The American president

If all goes the way it usually did in many previous US elections, the world should know before the end of the day whether Barack Obama got reelected as president, or that America has a new president in Mitt Romney.And that is not only because of the swiftness of the results but, more appropriately, due to the quickness with which the losing candidate acknowledges defeat and concedes. Theirs is not like what we have in the Philippines.

In the Philippines, almost nobody ever owns defeat. Instead, almost every loser claims to have been cheated. Whether cheating actually happened or not, a protest is usually filed that can actually take an entire term to resolve, making the result useless, if not pathetically funny.

The most hilarious example, if only it wasn’t very cruel, happened right here in Cebu involving the 2007 congressional contest for the fourth district between Benhur Salimbangon and Celestino Martinez III.

The results of that election had Salimbangon winning, so he got to sit as congressman. But Martinez protested. The protest took so long to resolve that it was not until the waning days of the contested term that the true winner was known — Martinez.

I am not very sure now, but I think Martinez got to sit as the truly-elected congressman of the fourth district only on the last session day of Congress. But being congressman for a day probably felt less great than the feeling of being vindicated.

The vindication of Martinez was to be shortlived, however. In a rematch in the 2010 polls Salimbangon beat Martinez more decisively. And this time it had real icing on the cake — the 2010-2013 term of Salimbangon is considered his first of three possible terms.

That is because while Salimbangon sat through virtually the entire 2007-2010 term, it was eventually declared as having been officially won by Martinez. Salimbangon, therefore, cannot be credited with a term he did not win, even if he served it practically in its entirety.

There could be other similar examples, such as that between Senator Koko Pimentel and Migz Zubiri, who served out part of the former’s term before resigning amid mounting evidence that “some cheating had occurred in his favor.”

But let us go back to where we started from — the American presidential election. I am  not in a position to say if cheating does occur in America. But from what we know, there seems to be none, which is a tribute to the stability of their system and the maturity of their voters.

Their system seems strange, though, and many Filipinos don’t understand how America really elects its president, which is just as well so that we do not copy it. For I shudder to think what a mess we will be in if we copied their system of electoral voting.

In the US, it is actually the College of Electors who officially vote for and determine the presidential winner. And they do not get to meet and vote until after the elections, in this case November 6 (the first Tuesday after the first Monday, they say) are over.

Every state sends delegates to the College of Electors corresponding to how many members of Congress that state has. Every state equally has two senators. But the number of congressmen is determined by population.

Thus a big state like California has I think 55 Electoral College voters (corresponding to two senators and 53 congressmen) while a small state like Delaware only has three (two senators and one congressman).

Now suppose Obama beats Romney in California by just one vote in the popular voting, i.e. voting by the people, but gets California’s 55 electoral votes, it won’t matter if he loses by a million votes of the people in Delaware because Romney gets only three electoral votes there.

In this system, it can happen that the candidate who wins the popular vote (direct vote of the people) will not get the electoral votes to be president. This has happened twice already, the last time when Al Gore (popular winner) lost to George W. Bush (electoral votes winner).