Trumpageddon 2016: Why the Electoral College Sucks

I'll let the Mexican press introduce this one:

In hindsight, it was of course entirely my fault for having any shred of remaining faith in the year 2016, aka the world's Annus Shittus. Had I any sense, I would've completely ignored the final polls giving Hillary an 80% chance of victory, and instead spent those precious 24 hours before the results were announced hastily constructing my Trump-proof bunker. 

Specifically designed to be utterly repellant to The Donald.

Watching the election results roll in was somewhat like a real-life Game of Thrones episode, with all hope and goodness being snuffed out before your eyes and leaving you in a shell-shocked pool of spluttering jelly. Only, instead of being a weekly hour of HBO, this spectacle was instead deciding the fate of the richest and most powerful country in the world for at least the next four years.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect was how quickly things seemed to go from 'fine' to 'that nuclear bomb scene from Terminator 2'. I left for a class at 9:20, and by the time I returned- a mere 50 minutes later- the predictions were completely flipped:

It's pretty strange to pinpoint the exact moment I lost the last remaining faith I had in American politics

The weeks since 8th November has seen a lot of reflection and introspection; some fair, some misguided, and some which shouldn't be repeated aloud for fear of damaging brain cells. For this post, I'm going to talk about just one of my biggest gripes: the Electoral College.

It's a rather bittersweet irony that the whole point of American independence was to give the people a democratically representative voice, but that a presidential candidate could both simultaneously win and lose an election. The reason- of course!- was that most wonderfully archaic of democratic instruments, the Electoral College. Now, I don't have all night, so here's another affable, speccy blonde guy to tell you just how much this system is misguided needs reforming was ultimately misguided just really fucking sucks:

And, yet again, those faults were laid bare for all to see yet again this election. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by around 160,000 people, (i.e. a majority of the electorate) 2 million votes(!) but handily lost the Electoral College by 306 to 232. This is because she evidently failed to cater to the specific tastes of people in Bumblefuck, Ohio, or because Floridians noticed that her rival was the same colour as their beloved oranges and voted instinctively in favour.

This is the best we can do? This?

Of course, you could say this is largely just sour grapes on my part because the Democrats lost and an incompetent, bloviating fascist is now in the White House (or as it's soon to be known, theTrump Plaza DC Hotel, Casino and POTUS Palace). But the fact remains that the Electoral College seems to have been deliberately designed to impede the democratic will of the people. Which is, y'know, kind of un-American. In today's world, it stands out as an anachronism of a specific point in American history which is at best irrelevant (hello, 3rd Amendment!) and at worst a subversion of the very ideals on which the United States was founded (hello, belief that black people were "worth" only 3/5 of a white person!).

Well done, Founders. Well done.

Whilst in principle it is a good thing that smaller states have a proportionally strong voice, it seems absurd to minimise the voice of states with the largest populations. I mean, look at this:

And that's just comparing the discrepancy in vote power from larger vs smaller states. As mentioned above, the biggest failing of the Electoral College is that it minimises the voice of states which are fairly one-sided (including mega-states like California and New York), and instead arbitrarily hands the Presidency to whatever the people of Ohio and Florida are leaning towards. If you're from a major party and pander hard enough to those two states, you're pretty much guaranteed to win. 

"...Presidential Candidates"

So, there we have it. The Electoral College is almost universally acknowledged as a terrible institution which only occasionally reflects the democratic will of the country. However, seeing as the Republicans benefit most from it (and pretty much all of the balls are currently in their court), the chance of reform seems about as likely as The Donald himself winning a Nobel Peace Prize. 

The face of reason.