 2.9 million more votes than Trump. In every other Western democracy and republic, Gore and Clinton would have been elected because of the fact that they were more popular.
And why did the top vote getters in 2000 and 2016 not become Presidents? Because of the Electoral College, a racist, antiquated system of selecting the chief executive of the federal government. Out of the 191 countries in the world, only a few other countries use this perverse system to elect their top political leader: Botswana, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, South Africa, and Suriname.
If the United States elected its leader by a method that ALL other Western democracies and republics use, Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees would never have come into power. The Roe v. Wade law would not have been overturned. Abortion would still be fully legal in the United States.
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Wilfred U. Codrington III writes: Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history.
Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost. https://tinyurl.com/RacistElectoralCollege
Another article about how slavery played a major role in creating the Electoral College: https://www.hnn.us/article/strange-political-bedfellows
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Here’s one way we can work toward abolishing the Electoral College: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com
(Courtesy of Rob Brezsny)