The American system is broken

1. The American system of government is ineffective and crisis-prone.

The point of elections is to produce effective governments generally regarded as legitimate by most citizens.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. system of government has failed that test again and again. Elections now systematically disfavor voting majorities. From 1880 through 1996, the person who won the most votes became president, every time. In 2000, the U.S. got its first minority-rule president since the aftermath of the Civil War. That outcome was seen as a freak at the time. Four elections later, it happened again. Today, Trump is looking to the courts to overrule the voting majority for a third time.

It should not take the largest voter turnout in U.S. history to guarantee that a president rejected by the majority of the American people actually stops being president.

Even given that turnout, assuming Trump steps down, the electoral system will produce a gridlocked government—not because “the voters” or “the American people” wanted it that way, but because strategically positioned voters in small states did. The unrepresentativeness of state governments is even more extreme because of gerrymandering. And Republicans seem to have done well enough at the state level in 2020 to thwart any system-wide move to fairer representation in 2021.