With all the violence and vandalism on January 6th, it’s easy to forget that Trump and his henchmen’s real game plan was to send the election to the House and let them decide the winner, as the Constitution predicted would happen in the event of a tie. This would be accomplished by submitting competing sets of voters to the vice president, who would throw up his hands and say he didn’t know how to count the votes, so Congress would have to decide the election. Aaccording to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, they hoped that in the event of Pence not cooperating, the mob storming the Capitol could have caused a delay that would have given Justice Samuel Alito time to stop the certification, but they were thwarted when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reconvened Congress that night. (There’s no word on whether Justice Alito was briefed on his role, but it’s not a stretch to think he would have been happy to oblige, considering his record of flying insurrectionist flags during this period.)
If they had persuaded Pence to distort the constitutional process to a tied vote in a process to resolve competing (fake) electoral vote lists and if the House of Representatives had accepted this, Trump would have won because votes are counted by state delegation and there are more Republican delegations than Democrats. There was a whole group of Republicans ready and willing to declare Trump the winner and let the courts and anyone else try to stop them under this unprecedented, unconstitutional conspiracy. This was the blow.
Essentially, they were willing to extend their undemocratic electoral college advantage in controlling rural and sparsely populated states into an even more undemocratic electoral college advantage in the House to steal the election. If Pence had cooperated, they might have succeeded.
It is obvious that the authors made a huge mistake with this foolish process of having the House delegations decide the election in the event of a tie. Must be the winner of the popular vote. (This he must be the winner of the popular vote in every case, but for some reason, we seem to be stuck with this antediluvian artifact of a compromise that should have been fixed more than a century ago.)
There has long been a belief among a certain group of white elites in America that democracy is good in theory and a very good idea, but in reality we cannot let the rabble have the last word. Our history of denying the right to vote to large numbers of citizens goes back to the beginning and we are still fighting for it. This is also why we’re stuck with the Senate, which gives two senators to states that have more cows than people and two senators to states that have many more people than cows. They were finally able to allow the direct election of these senators, which was a step in the right direction, but the Senate is an undemocratic institution.
And after the disasters of the 2000 and 2016 elections, in which Republicans won the presidency with electoral college victories and lost the popular vote, there is no need to argue that our presidential elections have a very serious and potentially fatal flaw for a modern economy. . democracy. It is no wonder that the Republican Party, faced with being a minority party, decided to go even further.
Voter suppression and disenfranchisement are no longer enough. They discovered that they can now change the system itself in their favor. The most recent example comes from Texas, which held its Republican convention last week. In addition to the hateful issues of the culture war, they installed on your platformsuch as labeling gender-affirming care as child abuse, requiring the Bible to be taught in public schools, and calling for “equal protection for the preborn,” meaning Abortion can be punishable as murderpropose the creation of an electoral college system in their state:
The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add additional criteria for election to a state office to include a majority vote of the counties, with each individual county being allocated one vote allocated to the winner of each county’s popular majority vote. individual.
In other words, they want to create a system in which every county has exactly the same vote, whether the county has 20 people or 5 million people. As Paul Waldman wrote in his newsletter The cross section, this would be the equivalent of California and Wyoming each having one electoral vote for president. Waldman calculated some numbers and the result is surprising:
In the 2020 elections, 11,315,056 votes were cast for president in Texas. Fifty percent plus one of the votes cast in the 178 smallest counties (almost all of which Trump won) produces a total of 481,548 votes. Which means that under the GOP proposal, a candidate could win a statewide race with just 4 percent of the vote.
That’s right: you can lose 96%-4% and become governor, attorney general, or any other state office. The candidates who did this would inevitably be Republicans, because they would be the ones winning all those small rural counties. Which is, of course, the point.
Texas is not the only red state trying to end democracy and majority rule. In Missouri where their electoral system allowed some progressive policies to be approved by a majority of citizens, they attempted to change the law to require that they not only need a majority of voters to be approved, but also that they have a majority in five of their eight electoral districts, which gives the Republican Party’s rural districts an advantage. Arizona proposed a similar initiative. So far they’ve had no luck implementing any of these changes, and the Texas proposals are just part of the GOP platform for now, but does anyone think MAGAfied parties in red states won’t do it if they get the chance?
The old adage that “states are the laboratories of democracy” has long been one of the reasons states’ rights advocates excuse their undemocratic behavior. The Big Lie and Donald Trump’s attempted coup gave these same political actors permission to experiment with ways to permanently benefit their dwindling electorates by corrupting electoral systems in the states. And because of the electoral college, this will probably also permanently benefit them in the presidential election.
Donald Trump will not win the popular vote next November, but he could achieve another victory in the electoral college. The opposition that fights so energetically to save democracy is already fighting with one hand tied behind its back and the situation will only get worse.
