Look who is rigging the elections now

American presidential elections are complicated. Most of the world that wants to follow them by now understands that they are decided in an Electoral College. That however is not necessarily the case.

The Electoral College is a process

The Electoral College is not an institution with a well-tended campus, but rather a process. Each state gets a number of votes in this process equivalent to its number of members of Congress (two Senators for each state plus a number of representatives proportional to its population). The electors will cast their votes in state capitals on December 17 this year. In all but two states (Maine and Nebraska), the electoral votes go to the winner of the popular vote (those two states have processes for splitting their electoral votes).

The District of Columbia, which is not a state, also gets three electoral votes. That makes a total of 538 votes (50 states x 2 Senators each, no matter their population, plus + 435 members of the House + 3 for DC). In order to be elected president, a candidate needs a majority, that is at least 270 electoral votes.

The Electoral College process favors the Republicans, who control more smaller population states with disproportionately larger numbers of electoral votes, due to the two senators. Both George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College. Trump is likely to lose the popular vote again but could still win in the Electoral College due to his strength in low-population states.

Here’s the rub

If no one gets a majority in the Electoral College, the presidency would be decided in the House of Representatives. There each state would cast a single vote. The Republicans hold the advantage. They control more state delegations. That is why Republicans are working hard to try to prevent certification in enough states to prevent Harris from winning the majority of the Electoral College.

This is election rigging. It is attractive to hope that it won’t pass muster in the courts, as the video above suggests. But the reality is that courts are slow. The Georgia Election Board has already adopted rules intended to make it easier to delay certification. Election officials in other states may do likewise. And violent demonstrations could prevent certification at the state level, as the January 6, 2021 crowd tried to do at the national level. Even the credible threat of jail terms after the fact is unlikely to prevent some miscreants from trying to rig the election.

There is a solution

The solution is an unequivocal election outcome, especially in battleground states. That will not be easy to achieve. We call them battlegrounds precisely because we expect the vote there to be close. In many, Trump and Harris are running neck and neck, even if she is pulling out ahead in the national polls. In Georgia, Harris is still 4 percentage points behind. You shouldn’t expect the Trumpkins to delay certification there if he scores a definitive win.

Enthusiasm for Harris is still growing. Trump is stumbling. He has tried many lines of attack, to no avail. He has claimed she is dumb and that he is better looking. It was no surprise that he gained little traction with those obviously false claims. Trump may have looked viable against an aging Joe Biden. But he is now the aging candidate all too obviously less energetic, articulate, smart, well-informed, and well-prepared than Harris. May the best woman win, big.