IS THE U.S. A DEMOCRACY?

There has been a recent spate of articles about democracy being in danger (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/four-threats-to-american-democracy-250120) and this item is my take on the matter.

The U.S. has never been a full democracy and was designed to be a Representative Democracy because of how to count slaves.*

But over the decades, America has become less and less even a representative democracy.  The problem is a couple fold.  One is that every state has at minimum three electors (one for each Senator and one for each Representative).  These are Alaska, Delaware, District of Columbia*, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming.

The problem comes in because the number of electors has become fixed at 538.  Therefore, states with minimal population got three electors whereas the more populous states divide up the remainder.  Although California has the most electors with 55, it is still under representative of its population.  Of course this could be fixed by increasing the number of electors, but this has never been done.

Furthermore, the electors of most states vote on a winner take all basis.

In 2000, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote, yet Republican George W. Bush won the presidency.  In 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by quite a margin (about 3 million); yet Republican Donald Trump won the election on the basis of electors from Michigan (16),  Pennsylvania (20), and Wisconsin (10).  Thus in two of the last 5 elections, the candidate with the most popular votes lost the election.

There was a problem in the Senate in 2016 also.  Though Republicans kept their majority in the Senate, Democrats got more votes total.**  The big part of the problem is that each state gets two Senators no matter what their population.  This is dramatically shown by Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was re-elected with 111,000 votes; Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York was re-elected with 4.8 million votes.**

 Today, Republicans don’t even need to win any “swing states” to win a Senate majority: 52 seats are in states where the 2016 presidential margin was at least 5 percentage points more Republican than the national outcome. By contrast, there are just 28 seats in states where the margin was at least 5 points more Democratic, and only 20 seats in swing states.***

Similar biases also appear in state legislatures, e.g. Michigan****  In Virginia, Democratic delegates got by far the most votes but only tied with the Republicans for number of seats.  The Republicans ended up controlling the House by a coin flip and taking names from a hat.****

If the U.S. is a democracy, shouldn't all American have the right to vote?
First, the law requires that voters present qualifying ID in order to cast a ballot. An ID card isn’t valid unless it contains the voter’s current residential street address. This requirement disproportionately burdens Native Americans, plaintiffs pointed out, since many do not have residential addresses; they have their mail delivered to a post office box rather than to a physical address
I think this idea that you have to have a street address is a compromise from the day that you had to be a property owner to vote.  When I lived in Washington, D.C., for example, homeless people didn't have a street address so couldn't vote.  The current case involves American Indians living in North Dakota who have P.O. address but not street addresses. This requirement should be abolished if we are going to consider ourselves a democracy, but the Supreme Court thinks otherwise. (https://rewire.news/ablc/2018/10/11/supreme-court-native-americans-november/)

The bottom line to all this is that the U.S. is no longer even a representative democracy.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_electors,_2016
** https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/10/democrats-won-popular-vote-senate-too/93598998/
*** https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-congressional-map-is-historically-biased-toward-the-gop/
**** https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/once-again-michigan-dems-receive-more-votes-in-the-state-house-but-republicans-hold-onto-power/Content?oid=2472685
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/12/21/virginia-election-tie-coin-tosses-picking-names-hat-yep-thats-how-races-decided-probably-never-going/973630001/