Dec 19, 2016 By Ken Satifka 4 min read

Amidst all the pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth over the unfairness of the Electoral College, I’d like to weigh in with my observations.

First and foremost, both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump ran their campaigns to win the EC, not the popular vote. To quote from “MacBeth,” all else is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Trump just had a better game plan to win the EC, and he worked a lot harder at it. While he was campaigning around the clock, Clinton was mostly coasting on her “insurmountable” lead, and raising millions from corporate and celebrity donors in Hollywood and New York – states she was going to win anyway.

In particular, Clinton thought she had the normally blue big population states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the bag. No wonder, after she lost them, she sent out her surrogate Jill Stein to attempt a frivolous recount of these states only. While I’m at it, let’s not forget that Clinton (and the media) severely chastised Trump for saying that he “might” not accept the results if she had won. That was then, this is now. By the way, my hat goes off to the wise Pennsylvania judge who shut down Stein’s bogus waste of time.

Here’s another thing. If there was no EC and the popular vote won, Trump would have campaigned entirely differently. He would have spent much more time and money in the big cities to gain as many votes there as possible, even if he still didn’t win them. He would have still won “flyover” country. So, claiming that Trump is illegitimate is ridiculous. Without the EC there’s no telling who would have won the popular vote.

Out of curiosity, I compiled some interesting statistics on the popular vote. The figures are rounded to the nearest thousand. In California, according to their secretary of state’s website, the figures are in and will not be updated. Clinton has 8,754,000 votes and Trump has 4,484,000, a difference of 4,270,000 for Clinton. (The percentage difference is 62.2 percent to 31.8 percent – almost double).

Contrast that to the total popular vote nationwide. According to the New York Times, Clinton had 65,763,000 votes while Trump had 62,915,000, a margin of 2,848,000 for Clinton. Now, if you subtract Clinton’s national vote total from her California votes, you wind up with Trump winning the popular vote in the other 49 states by 1,422,000 votes. That’s not insignificant. I’d say the EC, designed to look out for the republic as a whole, did its job.

But I’ve remained skeptical of the size of Clinton’s popular vote win. Every time I read about it, her margin seems to be growing and growing like the blob. So, a few days ago, I jotted down some stats from the same sources previously mentioned. On 11-29, Clinton was leading in California by 4,016,000 votes. So, in 10 days her margin of victory there grew by 468,000 votes! Her nationwide lead grew 541,000 in the same period. Pretty impressive, huh?

On 11-29, Trump had a lead in the other 49 states of 1,709,000, so it dropped by 287,000 in the same period. Given enough time I wouldn’t be surprised if, one way or another, Trump would lose that lead also.

So, call me crazy, but where are all those late Clinton votes coming from? In California, were there that many absentee ballots, nearly all for Clinton, still being counted a month after the election? My humble suggestion to Jill Stein would be, if you are really interested in voter fraud, you should have recounted California instead. Or you could just blame Trump’s Electoral College win on the Russians.

Ken Satifka is a resident of South Union Township.