Democracies Where the Popular Vote is Meaningless Are Not Democracies
To count, or not to count? Depending on the location, that is the question that (current) President Trump is trying to make a reality. In his brazen and baseless attacks on legal and long-standing vote-counting processes, he hopes to gerrymander the situation, shamelessly and dangerously, to his advantage.
This behaviour, parroted by his relatives and political allies and cheered on by supporters, is shocking only if you have not been paying attention. It is behaviour only permissible in a ‘Trumpian’ political culture of mistrust, anger, and ugly aggression that preceded and will long outlive the President who gave it a name. It is behaviour that is only possible in a democracy isn’t really a democracy.
Put simply, Trump or Biden could win this election, or any US Presidential election, without winning the greatest amount of individual voters. Trump managed this in 2016; three million Clinton voters left meaningless in a structure of disenfranchisement. George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 but won the presidency. Benjamin Harrison, the twenty-fourth US President, similarly won office in 1888. Samuel J. Tilden, a New York Democrat, won nearly 51% of the national popular vote in 1876; Rutherford B. Hayes, however, was elected.
Facts like this, and the tutting from commentators on the other side of the Atlantic, should not detract from similar travesties in British electoral history. Clement Attlee’s Labour Party won two consecutive general elections, in 1945 and 1950. Seeking re-election again in 1951, they not only received more votes than Churchill’s Conservatives, but they won a higher share of the national vote than they had ever done before. Churchill however was elected Prime Minister, because his party’s votes, while fewer in number, were better geographically placed.
This goes beyond erroneous historic results, ‘one-offs’ that defenders of a status quo can say is the price for a supposedly stable electoral system. The inherent unfairness of systems where majorities of voter numbers (to quote Nick Bryant on BBC Radio 4’s Today the morning after the US polls closed) are “irrelevant” can be seen as the core issue defining, or plaguing, modern Anglo-American politics.
It is an issue that sees parties or presidents claim, and then reinforce, political majorities in the face of largely unwilling publics. It is an issue that sees millions vote for parties that are left powerless because of their placement on a map. It is an issue that permits governments to fabricate, fumble, and fail in the comfort that they cannot be challenged — a situation that, during a pandemic no less, lets politicians get away with petty point-scoring as people are taken off of ventilators.
Beyond simple issues of fairness and right-and-wrong, continuing with broken electoral systems only further fosters the hatred and the conniving that has defined the fallout of the 2020 Presidential election. A better democracy does not see a national poll swung completely by armed protestors harassing polling states. A better democracy does not take millions of unheard voices as both a given and a non-issue. A better democracy does allow somebody to grab power by deciding where, exactly, votes should continue to be counted. A better democracy does not allow somebody to preside over hundreds of thousands of deaths, and then be rewarded, possibly, with another term in the world’s most powerful political office…
