Ironically, some votes count more

The Universe loves irony. As proof of my wisdom in this, I give you exhibit No. 1053, the 2016 Election of the President of these United States.

As pretty much everybody on Earth and in the planet’s geosynchronous, elliptical and circular orbits and still subject to its gravitational pull, knows, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump beat Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to become future 45th president of the U.S.

Ironically, though Clinton won the popular vote, receiving the highest number of votes in history, about 62,896,704, she conceded defeat to Trump Nov. 9, the day after the election, having failed to win a majority of the Electoral College votes.

This can happen because the number of Electoral College members is based on the number of representatives and senators the states (and the District of Columbia) have. And the number of representatives a state has isn’t based on the number of residents in the state, it’s based on the number of residents relative to all the other states.

This is so the number of elected folks in the House of Representatives stays at 435, otherwise, as the population of the country grew the number of representatives would outgrow the number of chairs available in the House Chamber, and no one wants to ruin the symmetry of the Capitol building by adding more and more lean-to structures.

And there’s complicated math, so that’s all I’m going to say about that. Let’s move along.

The election really isn’t over until the vote is given by the Electoral College, a pack of 538 designated voters (called electors) who actually elect the president because — and this is ironic if you think Trump and his supporters are nut-jobs — the Founding Fathers were worried that the masses could be swayed by a flamboyant, but unqualified candidate.

The Electoral College electors meet in their respective state capitols Monday, Dec. 19, or, as the Constitution says it, the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December after the presidential election — which, I think, means that the Founding Fathers were trying to ensure that people in the Electoral College had to be smart enough to solve word problems to cast their vote. Which is not ironic, just funny to me.

A surprisingly large number of Clinton supporters are hoping that electors will look at Trump and say, “Hey, this is the exact scenario the Founding Fathers were worried about, let’s not make our nation into a reality TV contestant for the next four years, let’s vote Hillary because the majority of voters actually got it right.”

The Clinton supporters’ hope is that at least 38 electors will defect from the Trump camp and vote for Clinton — despite the overwhelming facts that in all of U.S. history only a relative handful of times has an elector not voted in accordance with the popular vote from his or her state, and that 29 states and the District of Columbia legally require their electors to vote as the people of their state said to vote.

Who are the nut-jobs, now?

Ironically, it’s hard to tell.

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By the by, if 38 electors defect from the Trump camp but one votes for me rather than Clinton, then the House of Representatives gets to elect the president because then neither Trump nor Clinton would have the required 270 electoral votes. I don’t know if that is so much ironic as it is just completely confusingly complex at [email protected].