Consider this: Donald Trump's insistence that the election was rigged, his claim of millions of fraudulent ballots, his re-election campaign filing some 60 lawsuits to overturn the election in key states, his suborning of state legislators to choose a slate of electors voting the opposite of how the people of their state voted, his attempt to lure Electoral College appointees to do the same,
his tweeting "Big project in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!", The Washington Post reporting that "The Proud Boys, members of armed right-wing groups, conspiracy theorists and white supremacists all have pledged to attend" and "far-right demonstrators workshopping ways to smuggle guns into the District", and now asking Georgia's secretary of state "to find 11,780 votes" somewhere to flip that state's Biden win.
Consider all this and realize that all of it — every last bit of it — owes to a freakish 18th Century constitutional anachronism, the Electoral College.
Sound exaggerated? If we instead had chosen the president and vice president by the national vote count, we'd have known the election's outcome by midnight November 3rd when Biden had already taken the lead. That would have been the end of it. We would have had none of the Kabuki ritual of the Electoral College — commissioners certifying county votes, legislators choosing slates of electors to send to Congress, Congress anointing the state submissions — that gave Trump the opportunity to attempt his coup by disrupting at every turn. It was the obsession with state votes, irrelevant in the national count, and the small margins of a few that gave Trump the…
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