Why doesn’t Trump reform the US voting system?

Topic of the week: America’s new president

THE indignant assertion by Alex Morris that “Donald J Trump is the democratically-elected President of the United States of America” represents a convenient change of tune from the Trump camp (Thanks and no thanks for the Twilight Zone analogy, Letters, January 22). The reality is that the American electorate gave Hillary Clinton almost 2.9 million more votes, which was a margin of 2.1 per cent of the total votes cast nationally.

Donald Trump only won the presidency through the rather bizarre electoral college system. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly said that “the system is totally rigged”, even suggesting that he might not accept the outcome of the election if it went against him. It had been widely anticipated that he could win the popular vote and then lose through the electoral college, so we can assume that this is the possible outcome that he was referring to. There can be little doubt of the outrage that Trump would rightly have shown if this had been the case, and the protests that would have followed from his supporters. Strangely, he suddenly fell silent on the issue as soon as the result was known.

In what is virtually a two-party system, it is extraordinary that victory can be handed to the loser, and yet this has now happened five times in a country that is supposed to have exemplary democratic credentials.

If Trump was truly concerned about the credibility of American democracy, he could take the opportunity to advocate reform, and thereby earn considerable respect. Future discrepancies could be avoided if an amendment to the Constitution abolished the electoral college, or if all of the 50 states allocated their electoral college votes proportionally. Most of them currently have a “winner takes all” policy, which effectively disenfranchises those voters who supported the contender.

Instead, he is now making unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Funnily enough, he alleges that there were between three and five million fraudulent votes, so this will presumably lead to a claim that he did not really lose the popular vote at all.

Whenever he is criticised, Donald Trump reacts like a sulky schoolboy. He did this repeatedly during the campaign, so it is frightening that he received as many votes as he did, but it seems that many supported him for cynical reasons. Earning any widespread, long-term respect is a different matter. That can only be done by the likes of Barack Obama, who did win the popular vote in both 2008 and 2012. Philip Wright Chatteris, Cambridgeshire “THE billionaire tycoon now ensconced in the White House has already began,” reads your standfirst (America goes through the looking glass with President Trump, The World, January 22). Has began? Not a typo, just bad grammar in bold print in a quality Sunday. Shocking. N Armstrong Hamilton