We are all tempted to reason backwards.  If desired result R depends on the truth of proposition P, it is sometimes hard to resist arguing in favor of P without regard to its merits.  If your R is that you want Donald Trump’s electoral vote win to be illegitimate, then a handy P is that a candidate must win the nationwide popular vote to be considered the rightful winner of a presidential election.  Many times, the candidate with the most popular votes nationwide does not have a majority, just a plurality.  That was true in 1992, 1996, 2000, and now again in 2016.  Some countries that rely on a nationwide popular vote to select their head of state use a two-round system.  If no one wins a majority of the vote in the first round, the top two finishers compete in a second round.  One of the two will by necessity end up with a majority of the votes cast in the second round.  I know that France and Costa Rica both use this system, so the U.S. would not be breaking new ground.  However, the particular P before us is that a plurality is enough.  I don’t hear any calls for a run-off.

Applying this reasoning to other fields, Cleveland Indians fans can argue that the 2016 World Series has not been settled.  It ended in a tie.  Over the course of seven games, each team scored 27 runs in total.  We have ended up with an illegitimate World Series champion by using the arcane and biased method of counting the games won or lost rather than the number of runs scored over the entire series.  It’s obvious that we need a better method to settle a contest as important as the World Series.  Will Cleveland fans take to the streets until they get the result they desire?  If they are reading this, they just might.