What we know: Trump's only shot is another Electoral College special

Early Wednesday morning, in the contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, it was unclear who would win the Electoral College and thus the presidency. However, at time of writing Joe Biden had a decisive lead in the popular vote — just like Hillary Clinton did in 2016. This lead is almost certain to expand markedly as late-arriving ballots, particularly in California where Biden has a huge margin of victory, are collected and tabulated.

No other democratic nation has anything like the Electoral College. In general, they either have a parliamentary system, in which the party that wins the most seats gets to run the government, or a national popular vote for president. The same is true for gubernatorial elections in all the American states, except Mississippi (though even that may be ended soon).

None of the common justifications for the Electoral College hold up in the slightest. Aside from theoretically allowing a candidate to win the presidency while losing the popular vote 4-1, in practice it neither empowers small states nor disempowers large ones. On the contrary, as has been proved time and again, most of the smallest and largest states are ignored by political campaigns, because they are not competitive. The Electoral College only empowers a handful of states that randomly happen to have a close partisan balance. Moreover, if a certain set of states came firmly under the control of one party — if Texas became solidly Democratic, for instance — it would be impossible for them to lose the presidency.

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It's been an anxious night for anyone concerned about who will be the next president of the United States. But if the candidate with the most votes became president, then this election would already be over.