Early reports show Hillary Clinton got 48 percent of the vote while Donald Trump got 47 percent, so how come Trump has been declared the president-elect?

It’s that pesky Electoral College our founding fathers set up, which creates a system where individual electors from the states actually vote for the president.      It’s amazing how we hear people who act surprised to discover we’re not a true democracy and that it’s not the popular vote that actually picks the president. This is nothing new. It was taught in civics classes in the old days and presumably is still being part of most students’ lessons. The founding fathers set up a system so individual states elect the president and the Electoral College is the system that does it.

Why not just elect based on the popular vote, like states do for representatives of Congress or for governors or such? Voters in less populated states like Louisiana should be glad we don’t.

The six largest electoral states include California (55), Texas (38), New York (29), Florida (29), Illinois (20) and Pennsylvania (20). Those six states alone account for 191 electoral votes, 71 percent of the 270 needed to be elected president. There are 50 states plus the District of Columbia that cast votes for president, so 71 percent of the electoral votes are cast by just 12 percent of those voting districts, a significant concentration of power.

By having the Electoral College and individual states vote for president, it would seem to force candidates to pay them more attention and for sitting presidents to pay more attention to them to get reelected than if they were simply beholden to the popular vote.

Consider as well the huge populations concentrated in just a few cities. Louisiana’s population is around 4.7 million. The population for New York City is more than 8.5 million.

Different regions of our country have different issues that are priorities. Not enough water is a big problem in some states. Too much water is often a problem in Louisiana. Sugar cane is an important crop in Louisiana and maybe three other states, while 21 states produce more corn than does Louisiana.

And consider potential issues of rigging an election. If the president were picked simply by the popular vote, you’d only have to rig votes in a few places. With the Electoral College you’d have to spread your efforts to a number of states, making it more difficult and making getting caught seem more likely.

Isn’t it a good thing that a president needs the votes of people from as many parts of the country as possible so needs to listen to their needs and be responsive to them?

Sure some can say that they live in a typically blue or red state, so if they’re in the minority, why bother to vote? But we saw several states that swung in this election from expected blue to red, and several states where the split in votes was very close. If fewer but more densely populated areas could pick the next president, wouldn’t that be a disincentive for voters in rural areas?

There will be a loser in every election. Let’s not let see a system that’s served us well get changed because some don’t like a particular election’s result.

WILL CHAPMAN

PUBLISHER