Several weeks before Election Day, when polls were suggesting Donald Trump was going to lose, perhaps quite badly, he began to insist that the American electoral system was rigged.
In the days and weeks after the election, those of us who had been most skeptical of this claim discovered that Trump had been right. Our system was so flagrantly rigged that a candidate could lose by nearly three million votes and still be declared the winner. He could lay claim to the most powerful office on Earth while enjoying the support of barely a quarter of all eligible voters. I have no intention of documenting the full extent of our electoral depravities; that would be another book. But it’s worth a quick survey of the lowlights.
To begin, we must revisit the story of our Founding Fathers as a band of enlightened souls who sought equal representation in democracy. If that had been true, they would have forged a direct election system, in which every legal resident was entitled to one vote and the candidate with the most votes won.
That’s never the way presidential elections in this country worked, because our democracy was forged in the colonies of the 18th century, the majority of which profited immensely by slavery. The Electoral College was a compromise that allowed Southern states to count slaves as part of their population, officially enfranchised at 60 percent, thanks to the Three-Fifths Clause. This is why four of the first five presidents were from Virginia, the state with the most people—if you count slaves.
The modern effects of this giveaway to our slave-owning founders have been profoundly undemocratic, and they travel far beyond subverting the popular will of the electorate. For instance, electoral votes are allegedly apportioned based on population. But all states, no matter how sparsely populated, are apportioned three, one for each senator and congressperson. As a result, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.5 times as much as a vote in New York or California. The effort to protect the interests of sparsely populated states led to a systemic bias against populous states.
Because electoral votes are winner-take-all in most states, modern candidates formulate policy for, and direct campaign efforts at, a small group of swing states, while virtually ignoring the rest. The result is a process that caters to a tiny segment of our population, and discourages non-swing state voters by making them feel that their votes won’t matter.
Trump himself called the Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy” in 2012, after Obama defeated Mitt Romney. “We should have a revolution in this country! … The phoney [sic] electoral college made a laughing stock [sic] out of our nation. The loser one!”
Again, Trump was right. In 2016, the Electoral College amplified the power of rural areas, depressed turnout, stoked tribalism, and removed the central barrier to a candidacy predicated on broadly unpopular positions: winning the most votes.
There were other stories that might have helped the public understand that Trump’s path to 270 Electoral Votes wasn’t as narrow as polls made it appear.
The most distressing of these was embedded within his talk of a rigged election. The basis for this claim, when he bothered to provide one, was a study indicating that our voting rolls included more than a million dead people, and that some voters were registered in two states. Given that Americans move and die, usually without informing the local election board, these facts should come as no surprise. Trump’s insinuation was that some secret cabal stood ready to target these phantom voters and systematically perpetrate massive voter fraud on behalf of his opponent. But there are no election officials, of any political affiliation, who can point to more than a handful of isolated voter fraud cases.
So what were his ominous assertions really about? They are the newest incarnation of a hoary American tradition: voter suppression. In previous eras, these efforts took the form of Jim Crow laws that targeted people of color and the poor: poll taxes, literacy and property tests, selective purges of the voting rolls, and physical intimidation.
In 1965—a century after the Civil War—Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed these discriminatory practices. Ever since, conservative politicians and activists have been trying to chip away at the law by promoting a false sense of crisis around voter fraud. Three years ago, they won their biggest battle to date: the Supreme Court ruled that states could pass restrictive voting laws without federal approval. Fourteen states did so, all with legislatures controlled by Republicans. These measures did not make voting impossible, merely more difficult, especially for the urban poor.
As intended, voting rates dipped in all these states by nearly two percent from 2012. On Election Day, new voter identification laws were enforced in Wisconsin and reduced turnout by 200,000 votes, in a state Clinton lost by 23,000. Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods alone saw a drop of 41,000 votes.
In North Carolina, GOP lawmakers passed a voter ID law in 2013 that caused voter registration to plummet, before it was abolished in court for being racially discriminatory. Republicans then attempted to purge thousands from the state’s voting rolls, which a federal judge deemed “insane.” Another court noted that lawmakers had “requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices” then crafted a law to disenfranchise African Americans.
GOP-controlled election boards also slashed early voting sites and reduced their hours in particular counties, especially on Sundays, when African-American churches sponsored “souls to the polls” voting drives. The result was that early voting turnout was 20 percent lower in so-called “suppressed counties” than in other counties. None of these tactics were a secret. The state GOP in North Carolina put out a press release before Election Day bragging that African-American turnout was down by 8.5 percent in early voting.
Oddly, there was almost no coverage of these efforts during the campaign. Instead, Trump’s insinuations of voter fraud took center stage, diverting attention from verifiable voter suppression. This is what I have come to think of as The Central Law of Bad Stories. Bad stories don’t just distort our belief system; they act to prevent more truthful stories from being heard.
The proliferation of opinion polling had the perverse effect of suppressing the vote, as well. Here’s how that worked. First, you had two historically unpopular candidates. Second, you had coverage that barely took note of the profound differences in their policies. Third, you had an unknown sum of citizens uninspired by Clinton but ready to vote against Trump. These marginal voters, confronted by an endless parade of surveys showing Clinton comfortably ahead in the final days of the race began to ask: Why should I bother to schlep to the polls on a Tuesday if she has it in the bag?
That was another factor almost nobody mentioned: presidential elections are held on Tuesdays. Why? Because of an 1845 law predicated on the notion that voting shouldn’t interfere with the Sabbath, or with market day. See, farmers needed a day to drive their buggies to the county seat to vote, then a day to drive back … wait. Sabbath? Buggies? Is any of this relevant in 2016? No. Does it make any sense at all to hold our most important election on a workday? No. Does this further discourage turnout, especially among the working poor? Undoubtedly.
The reason the U.S. ranks 31 out of 35 in voter participation among advanced democracies—behind Slovakia, Greece, Mexico, and Turkey—is because our system of democracy has been rigged, structurally and logistically, by some combination of cynical partisan intent, class privilege, and abject negligence.
But the central reason 90 million Americans didn’t exercise their franchise has more to do with psychological and emotional factors. On a fundamental level, people have to believe in the democratic process. That doesn’t just require faith in the idea that your vote counts. It requires faith in the larger idea that voting matters, that who we elect at a local and state and federal level makes a difference in our lives. And it is here, at the level of basic disaffection, that American democracy faces its central crisis.
I think here of the young woman who agreed to babysit our children on election night, a college senior who planned to apply to medical schools. Did she have any idea where the candidates stood on the issue of college tuition or student debt? Had she listened to any of the debates, at which Clinton raised these issues nine times? Did she know about Clinton’s plan to make college debt-free and tuition free at public universities for families making less than $125,000?
Had she listened to Trump’s response? “She can say all she wants about college tuition. And I’m a big proponent. We’re going to do a lot of things for college tuition but the rest of the public is going to be paying for it.”
Had it occurred to her that there was an obvious difference between how seriously these candidates were taking her life? Or that the outcome of the election might mean the difference between emerging from medical school with no debt or in hawk up to her eyeballs?
Before I could ask any of these questions, our sitter mentioned, rather sheepishly, that she was registered to vote in North Carolina but got mixed up about the absentee ballot deadline. She hadn’t voted. That was her story. And it got more votes than either candidate.