In 2000, the presidential election came down to one state, Florida. Despite winning the popular vote, adding in the controversy about “hanging chads” and the governor of that one state being the Republican candidate’s brother, Democrat Al Gore lost the Electoral College to Republican George W. Bush partly in thanks to the conservative-leaning Supreme Court case of Bush v. Gore.
In 2016, the world was stunned by the election of reality TV personality and bankruptcy court veteran Donald John Trump as President of the United States. Despite losing the popular vote to former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by just shy of three million votes, he went on to win the Electoral College by winning razor thin margins across three states that would’ve tipped the election to Clinton: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
How close were we to Trump being re-elected in 2020? Closer than you would think and you have the antiquated Electoral College to thank yet again for that.
The popular vote wasn’t even remotely close. Joe Biden received a record 81,281,502 votes to Trump’s 74,222,593… a beat down of over seven million votes and more than twice the margin Hillary Clinton beat Trump by four years prior.
Like Trump in 2016, Biden can thank three states that he won by the skin of his teeth that would have sent him back to Delaware had they gone the other way.
In Arizona, Joe Biden won by 10,457 votes. Georgia was won by a mere 11,779 votes. Biden triumphed in Wisconsin by 20,682.
I’d like to pause and mention Libertarians here. The Libertarian Party in the United States is very conservative and right-leaning for the most part. Very few, if any, left wing libertarians would have voted for Jorgensen, let alone Trump. So it’s safe to assume had those voters followed their ideology in voting within a two-party system, those votes would have gone to Trump. Arizona had 51,465 votes for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen. Trump would’ve won Arizona by over forty thousand votes. Georgia also saw a significant amount of Libertarian votes at 62,229. Trump wins Georgia in that scenario by over fifty thousand votes. Finally Wisconsin had a bit slimmer of a margin with Jorgensen pulling in 38,491 votes, which flipping would have given Trump Wisconsin by a thin but decisive roughly seventeen thousand. Without a Libertarian Party, Donald Trump would have won all three states.
Now we return to just Trump and Biden.
For those three states to flip, you’d need half to go from the winner (Biden) to the loser (Trump) instead. So if 5,229 votes in Arizona flipped, 5,890 went the other way in Georgia, and 10,342 were cast for Trump in Wisconsin, all three states would have been certified for Donald J. Trump.
To be elected to the highest office in the nation, you need to garner 270 electoral votes. What would have happened had those 21,461 votes across three states gone to Trump instead of Biden? Those 37 electoral votes would have brought Joe Biden down from 306 to 269 and Trump would have improved from 232 to 269. A stone cold tie.
Okay, it’s all tied up. What happens? By law according to the Constitution of the United States, the election of the president goes to the House of Representatives in this case, where each state gets one vote determined by their respective representatives. The winner would require 26 votes by state delegations to win the majority.
Stop… think about that for just one second. California, with an estimated population exceeding 39 million and having 53 representatives, would get a single vote in this scenario. Wyoming, with a little over a half of a million people and just one representative, would equally get one vote. I don’t see that as democratic in any sense of the word… it’s flat out disproportionate representation to an absurd degree. As if the Electoral College isn’t screwed up enough, this process is even worse.
In today’s hyper-partisan political landscape, you can safely assume that votes would fall along party lines. Trump incited an attempted coup at the Capitol while Congress was in session in order to overturn the results of the election. Five lives were lost, one being a Trump supporting Capitol police officer, and it was a direct attack on American democracy. Despite his blatant actions violating his oath to uphold the Constitution, 197 Republicans gladly voted to defend him from impeachment for the incitement of the insurrection, four abstained from voting, and a paltry ten voted to impeach. It’s hard to imagine any Republicans voting against him in the case of an electoral college tie.
With the 117th Congress sworn in on January 3, 2021, the breakdown of the House of Representatives was 222 Democrats to 211 Republicans. Despite the Democrats holding a majority, the breakdown of state delegations tells a very different tale. Republicans would have 27 state delegations to Democrats carrying 20, with three states tied.
There it is, folks. If there were a tie in the Electoral College, a reality our nation missed by a mere 21,461 out of 158,394,605 votes cast (0.01355%), and I’d also say thanks to the Libertarian ticket of Jorgensen and Cohen, the Republicans would have had 27 delegation votes in the House, which would have provided the majority necessary to re-elect Donald J. Trump on this past January 6th despite his losing the popular vote by over seven million.
This is institutionalized tyranny of the minority. This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work and the United States is clearly running its government with a broken and antiquated electoral system. Unfortunately the Electoral College will persist as long as Republicans know their only path to the White House goes through that process as they have won the popular vote just a single time in the past eight presidential elections.
The next time someone tells you that their one vote doesn’t matter, share with them how close the 2020 election truly was. Throw in a little history about 2016 and 2000 for good measure. Change won’t happen if you don’t vote for it.
Marasco’s Musings 