Business Recorder Editorial November 3, 2020

Peculiarities of US electoral system

 

November 3, 2020 promises one of the most fractious presidential elections in the history of the US, the country having been polarised as seldom before by President Donald Trump’s antics. However, it is important to understand that on the question of the most critical election for the world as a whole given the US’s contemporary overwhelming power, Donald Trump represents less cause of the system’s discontents and more a symptom of its peculiarities and defects. Historically, the US federation that came into existence after its War of Independence comprised 13 states. Incrementally, more and more states came into being and joined to make up the current 50. An independent US was founded on the basis of white European immigration and black imported slavery. The divide between the Northern and Southern states rested primarily on the latter’s plantation economy being based on slave labour, while the industrialising North relied on a proletariat. Post-Civil War in the 19^thcentury, this divide was to have profound consequences. Immigration having declined, the North’s industry was hard pressed to find adequate labour. The freed slaves in the South then tended to migrate northwards and became an important part of the North’s proletariat. However, the abolition of slavery and the relative freedom granted to former slaves to relocate did not fully overcome racism, discrimination and violence by the state institutions (particularly police) and white supremacist groups to this day. The recent ruction about police brutality against black people and its antithetical Black Lives Matter movement have highlighted once again how the US is still grappling with its continuing slavery history.

But there is an even bigger anomaly at the heart of the presidential electoral system in what is touted as the world’s oldest and one of the largest democracies. Contrary to an ordinary understanding of democracy, the US system negates the one-man, one-vote principle and is capable of subverting majority rule because of the peculiarities of the Electoral College system. This system evolved in an attempt to correct the cumbersome procedures enshrined in the Constitution framed by the Founding Fathers. After founder George Washington’s uncontested election as the first president, a US polity that did not have political parties witnessed their emergence and rise. Whereas originally the parties selected their presidential candidate/s in primaries and caucuses, by now the primaries are dominant in the process while party national conventions have been reduced to little more than a rubber-stamp. The electoral college is composed of electors chosen by each state, their number being equal to the particular state’s representation in Congress, the lower House of Representatives and the upper Senate. Currently, the Electoral College numbers 538 overall, requiring 270 to win. However, the winner-takes-all system that accords the entire electoral college votes of a state to the candidate who wins a majority of its electoral college has led five times in the US’s history to a candidate losing despite winning a majority of the popular vote. In recent times, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton suffered this ignominious fate. Attempts over time to correct this anomaly have not succeeded, partly because consensus on the change could not be reached, partly because many people are more comfortable with this flawed system than the uncertainties of change. Another unintended consequence is that states considered ‘safe’ for one or the other of the two main parties, the Democrats and Republicans, seldom see much electioneering as a reflection of the perception that the result is a foregone conclusion. This leads to almost 75 percent of the country missing any electioneering. Though the system owes its origins and development to the manner in which the US was formed and expanded, its defenders quote the structure of the federalism adopted by the country, in which the states still enjoy more jealously guarded powers than any other modern democratic federal state. In recent times, television, and now the internet and social media have altered considerably the political landscape and enhanced the role of money in elections to an unprecedented level. Trump may be one of the most contentious presidents the US has had, but he represents a symptomatic anomaly compounded by the peculiarities of the electoral system described above. The rest, as they say, is up to the electors of November 3, 2020.