DONALD J. Trump won the presidency because more Americans voted for him is an “alternative fact”. A lie. A misrepresentation of the will of the citizens of America who casted their sacred vote in the November 8 presidential election.
The truth as substantiated by election results data verified and confirmed by both Republicans and Democrats in all states is that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump. Nearly three million people more people elected her to succeed Pres. Barack Obama. She won the popular vote by this big margin.
But because of the Electoral College, Donald Trump was proclaimed and sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. The electoral college appropriated certain number of “electors” per congressional districts and states instead of just using the popular votes.
It is a FACT that the Democratic Party had been very graceful in acknowledging that this is the law as stipulated in the Constitution and so they paved the way for the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. Donald Trump was sworn in as president on January 20.
However, despite his victory he maintained that he believes he was cheated of the popular vote, alleging that about 3 to 5 million “illegals” voted that was why election results revealed that Clinton won more votes than him.
This continued allegations of conspiracy from Trump himself has been troubling not only Democrats but even members of the Republican Party. One outspoken Republican Party leader Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina voiced out the concerns of his party in an interview. He told CNN:
“It is the most inappropriate thing for the president to say without proof…We’re talking about a man who won the election and seems to be obsessed with the idea that he could not have possibly lost the popular vote without cheating and fraud. So I would urge the president to knock this off….People are going to start doubting you as a person if you keep making accusations against our electoral system without justification. This is going to erode his ability to govern this country if he does not stop it.”
Many kababayans unfamiliar with U.S. history would ask why and how the use of Electoral College came about. This is how TIME explained it:
Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.
At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.”
In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round.
After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
THE QUESTION: Why has the Electoral College not yet been abolished? When will the Constitution be amended so that elections will truly reflect the will of the people?
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Gel Santos Relos is the anchor of TFC’s “Balitang America.” Views and opinions expressed by the author in this column are are solely those of the author and not of Asian Journal and ABS-CBN-TFC. For comments, go to www.TheFil-AmPerspective.com, https://www.facebook.com/Gel.Santos.Relos
