When asked what the governmental format of the United States is, Democracy is the easy answer, but I’m not so convinced. According to the Oxford dictionary a democracy is “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.” Immediately, some inacurracies come to mind.
America shows many of the signs of a democracy, we vote for our senators, governors, and president, but the water muddles a little when we get to the electoral college. When one votes for the president in America, one is not voting for the president. One instead, is voting for delegates called electors, who then supposedly vote on your behalf. The candidate who gets the most votes gets ALL of the electors. This means that if one party wins by 100 votes in one state of 100,000 people, then those 100 votes make all the electors from the other 4 9,900 people go to the party they didn’t vote for.
Because of this system, a presidential candidate can lose the popular vote but still be elected president. This has already happened 5 times in the past, most recently in 2016 and 2000. That means that of our 45 presidents, 1/9 have been elected undemocratically.
And the electoral college isn’t some unintentional quirk of the system. This was intended to be undemocratic. The founders of the electoral college were mostly slave traders, bankers, merchants, and other wealthy people who wanted to preserve the rule of elites. And the intentional effect of this decision was the prevention of popular social movements like the abolition of slavery.
So what would you call a system designed to prevent the rise of popular movements and retain the power of wealthy elites? A system that intentionally prevents social change. It seems clear that one such system is not an instrument of democracy.
