LIKE LEMMINGS, ELECTORS FOLLOW GOP OFF CLIFF

The very fact that America got a civics lesson this year on the Electoral College — and how pointless it is since it doesn’t work as it was designed — is just further proof that this outdated mechanism should go away.

State by state and in the District of Columbia, electors gathered Monday to officially decide who will be the next president. Yet in about half of those jurisdictions, state law already overrides the original intent of the framers who dreamed up the Electoral College to keep ordinary voters from making a mistake and electing a unfit demagogue (or, in the framers’ time, from electing abolitionists). In half of the states — count Tennessee as one — electors are bound by state law to vote for the candidate whose party carried the state.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton won the popular ballot — the ordinary people vote — by nearly 3 million votes. By the way, that made Trump the worst-performing winner in the popular vote since 1876, according to both CNN and Fox News. But it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter because the Electoral College — a cruel anachronism for a time when fake news fanned by a white nationalist candidate whose only truth was and is what he wants it to be, along with Russian election interference — handed the election to the very kind of demagogue that Alexander Hamilton so presciently foresaw.

Raucous protesters at many statehouses Monday braved the brutal cold that grips the country, putting exclamation points on the deep divisions that emerged during the campaign. And though those protesters didn’t make the difference in the election, they did make a difference.

That difference is the two big takeaways we will have today and after this joke of our 2016 election year:

Donald Trump may be president, but thanks to Russia and our own antique and state-circumvented Electoral College and his own unfitness, he is every bit and then some as illegitimate in the presidency as he tried to say Barack Obama was by falsely claiming Obama was Kenyan-born rather than American-born. That was just another Trump-truth, which is to say it was no truth at all.

The Electoral College must be scrapped with a constitutional amendment or neutered by something like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among a group of states and the District of Columbia to award all of their respective electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote. (As of 2016, it had been adopted by 10 states and the District of Columbia.) Together, they have 165 electoral votes. If more states join until they reach 270 electoral votes, the measure would render the Electoral College moot, and the only votes for president that would matter — that should matter — would be voters’ votes. Not electors, not Congress, not Russia. Just American voters.

In all of the countries in which America’s democracy has served as a model, not one has adopted the Electoral College provision. In all other countries, voters elect their presidents. Not here. Shouldn’t that tell us something?

No wonder protesters have been willing to brave single-digit temperatures at state capitols while the electors — like lemmings — followed their party and state rules over a cliff. More than 99 percent of electors through U.S. history voted for the candidate who won their state, according to the National Archives.

One of the peculiarities of American democracy is that these 538 electors — in this nation of 318 million — actually pick the president. It is un-American, even while it is singularly American.

None of the 538 is constitutionally bound to follow the will of the people they represent. As we’ve noted, some are bound in various ways by their state law, but they could still have “gone rogue,” albeit facing minor state penalties.

But that belies partisanship, and the Electoral College is all about partisanship. Normally the electors rubber-stamp the results of the election because of who they are — party stalwarts chosen by their party to vote for their party’s nominee.

Electors flipping allegiances from Trump to Clinton, or vice-versa, would require ignoring the will of the party voters who selected them and breaking with their political party.

So much for our electors representing the will of the people and the popular vote.

That means we’re stuck with Trump — the Russians’ Celebrity Apprentice.