Don’t throw a fit if your candidate loses

I do not know if American democracy will survive this bizarre election year, but if it does not make it, I can predict the cause of death. The smoking gun will be the growing, highly toxic, self-serving, and baseless belief that whenever one’s favored candidate, party or issue loses an election, it must be because “the system” was “rigged” by the winning side.

Nonsense.

While GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump spews this bile on the national stage, we also have problems right here in Kansas. Secretary of State Kris Kobach will not quit insisting that restrictive new voting laws are needed to prevent rampant voter fraud, despite the failure of his or any other office to find any substantial evidence that it exists.

On the other side of the aisle, critics have wondered if the particularly high voter turnout for Republicans in large, high-turnout precincts is due to some sort of tampering with the voting machines. Not so fast: These precincts tend to be located in higher-income, suburban areas such as Olathe and Maize – areas that vote heavily Republican, where demographics alone explain the results.

Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders were devastated by his loss to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, but Clinton finished more than three and a half million votes ahead.

No voter is always going to like the results of our process, but when we lose, instead of throwing brickbats and broken bottles at the officials like disgruntled sports fans, we need to take the high road.

Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow used mathematics to demonstrate that no system of counting votes can guarantee an absolutely fair outcome, every time. Just ask Al Gore, who won the popular vote but lost the presidency in 2000 amid a circus of butterfly ballots and hanging chads. Clinton knows, too – she narrowly lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama in 2008 despite her slight edge in popular votes.

Complications such as races with more than two candidates, low-turnout elections, unstable public attitudes, the electoral college, and convention superdelegates can skew outcomes in close races. No wonder the Democrats have pledged to eliminate two-thirds of their superdelegates by 2020.

Even then, democracy will still be imperfect. But it still beats the alternatives.

Yet democracy is also vulnerable. The only thing holding it in place is us. It cannot survive unless we all take one for the team sometimes, even when it hurts.

This story was originally published August 20, 2016 at 5:04 AM with the headline "Don’t throw a fit if your candidate loses."