The Republicans have scraped by hanging onto the office roughly half the time thanks to the long outdated system of weighting set up 250 years ago by our farmer forebearers. Like the theory that Senators should be selected by State Legislatures, not the people, I remain confident that this anachronism will be removed at some point, or that the Republic will fail as it continues to enshrine a minority leader over the will of the majority.

A local right winger wrote an op-ed for our little weekly newspaper extolling the virtues of the electoral college, when it has no virtue in a democracy. He also repeated the right wing lie that justifies minority rule: our nation is a republic not a democracy. Wrong. It is a democratic republic. The framers of the Constitution didn't put the word democracy into the document but in other writings they frequently referred to the fledgling nation as a democracy.

The electoral college is probably the single worst mistake in the Constitution. It disenfranchises all the voters who don't live in the handful of states whose electoral college votes count. It gives the voters of states with tiny populations, like Wyoming, vastly more power than voters in populous states like California.

The most important vote we get to cast is the only one where the majority does not win. Ridiculous. And I can guarantee you, that if the electoral college was benefitting Democrats, the GOP would be saying it must be changed.