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Since the decisive presidential election, the op-ed page has featured letters, both from adamant Trump supporters as well as detractors. I offer a few observations.
I find it oddly both humorous and disturbing that discussion of our antiquated Electoral College is not a daily topic for open debate and reform. Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.7 million votes in 2016, but because of the Electoral College, he was named the "winner," certainly to despair and hand-wringing from the left, but without a parade of ill-conceived, antidemocratic, and misdirected election challenges.
In 2020, Trump again lost the popular vote, this time by a margin of over 7 million votes; mercifully, he lost the Electoral College by his EC margin of "victory" in 2016. The deplorable responses from him and a handful of spineless, cultish, elected Republicans across the country (from whom we should demand better in this time of surging pandemic and related economic malaise), are to proceed with what I like to call "election-anigans", including the typical Trump disinformation aimed at his gullible base, fund-raising because whatever he does, he prefers to do it on someone else's nickel, and the aforementioned multiple, frivolous, baseless, ill-advised and, with a nod to the inherent strength of democracy under attack, ultimately unsuccessful court challenges.
Trump "stole" the 2016 election with a big assist from the Electoral College; how ironic and hypocritical for his cult to claim the 2020 election was "stolen," notwithstanding the considerable Biden/Harris margin of victory! Praise be that the outcome was not close. That bears repeating: the outcome was not close, and our "so much winning" chief executive finally is exposed as the loser he has always been!
Even so, it is high time for two things to occur: First, we need to call out the errant, dis-serving, elected Republicans who lack the spine to denounce Trump's deplorable post-election behavior (David Rowe, I'm talking to you!) Second, Pennsylvania's state legislators need to move forward to have Pennsylvania sign the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact so that future presidential elections are awarded to the winner of the popular vote.
Most often, the popular vote winner is the electoral vote winner. Only a few times in the past, recently George W Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016, has the popular vote loser been the electoral vote winner. That outcome is only possible by reason of the Electoral College, which came into being to accommodate slavery in the late 1780s. There is today no viable reason why we should not elect the president by a simple, popular-vote majority, one person, one vote, giving the vote of each eligible voter equal weight: no more "swing state" drama, no more backroom partisan scheming to enable those who lose the popular vote to wield power in the form of tyranny of the minority. That formula is antidemocratic and destructive, and I can offer no better illustrations of that fact than the anemic, pandemic mismanagement and persistent corruption of our lame duck president, who self-destructed when confronted with a national emergency beyond his limited competence.
Don't be shy about voicing to your state representatives and senators your support for one person, one vote and the NPVIC. End the tyranny of the minority.
JOSEPH R. DeCRISTOPHER
Lewisburg
Submitted via email