The rules of the game are set at the beginning. You cannot change them halfway through because you are losing the game. Please keep this in mind when it comes to snakes and ladders, chess or indeed Wimbledon and the US Presidential Election.
What do Wimbledon and the US Presidential Election have in common? Quite a bit, in fact. Often people like to point out certain quirks in the system at the end of the game claiming them to be unfair and demand to change the rules retroactively. No, that is not how it works.
I remember a few years back after the Djokovic v Federer Wimbledon final in 2019, in which Djokovic finally won the five set thriller. A few clever clogs pointed out that Djokovic might have won the classic final but in fact Federer won more points. Now I like Federer as much as the next person, which is a lot, but the appropriate reply to this is – so what?
The scoring system in tennis is quirky and creates pressure points. You must win a game 2 points clear – hence the deuce-advantage rule. You must win a set 2 games clear. Thankfully you do not have to win the match two sets clear, otherwise I think Djokovic and Federer would be still going. (Some junior tournaments do use ‘sudden death at deuce, which is an abomination, obviously.)
Tennis is not football – you don’t get to pile all the points up for each side and see who has the most. If you win a game to love, it’s your game. If you spend 25 minutes on a game and it has 19 deuce-advantages, you still get one game. The loser of that game does not get to use all their points, later.
In tennis, the scoring is clear. Therefore, if Djokovic is 5-2 up in a set, and Federer is 40 love up in his service game, Djokovic ‘can let that game go’. All Djokovic must do is close out his serve and he wins the set. All the points that Federer won in that lost set are gone. He doesn’t get to use them later; he doesn’t get to call a friend.
Similarly, the Electoral College in the US Presidential Election is a little quirky. This is because it is the United States of America and a federal system. You are not voting for class captain.
Come November as the usual suspects prepare to tell us that Biden won the popular vote and Trump ‘only’ won on the Electoral College and therefore this is an affront to democracy blah-blah, I say re-read your copy of the Federalists papers, or just watch Wimbledon. Simply piling up the votes in a wheelbarrow are not the rules of the game.
The Electoral College system is there for a reason- it holds the United States together and means Presidential candidates must campaign in ‘fly over’ country.
If the US Presidential Election were determined solely by the popular vote, then only the west and east coasts would elect the President which would mean a Democratic Dictatorship forever. Fine by me, you might say. But it would not be fine by the Founders, or the people of South Carolina (9 Electoral college votes) or Nebraska (5 electoral votes) or Wyoming (3 electoral votes.)
Neither Presidential candidate would ever set foot in those sparsely populated states and that would be the real affront to democracy. It is not the President of New York and California that is elected, it is the President of the United States that is head of that republic.
There we have it. Like snakes and ladders, chess, and tennis, the US Presidential Election has a very specific system from the outset. It is not anti-democratic, it prevents the Union from collapsing completely.