Our Back Pages/ November 28, 2024
As far back as the 1870s, The Nation opposed the presence of the Electoral College as “so monstrous regarding be practically ridiculous.”
Among the numerous secrets that future historians will need to attempt to discuss as they mull just what befell the American Republic in the very first quarter of this century is our failure to take apart the shabby piece of constitutional equipment understood, bizarrely, as the Electoral College. Two times currently, in 2000 and in 2016, a president was chosen regardless of losing the popular vote– in the latter case, by almost 3 million tallies. In 2020, the exceptionally sluggish, unnecessarily complex tallying of Electoral College votes left an opening for the beat incumbent to release a tried coup d’état. The truth that this year’s gruesome election results spared us such a mess is a magnificent slim silver lining.
As bewildered as future historians will be, Americans of the past would similarly be frightened to discover we let things go on this long. The Nation has actually opposed the Electoral College considering that a minimum of 1876, when contending voter-fraud claims after the heated governmental contest in between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden stalled the Electoral College count– and practically resulted in a 2nd civil war. (Eventually, the crisis ended with a compromise that handed the success to Hayes, a Republican, in exchange for his consenting to compromise what stayed of Reconstruction in the South.)
As the crisis unfolded, The Nation took objective, in an editorial, at the Electoral College. Its continued presence was “so monstrous regarding be nearly ridiculous,” the publication stated. While Alexander Hamilton had actually argued in The Federalist Papers that the system was developed to “manage as little chance as possible to tumult and condition,” the Electoral College had actually never ever worked as meant. Rather, it had actually ended up being a nationwide humiliation: Anyone searching for “a clear case of political sham and humbug,” The Nation argued, might “hardly discover a much better circumstances in any nation than the Electoral College of to-day.”
Fast-forward some 85 years, and The Nation was still singing the exact same tune. After John F. Kennedy’s traditionally narrow 1960 triumph, the experienced reporter Ted Lewis kept in mind that a modification of a couple of thousand votes might have swung the election to Richard Nixon. Observing that the close call had actually produced an “unmatched public revulsion versus the complex electoral-college treatment,” Lewis alerted that the organization would ultimately need to be ditched “when the country, in some future Presidential election, discovers its will has been warded off to the point where it revolts versus the outcomes.” The nationwide will has actually been warded off two times because Lewis made that forecast– and still we await the revolt.
We can not pull back
We now challenge a 2nd Trump presidency.
There’s not a minute to lose. We should harness our worries, our sorrow, and yes, our anger,