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ANALYSIS

Electoral College pitfalls on full display as Donald Trump disparages recount effort

Paul McGeough
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Washington: What might have been an exercise in academic curiosity about the accuracy of the counting of presidential votes has become a political gutter fight, with absurd claims by Donald Trump that he'd have won the popular vote – but for the casting of millions of fraudulent votes for Hillary Clinton. 

A quirk in a quaint US electoral process makes it possible for a presidential winner to be a loser. And Americans already are well acquainted with a dominant circuit in the Trump DNA that does not tolerate even a hint that Trump might be a loser – notwithstanding that he's won the White House.

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White House: no fraud evidence

The White House says there has been no evidence of widespread election fraud in the 8th of November election after President-elect Donald Trump tweeted over the weekend that millions of illegal votes were cast.

Hence the crazy Sunday tweet by the president-elect claiming "millions of people" voting "illegally."

And with that, Americans might well question an election outcome that generally, was being taken for granted. If the poll winner is claiming millions of fraudulent votes were cast in just Virginia, New Hampshire and California, three states he identified in his weekend Twitterstorm, then surely it's reasonable to wonder if tens of millions more were cast illegally in the rest of the country.

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Here's how the winner-loser thing works – the candidate who wins the race in a particular state is credited with that state's allocation of Electoral College votes, 270 of which are required to win the presidency. But the candidate who loses the college vote, can still garnered a bigger popular vote nationally, by running up bigger winning margins in more populous states.

Thus Hillary Clinton, who now leads by about two million in the popular vote tally, a process that is continuing, is destined to be recorded by history as the Electoral College loser who won the popular vote after the count in all states, by the biggest margin – with her nearest rival being her Democrat colleague Al Gore, who outpolled George W Bush by 547 000 votes in 2000.

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At first, there were no serious political takers for the academics' questioning of the 2016 outcome.

Motivated initially by Trump shrieking throughout the campaign that it was rigged against him; and by evidence of Russian-sponsored attempts to hack the election system in several states and the hackers' success in penetrating the Democratic Party's computer system, the academics came upon a few oddities – it seemed that Trump did particularly well in counties in Wisconsin that used only electronic voting and there were voting machine malfunctions in Michigan and North Carolina.

And still the losing candidates were reluctant to put their names to formal applications for recounts.

Green Party Candidate Jill Stein refused to put her own money where her mouth was, and signed on for recounts in three states – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – only after she was convinced that the $US7 million cost of the process might be raised through crowd-funding.

Clinton has said nothing publicly.

But her campaign attorney Marc Elias intimated reluctance too, arguing they came onboard after the Greens, only to ensure that "the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides." Elias also acknowledged little expectation of success – the Clinton campaign had been poring over the results and so far had uncovered no "actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology," he said.

It's highly unlikely a recount will change the election outcome. In the 15 years from 2000 there were state-level general election recounts in just 27 states – in which the median change in the outcome after the recount was just 219 votes. And while narrow, Trump's winning margins in the three states are well in excess of that – 27 000 in Wisconsin; 68 000 in Pennsylvania; and 11 000 in Michigan.

And just as recounts are unlikely to produce the votes needed the give Clinton the presidency, there is absolutely no evidence of the alleged fraudulent voting that might have robbed Trump of the popular vote. 

In one of his tweets, Trump demanded that the "results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused." And in that he seemed quite oblivious to the fact that in alleging unsubstantiated voter fraud by which he claimed he had been robbed of a popular victory, he too was challenging and abusing the result.

In the wake of the Trump tweets and claims by his campaign manager Kelly Anne Conway that the Democrats were "crybabies," the Clinton campaign lawyer Elias seemed a bit non-plussed as he took to Twitter – "we're getting attacked for participating in a recount that we didn't ask for, by the man who won the election but [who] thinks there was massive fraud." 

Lost in all of claimed rigging of the election is the reality that the Electoral College process is a real rigging of the electoral process, because instead of being based on the principle of one-man, one-vote, it is weighted in favour of smaller, more conservative states.

The way it works, a candidate who wins a state by a single vote – gets all that state's Electoral College votes, same as the candidate who wins the same state by a margin of tens or hundreds of thousands of votes. So Clinton's victories in some of the most highly populated states, like California [by an estimated five million votes] and New York [by about two million], was no antidote to the Electoral College weight of the combined margin of about 106 000 votes by which Trump won the three states in which there is to be a recount.

And by the inclusion of two senators for each state regardless of population in the allocation of Electoral College delegates, votes in less populous states become absurdly weighted – Wyoming gets one college vote per 186 000 people; California has one college vote for each 670 000 people. 

Bizarrely and in hindsight, the consensus among analysts going into the 2016 election, was that Clinton had hundreds of paths through the Electoral College, in terms of different state-by- state permutations, and Trump had only dozens. 

But what was perceived as the Democrats "blue wall," it's guaranteed or almost-guaranteed hold on working class white votes in the recount states, was breached by the Trump campaign.

And so a political term has been coined – we're being told this regional shift to Trump by white, working-class voters is an "inversion," that likely will be repeated unless the Democratic Party can win them back.

In the long term, changing national demographics favour the Democrats. But winning the popular vote is not what American politics is about. 

"In fact, all evidence points to Democrats increasing their national party identification," former Democratic White House adviser Mark Siegel writes in The Huffington Post. "But given the composition of the industrial Midwest, there is also no evidence that this will consistently translate into a [Democratic] Electoral College majority."

In the mistaken belief that Barack Obama had lost the popular vote to Mitt Romney in 2012, Trump tweeted what he really thought of the Electoral College process by which he has become president-elect without winning the popular vote – "a disaster for democracy;" "a total sham and a travesty;" "a laughing stock;" there ought to be "a revolution in this country…[we] should fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice;" "we can't let this happen;" and "[we] should march on Washington."

Since winning the 2016 election, Trump has been tweeting about the "genius" of the Electoral College system, because "it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play."

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