Trump received fewer votes, however the system, in its knowledge, stated he received his first election anyway. Is it any surprise, then, that in 2020, when a majority of the voting public rejected his bid for energy a second time, the previous president instantly turned his consideration to manipulating that system as a way to stay in energy? And make no mistake, Trump’s plot hinged on the complexities of the Electoral School.
“Following the election, President Trump labored ruthlessly to transform loss into victory, exploiting strain factors and ambiguities within the protracted and complicated course of, partly constitutional and partly statutory, that we confer with collectively because the Electoral School,” noticed the authorized scholar Kate Shaw, who can be a contributing Opinion author to this newspaper, in a 2022 article for The Michigan Law Review. This “baroque and multistep course of,” she continued, “afforded Trump numerous postelection alternatives to contest or undermine, in phrases framed in legislation and authorized course of, the outcomes of an election he had plainly misplaced.”
Moderately than attempt to name out the Military or foment a mob, Trump’s opening gambit in his try and overturn the election was to contest our unusual and byzantine system for selecting presidents — a system that runs as a lot on the great religion of the varied contributors because it does on legislation and process. And so, earlier than Jan. 6, there was the try and delay certification of electors, the try to find new electors who would vote in Trump’s favor, the attempt to pressure Republican-led state legislatures into seizing the method and deciding their elections for Trump and the try to pressure the vice president into throwing the election to the Home of Representatives, the place statewide Republican delegations would give Trump the victory he couldn’t win himself.
But it surely’s not simply that our course of for selecting presidents is much less resilient than it appears. Along with its structural flaws, the Electoral School additionally inculcates a set of political fictions — like the concept a “pink” state is uniformly Republican or {that a} “blue” one is uniformly Democratic — that may make it simpler, for some voters, to imagine claims of fraud.
There may be additionally the broader downside of the American political system when taken in its entirety. There may be the inequality of voting energy amongst residents I discussed earlier — some votes are price way more than others, whether or not it’s a vote for president, senator or member of the Home — and the way in which that that inequality can encourage some voters to consider themselves as “extra equal” and extra entitled to energy than others.
