U.S. Constitution now thwarts the will of American people

As a young man, I believed the U.S. Constitution was history’s premier blueprint for human governance. But now our “one person-one vote” ideal is so corrupted that nonrepresentative, disproportional voting could send us into the chaos of nationwide disenfranchisement.

In 2000, Al Gore lost the election but won the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. In 2012, Democrats lost congressional seats despite winning the national count by well over 1 million votes. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost the presidency despite winning the popular vote by more than 2.5 million votes. In fact, she won by a greater percentage than eight previous elected presidents.

In 2010, mountains of unattributed donations, available after the Citizens United decision, helped to worsen state voting inequities. California has no gerrymandering, but gerrymandering in red states now guarantees that most districts remain Republican.

And perhaps most remarkably of all, it now takes low-population states — accounting for only 17 percent of the nation’s population — to elect 51 senators and thus control the U.S. Senate. The vast majority of those states are red.

These inequities thwart the will of the people. To preserve our democracy, we must find ways to resist and reverse the skewering of our voting system.

This story was originally published December 16, 2016 at 8:06 PM with the headline "U.S. Constitution now thwarts the will of American people."