COUNTY VIEW: The rocky road to the White House

With only six weeks to go to the US Presidential election, the only thing that remains certain is that it won’t finish on November 5. Already, the Trump camp has let it be known that every state outcome will be challenged, every legal device resorted to and every fraud allegation loudly proclaimed if their candidate fails to be elected for another term.
The Trump campaign has made no secret of its belief that the electoral system is out to deprive him of what he still maintains was rightfully his in 2020. Its exhortation to its canvassers is to ‘make it too big to rig’. Campaign senior advisor Chris LaCivita has ominously predicted: “It’s not over on election day. It’s over on inauguration day.” In a massive recruitment drive, Trump’s campaign is training 100,000 ‘volunteer citizen patriots’ as poll watchers in swing states.
One would be hard put to devise an electoral system more convoluted than that which determines, every four years, who should be the leader of the free world. The United States is the only democracy where the candidate who gets the most votes does not necessarily win election to office. Twice in recent times, the express wish of the people has been overturned by a system that is the opposite of what it purports to be. In 2000, George W Bush, having lost the popular vote, secured the narrowest of majorities in the Electoral College to become president. In 2016, Donald Trump was 3 million voted behind Hillary Clinton, but yet went on to win the prize.
The Electoral College itself is something of a misnomer, since it is not a place but rather a process. It is a throwback to when each of the individual states which make up the union robustly defended its own independence, and had little time for federal meddling in their internal affairs. Under that process, each state is allocated a certain number of Electoral College votes, largely dependent on population, and ranging from as high as 54 to as little as three. The candidate reaching the magic majority of 270 College votes becomes president.
Theoretically, the system is straightforward. The candidate who wins the popular vote in each state is entitled to the total electoral college votes of that state (with two exceptions) on a winner-takes-all basis. To observe the formalities, the Electoral College electors for each state (not to be confused with voters) meet in the state capital and formally record the results for transmission to Washington.
But nothing in the American system is straightforward, and since there is no overarching legislation to govern electoral practice, each state is free to make its own laws. It is not unheard of, but rare, for a state electoral college voter to go rogue and vote for someone other than the winner of the popular mandate.
The American election system is surprisingly loose and unstructured, with the absence of any single central authority enabling all sorts of challenges and legal loopholing. The system reached its nadir in 2020 when Mr Trump tried to bully state officials into changing the local results. When that failed, he leaned on Congress and his vice president, Mike Pence, to reject the outcome. And when all of that failed, he incited a mob to storm the Capitol and wreak mayhem. There is nothing to suggest that, if the results again go against him, he will not resort to the same tactics.
To add one further grotesque ingredient to the mix is the possibility of a dead heat, a tie between Ms Harris and Mr Trump in the Electoral College. In that event, true to form, the next US president will be selected by the House of Representatives, with each state carrying one vote.