Opinion | Presidential Elections In World's Oldest Democracy Aren't Truly Democratic

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US founding fathers were elitist and believed in excluding the masses, especially the poor, from directly electing the president.

Due to the importance of the swing states, Harris and Trump have spent maximum time and money on them and ignored the rest of the country. (File photos)
Due to the importance of the swing states, Harris and Trump have spent maximum time and money on them and ignored the rest of the country. (File photos)

Women’s “delicacy renders them unfit" to have a voice in the formation of government and “very few men who have no property (the poor) have any judgment of their own".

John Adams, a statesman, attorney and diplomat elected the second US president, strongly believed in excluding women and the poor from government formation.

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    On May 26, 1776, around a month before the Declaration of Independence was unanimously adopted by 56 delegates—later known as America’s founding fathers—to the Second Continental Congress in Pennsylvania on July 4, 1776, James Sullivan, a state court judge in Massachusetts and Adams’s colleague, wrote to him asking, “Why exclude women?"

    Sullivan believed in including the voices of women and the poor in the new nation’s government. Adams, who strongly disagreed, wrote back to Sullivan: “Because their delicacy renders them unfit for practice and experience in the great business of life and the hardy enterprises of war, as well as the arduous cares of state. Besides, their attention is so much engaged with the necessary nurture of their children, that nature has made them fittest for domestic cares."

    What looks outright outrageous was one of the guiding principles of the founders of the US Constitution behind electing the American president indirectly.

    In the biggest ironic twist, a woman of colour who is also the vice-president is contesting for the White House. What America’s founding fathers never imagined is a reality today.

    On November 5, American voters will ‘elect’ either Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump in the 60th presidential election, the most eventful and controversial election that has polarised the country on race and gender.

    The US claims to be the oldest democracy in which “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws".

    The 14th Amendment, which guarantees the above right, was passed by Congress on June 13, 1866, and ratified on July 9, extending the liberty and rights granted by the Bill of Rights to formerly enslaved people.

    The Preamble to the Constitution, formed after the 1787  Constitutional Convention, reads: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

    Shockingly, the word ‘democracy’ is nowhere in the Constitution.

    According to the 16th US president, Abraham Lincoln, democracy is a government “of the people, by the people and for the people".

    Essentially, in a democracy, the head of the state is elected directly by its people—like India, the largest democracy.

    However, is the US president’s election truly democratic and represents the people’s will?

    US founding fathers were elitist, despised the poor

    The 55 white delegates who gathered in Philadelphia from May 25 to September 17, 1787, to revise the Articles of Confederation—adopted by the Continental Congress on November 15, 1777, and which became the first Constitution—were wealthy and owned property.

    The delegates included James Madison of Virginia, later known as the ‘Father of the Constitution’ and elected as the fourth president, and Alexander Hamilton of New York, who served as the first US treasury secretary. The Convention resulted in the creation of the US Constitution.

    Most of the delegates didn’t trust the masses—the poor and the underprivileged, especially Blacks. They were inherently racist and anti-democratic and 25 of them were slave owners.

    Though Adams, the then-ambassador to Great Britain, missed the Convention, he actively participated from across the Atlantic Ocean.

    Adams believed that women were only fit for domestic chores and nurturing children and would demand the right to vote if included in government formation.

    “Besides, their attention is so much engaged with the necessary nurture of their children, that nature has made them fittest for domestic cares," he wrote to Sullivan. “Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open [such a] source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to [change] the qualifications of voters. There will be no end of it. New claims will arise. Women will demand a vote."

    Similarly, Adams believed that the poor lacked judgement and that giving voting rights to them would result in corruption.

    In the same correspondence with Sullivan, Adams wrote: “If you give to every man who has no property a vote, will you not make a fine encouraging provision for corruption by your fundamental law? Such is the frailty of the human heart, that very few men who have no property have any judgment of their own."

    According to Adams, the poor vote as they are “directed by some man of property who has attached their minds to his interest".

    Arguing for the rights of the elite and only their votes in government formation, Adams wrote: “…every man who has not a [dime] will demand an equal voice with any other in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions and [surrender] all ranks to one common level," he added.

    According to Hamilton, the poor should have no share in government formation. “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well-born; the other, the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact."

    The masses “are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right". Therefore, the rich should have a “permanent share in the government" as they “will check the unsteadiness" of the poor.

    Declaring that direct democracy was a “disease" and a “poison", he said in 1787, “Can a democratic assembly who annually [through annual elections] revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?  Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy. Their turbulent and changing disposition requires checks."

    In 1775, a young Hamilton wrote a pamphlet titled The Farmer Refutedlinking property to voting. If people without property had votes, they “would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or other".

    Arguing against the poor’s right to vote, he wrote that if “every man would give his vote, freely and without influence of any kind, then, upon the true theory and genuine principles of liberty, every member of the community, however poor, should have a vote" but “since that can hardly be expected in persons of indigent fortunes or such as are under the immediate dominion of others, all popular states have been obliged to establish certain qualifications, whereby, some who are suspected to have no will of their own are excluded from voting".

    Electoral College and people’s will

    America’s founding fathers never intended the country to be a direct democracy. They wanted to end the centuries-old monarchical system but weren’t champions of democracy either.

    Therefore, they opted for a republic. Section 4 of Article IV states: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."

