Dec 4, 2016 5 min read

Chances are you’ve never heard of James McErlane of Chester County or Elstina Pickett of Bradford County. The same goes for Patricia Poprik of Bucks County and Andrew Reilly of Delaware County.

There is no reason you should, though their role in this year’s presidential election is crucial. They are four of the 20 mostly anonymous individuals in Pennsylvania who will elect Donald Trump president of the United States.

They are members of the Electoral College, the rather cumbersome and arcane agency devised by the Founders and enshrined in the Constitution to select the chief executive. Each state is assigned “electors”, based on the size of their House delegation plus two (for each state’s two senators).

Winning candidates for president need to collect a majority of electors from across the country. Trump collected 306 electors, Hillary Clinton 232. A majority is 270.

Trump triumphed even though he lost the popular vote. As of this writing, he trails Clinton by better than two and a half million votes nationwide.

He says the difference is accounted for by the fact that millions of illegals managed to worm their way into polling stations to cast ballots against him.

Baloney. The president-elect is either nuts or trying to scheme his way into getting people to believe that he won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College.

The truth is that for the fifth time in our history the president will be someone who lost the popular vote but moved into White House on the strength of either winning a majority of electors or by a vote in the House of Representatives.

It happened three times in the 19th century — in 1824, 1878, and 1888. The country limped through the 20th century with several near misses. In the still young 21st century, it’s already happened twice.

That is enough to cause serious alarm. At minimum, the country should get the man (or woman) it voted for. As Alexander Hamilton wrote, “the sense of the majority should prevail.”

Calls for the abolition or modification of the Electoral College go back the late 1820s and Andrew Jackson, who lost the presidency to John Quincy Adams in 1824, though clearly the people’s choice.

“The streams of national power ought to flow … from the pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority … the consent of the people,” Jackson subsequently said in petitioning Congress and the states for a change.

Donald Trump’s problem — and it’s our problem as well — is not that he’s a minority president: he was favored by 46 percent of voters on Election Day, Clinton by 48 percent. We’ve lived with minority presidents before. Old Abe fell short of a majority in 1860. Woodrow Wilson failed the test in 1912. Yet both were strong, successful presidents.

Trump’s plight — and ours — is that he was not the popular choice for president. He was the favorite, instead, of the Electoral College.

Now, it can be argued the system, working perfectly, did what it was designed to do: the selection of the individual who demonstrates strength across the broadest spectrum of the states. Originalists can point to the fact that we are, after all, a republic.

But this misses the way we have been trending for the past 230 years. The idea, as well as the ideal, of popular rule is deeply engrained, especially when it comes to elections. The presidency is the one and only elected office in the whole land in which it’s possible to fail of election while succeeding.

With the highest office in the land at stake, we can’t continue to thumb our nose at the very foundation of popular democracy.

Various suggestions have been made over the years to fix our Electoral College problem. Some, including Presidents Jackson, Nixon, Ford and Carter, have said it would be better to mothball the whole contraption. Just do away with it. Winner take all.

Others favor abolition or modification but with caveats. One of the favorites is direct election with an instant run-off. In the event of more than two candidates on the ballot, voters would be asked to list a first and a second choice for president. A majority-vote winner would emerge after all the others had been eliminated.

Another alternative was proposed in 1978. It’s called the National Bonus Plan. It’s biggest advocate was the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who liked it because it keeps the Electoral College, with it’s major-party, two-party bias. In addition, it preserves the role of the states and our federal system.

Schlesinger argued the National Bonus Plan practically guaranteed the winner of the popular vote and the Electoral College would be one and the same person. It would do this by giving the national popular-vote winner a “bonus” 102 electors (two for each state and the District of Columbia) — 16 percent of the required number on the road to 270.

This seems fair as well as simple. It also seems out of reach. The chief reason: two centuries plus of watchful inaction.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.