THERE will be a significant election this year in a significant country which prides itself as the greatest democracy on earth. That country, a super power, claims that the election will be consequential, and will have ramifications for its citizens, and the whole world. For about two centuries this country has held this poll on the first Saturday in November in the election year. For this year, that date falls on November 5. The election was initially slated to be a fierce battle between two old men, one in his late 70s, and the other in his early 80s. It was supposed to be a rematch, sort of, because the duo had battled each other four years ago with the older prevailing. You already know because that country is the United States of America where the then incumbent president, Donald Trump, was defeated in 2020, and his successor, Joe Biden, was defeated from seeking a second term by a disastrous presidential debate outing on June 27. Biden came under intense pressure from his party people, and had to ‘pass the torch’ in July to his vice president Kamala Harris who is younger and more energetic.
America has many contradictions in spite of its claim to exceptionalism. There’s is no record that it has been governed by any other means except through the ballot box, at least not in the last 200 years. It lays claim to democracy but it fails to meet the key ingredient of rule by the majority of its citizens voting in an election. Certainly, not for the election of its president. The classical definition of democracy is government of the people by the people for the people. In many climes, it is also governance by representatives who had been elected by a majority of voters during any election. Not so in the United States. In 2016, Hillary Clinton, candidate of the Democratic Party lost the presidential election in spite of winning three million more popular votes of the electorate. His rival, Donald Trump, of the Republican Party with an inferior popular votes tally was returned as the winner. The unique but apparently an undemocratic (to many outsiders) Electoral College gave victory to Trump. The candidates and the parties in that contest knew the rule and so could not complain.
The name, Electoral College, which determines who is elected as the US president is not in that country’s constitution. History has it that the founding fathers of the country inserted this mode of electing a president as a compromise between election of the president by a vote in Congress (parliament), which used to be the practice, and the election of the president by a popular vote of qualified citizens. Until the 1960s not many people were qualified to vote in elections. There was no universal suffrage. The constitution in its 12th Amendment recognised ‘electors’. And the ‘electors’ for each of the 50 states have been determined, and the number of ‘electors’ for each state may be reflective but not necessarily proportional to the population of the state. Any candidate who secures a minimum of 270 Electoral College votes wins the presidency irrespective of the outcome of the popular votes.
The Electoral College has been a vexatious subject in American politics for centuries. And that explains why surveys showed that in the past 200 years more than 700 proposals had been introduced in Congress to either reform or eliminate the Electoral College. Probably, to underline its undemocratic nature, it has been recorded that there have been more proposals for constitutional amendments on changing the ‘electors’ method for determining the winner of the American presidency than on any other subject.
Apart from politicians, America’s body of lawyers, the American Bar Association, has had cause to criticise the Electoral College as “archaic” and “ambiguous”, and its polling showed that 69% of lawyers favoured abolishing it in 1987. In addition, public opinion polls showed that Americans favoured abolishing it by majorities of 58% in 1967; 81% in 1968; and 75% in 1981. The conventional wisdom is that any candidate who wins a majority or plurality of the popular votes nationwide has a good chance of winning in the Electoral College, but there are no guarantees as implicated in the presidential election results of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016.
It has been suggested that the Electoral College was contrived by the founders of the US to stem the possible agitations for separation from the Union by less populated states who may feel cheated and excluded in producing the president of the country. In effect, the Electoral College was informed by the need for the accommodation of all segments of the society. However, some scholars argued that the ‘electors’ scheme was indeed the handiwork of a segment of the elite among the founding fathers who did not want to totally relinquish the election of the president to the masses.
On November 5, two candidates Harris (Democrat), and Trump (Republican) will lock horns for who occupies the American presidency which is generally regarded as the most powerful office in the world. Third party candidates are usually inconsequential since none has won the office ever. Harris appears to have an edge in the race at this time but election watchers reckon that in reality, the two candidates are running neck-and-neck. The proposition for the moment is that any of Harris or Trump can win the election. And this uncertainty is down to the complexities of the Electoral College. In 2016, polls and pundits put Hillary Clinton ahead by several miles. It was expected to be a coronation of the former American first lady (she was the wife of former President Bill Clinton), senator and secretary of state. Alas, it was not. Trump, who reportedly had given up that fateful election night in 2016 in the wake of exit polls that overwhelmingly pointed to Hillary’s win, won through the Electoral College.
That scenario may not play out the same way this November. Nobody has yet said that November 5 will be a coronation for either of the candidates. This is so because the division in American politics is deep. It has been so since the advent of Trump (descending from the golden escalator) in presidential politics in 2015. The division became deeper when Trump was declared as the loser of the 2020 election. He has refused to concede defeat. He has failed to accept that he lost. He still insists even less than one month to the next election that the election in 2020 was procured by fraud for Biden. It does not matter that he was the incumbent at the time.
A lot has happened in the years between the 2020 presidential election and this year’s. There was a violent attack on January 6, 2021, ostensibly to stop the certification of the election results by the House of Representatives and the Senate. Those who stormed the Capitol Hill, the location of the parliament, chanted that they would hang the then vice president, Mike Pence. They even prepared a noose in the vicinity of Congress for Pence. And were heard chanting ‘hang Mike Pence’. By the way, Pence was on the losing ticket but he was constitutionally mandated to preside over the certification of the results of the election as the president of the senate. He rejected pressure from a section of his party to overthrow the election result. Trump, who was twice impeached by the House of Representatives and twice not convicted by the senate, reportedly watched the hours of the attack on the Capitol from the White House, and allegedly failed to lift a finger even when the life of his vice president was in danger. When he was told about the danger faced by Pence and the urgent need for him to act, he allegedly retorted, “so what?”
In the intervening years also, former President Trump had been indicted in multiple jurisdictions, tried in two cases and convicted in at least two courts of law. He was convicted for sexual assault, and for business fraud. Trump and his supporters still rail that his indictments and convictions were politically motivated, and brazen attempts to interfere with the November presidential election. But in the eyes of the law, and at least until the convictions are upturned by superior courts, Trump remains a felon. In some other democracies a convict or felon would not be allowed to be on the ballot. But apparently not in the United States. So, he could be a felon and president of the most powerful country in the world at the same time. That could just be part of the exceptionalism of America.
Next week we’ll discuss how Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC’s) notorious inconclusive elections could play out in the November election in the US. The possibility of another round of violently contested election outcome is visible in the horizon with local election bodies planning to delay certification of results so as to provide ample time for the loser to sow doubts on the validity of the polls. We will also examine a ‘democratic’ setting where a single senator could hold the whole nation to ransom, a court system where judgments are informed not by the letters and spirit of the law but by the ideological leanings of the judges, and who appointed them, and a 21st century supposed beacon of democracy governed by a constitution written in the 18th century, some of which words were laid out in unclear words and fractured sentences.
