Despite Donald Trump getting 77.3 million votes of Americans last month, 2.3 million more than Kamala Harris, he won’t win the presidential election until today, when the Electoral College meets in 50 state capitals and in D.C. to cast their votes and those votes are counted and certified on Jan. 6.
Trump’s clear popular vote victory is what should have given him another four years in the Oval Office, not him scoring 312 electoral votes to Harris getting 226. The votes of real people should be what matters and our nutty system, on display today, should be changed.
Written into the Constitution in 1787, when Madison and Hamilton and the rest of the demi-gods were working that summer in Philly, the Electoral College concept was that the new country’s president would be chosen by a collection of wise men. It never worked out that way.
So we have a really dumb method to choose a national leader, but it’s still the only vote that counts, as Trump was fully, legally and legitimately elected in 2016 over Hillary Clinton even though she had 2.9 million more votes.
Or apply that scenario this year and suppose last month if Harris had won 29,398 more votes in Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), 80,104 more votes in Michigan (15) and 120,267 more votes in Pennsylvania (19). Give Harris those 44 electoral votes and she tops Trump 270 to 268, even though he beat her by millions.
The theoretical extra 229,769 votes to put Harris in the White House is just .1% of the combined total for the Republican and Democratic nominees. It’s also less than 10% of the 2.9 million votes cast for the assorted third party candidates like Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Jill Stein. Like 2016, it would be an odd outcome, with the choice of more Americans, in this case, Trump, being denied.
Today is the 60th meeting of the Electoral College, the first being on Feb. 4, 1789. Then the law stipulated that the meetings were to occur on the first Wednesday in February. After a disputed presidential election, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 set the date as the Monday after the second Wednesday in December, a time frame which lasted until 2020.
The 2020 disputed election, which Joe Biden clearly won and Trump clearly lost (both in popular and electoral votes) saw fake electors, phony theories about the vice president being able to reject certified results and a mob attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6. In response, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 to clear it all up and moved the Electoral College to the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December.
But there is one bit of very old history that pertains just to New York State. While this is the 60th Electoral College meeting for states like New Jersey and Connecticut and most of the original 13 states (North Carolina and Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution), it’s only No. 59 for New York even though our ancestors did ratify the Constitution in time.
The reason is that the New York Legislature in 1788 and 1789 failed to agree on how to select the state’s eight electors. The Federalists, in control of the state Senate, wanted appointed electors and the Anti-Federalists running the Assembly wanted presidential electors to be elected by the public. The two houses never agreed and New York missed the deadline to name electors.
George Washington was elected unanimously by the first Electoral College, but New York did not participate. At least we never repeated that mistake.
