The United States is an empire with immense power and influence over global politics. As we approach Election Day, we hope to use the electoral system to help us craft a better version of our own country. Voting is supposed to give the people a voice, but in America, electoralism doesn’t guarantee democracy. When the country’s bleak status quo permeates the Supreme Court and Electoral College, our allegedly exceptional democracy is challenged.
As industrialization concentrated power in the Global North and the old empires collapsed, we built new ones. The current republic system replaced monarchy as the primary form of government. However, to keep the masses under control and the elite in power, the ruling classes installed institutions that limit the power of the people.
One of these institutions is the Electoral College – a body created by the nation’s founders to delegate more power to the states. However, this is a thin veil that barely hides the truth. The winner-takes-all rule creates an uneven divide between the rural and urban poor. Optimally, we would have a popular system where the public directly elects a president. I often find myself asking, is it democratic to hold the value of one voter over another?
We think that balancing provincial authority with the collective is somehow more representative, but we forget the elections of 2016 and 2000, when the distribution of delegates didn’t quite match up with the popular vote. Or, on a smaller scale, when the Republicans hijacked state legislatures by gerrymandering and segregating state assemblies’ electoral districts. This is not to degrade the representation of rural populations; different rules for different states can be necessary, but the election of a chief executive should be done by the entire population.
On the other side of the aisle, we remember the 2016 Democratic Primaries, when, through various propaganda wars and maneuvering, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) attempted to thwart the Bernie Sanders campaign, prompting the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the nomination of Hillary Clinton, a hawkish and insufferable centrist.
Why we use district representative systems like the Electoral College is plain and simple: the U.S. is scared of popular demand. The will of the people disassembles the financial complex we have created through the last 30 years. Keeping poor people down is the rich man’s first priority, and his status quo of misleading politics is possible with the “stopgap” mechanism of the Electoral College, as Megan Day points out in Jacobin. Sadly, this kind of interference is not exclusive to the Electoral College. The Supreme Court operates in a similar manner, except it awkwardly fulfills the role of a secondary legislature.
The mainstream consensus grants the Supreme Court the same prestigious status as the Electoral College. However, justices are not elected by the public, are nearly impossible to impeach and have no obligations to uphold popular opinion. Some of the most important decisions in recent history – rulings on abortion, gay marriage and other cultural benchmarks – were gridlocked or blocked in Congress before they were sent to the Court. It’s not like Congress doesn’t have the authority, it’s just too dysfunctional to make the important decisions.
Instead of making laws through our (allegedly) dually elected legislature, we pipeline our bills to the supposed genius of nine jurors who are chosen through an already questionable election system. Liberals may herald Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a stalwart advocate for women’s rights, but they also forget she was an enabler of the same system that replaced much of our lawmaking democracy with autocrats.
It’s fair game to nominate a justice during a president’s term, just like it’s fair game to gerrymander districts in your favor during a census year. However, that doesn’t make it right.
As people mailed in their ballots and stood in the hours-long lines, they put their trust in these systems that work against their interest. I find it hard to do the same.