    They were among the richest and several of them were slave owners and expected the wealthy, educated and privileged to guide the nation—as president, Adams was worth $21.5 million, Jefferson $212 million and Madison $101 million.

    The founding fathers felt the president should be elected by people with knowledge, experience and understanding of government—such people were obviously not poor.

    They wanted the masses to vote indirectly through their local government at town halls and meetings. They thought that allowing the masses to vote directly would result in a demagogue occupying the highest seat of power. The founding fathers wanted only the House of Representatives popularly elected by the people. US senators were elected by directed by popular vote only after the 17th Amendment was ratified.

    Basically, they wanted the interests of the wealthy and the educated to be preserved and feared that allowing too many voices in the state legislatures would only serve the interests of the common man.

    The delegates also protected slavery in the process because they wanted to preserve the rights to private property. Though many of the founding fathers didn’t support slavery, they never abolished it.

    For example, Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence who wrote that “all men are created equal", enslaved more than 600 people and believed that blacks were inferior to whites. Though Jefferson, the third president, mentioned the injustice of the slave trade in the draft of the Declaration of Independence, the statement was removed from the final version.

    Another example was Hamilton, who advocated the abolition of slavery but didn’t act due to his ambitions and belief in property rights. Born in a humble background, he aspired to rise to a high position in society by associating with the rich and influential.

    Delegates from the northern states wanted representation based on the size of a state’s free population while their peers from the South threatened to leave the Convention if slaves weren’t counted as they [the enslaved] had no voting rights.

    Finally, the delegates reached the infamous “three-fifths" compromise, which allowed three-fifths of the slaves in the southern states to be counted for determining representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. The three-fifths clause allowed the Southern states to increase their number of electors.

    The framers found the idea of electing the president by direct popular vote too democratic.

    In The Federalist Papers, a collection of 85 articles and essays written by Madison, Hamilton and John Jay to promote the ratification of the Constitution published on May 28, 1788, Madison distinguished between a democracy and a republic.

    In paper No. 14, Madison wrote: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region."

    In paper No. 68, Hamilton wrote: “A small number of persons selected by their fellow citizens from the general mass will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations."

    Associating the directing election of a president by the masses to future “tumult and disorder", he wrote: “It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder." Therefore, the “choice of SEVERAL to form an intermediate body of electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes".

    On May 19, 1777, Hamilton wrote to another Convention delegate, Gouverneur Morris: “But a representative democracy where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will, in my opinion, be most likely to be happy, regular and durable."

    According to Article II, the Electoral College allocates electors to each state based on the size of its House delegation plus two senators. Every state is awarded electoral votes based on its representation, not population, in the US Congress.

    Therefore, every state has, at least, one House and two Senate members, guaranteeing, at least, three electoral votes irrespective of its population size. For example, California, which has the largest population and 54 electoral votes, has 52 seats in the House while Wyoming, with the least population, has one. However, Wyoming, like other smaller states, is overrepresented (electoral vote per population) in the Electoral College compared to California because of the guaranteed minimum of three electoral votes.

    There are 538 votes in the Electoral College, and the candidate who wins, at least, 270 or more becomes the president.

    Therefore, like earlier elections, the next president will be indirectly elected in two stages.

    First, voters will cast ballots in the popular vote in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia on November 5 to choose a slate of electors, not the president. In fact, they will vote multiple times—despite marking only one box alongside their preferred nominee’s name—once for every elector in the state supporting the nominee of their choice.

    Under the winner-takes-all arrangement, the nominee winning the popular vote takes 100 per cent of the electoral votes, except in Maine and Nebraska, irrespective of how close the contest is. If Harris defeats Trump by even one per cent or vice versa in Pennsylvania, a swing state with the highest number of electoral votes, all the 19 electors on Harris’s slate will defeat all of Trump’s 19 electors by the same margin or vice versa.

    Second, these electors will vote in their state capitals on December 17. On January 6, On January 6, Congress will convene to certify the winner.

    Therefore, the popular vote doesn’t elect the president—as it happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016.

    The battleground/swing states, which can go either Democrat or Republican, attract a nominee’s maximum attention at the expense of other states. Only tens of thousands of voters in the swing states decide the contest as the rest are either Democratic or Republican.

    According to opinion polls, the seven swing states are Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (Rust Belt) and Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina (Sun Belt). Latest opinion polls show that Harris and Trump are either tied or lead/trail in the battleground states, especially Pennsylvania, by two to three points—within the margin of error.

    Due to the importance of the swing states, Harris and Trump have spent maximum time and money on them and ignored the rest of the country. They have visited Pennsylvania and Michigan 40 times since August but never campaigned in the 36 non-swing states.

    An Axios analysis shows that Harris visited Pennsylvania the most (13 times), followed by Michigan (7), Wisconsin (6), Georgia (5), North Carolina (4) and Arizona and Nevada (3).

    Trump also visited Pennsylvania the most number of times (11), followed by Michigan (9), North Carolina (7), Wisconsin (5), Georgia (5), Nevada (4) and Arizona (3).

    Sixteen years before Trump beat then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton by 304-227 electoral votes despite her beating him in the popular vote by 48.2-46.1 per cent (2.9 million votes) in 2016, she had called for doing away with the Electoral College.

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      In November 2000, Clinton, elected a senator, told the media, “We are a very different country than we were 200 years ago. I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president. I hope no one is ever in doubt again about whether their vote counts."

      The writer is a freelance journalist with more than two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.

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