Where is the justice in Trump, a man who lost the public vote by 200,000 to Clinton, becoming President?

Sadly, there is absolutely no chance that America will review its voting system in anything other than democratic fringe meetings for the next four years

Anti-Donald Trump rallies have broken out over the United States (AFP/Getty)

Amid the soul-searching, recriminations, protestations that if the democrats hadn’t rigged their own primary maybe Bernie would have won, a straightforward argument seems notably absent from the chatter. Is it not logical that the winner of the popular vote should become President? Hillary Clinton, like Al Gore before her, has suffered this ignominy, according to the New York Times, by a margin of over 200,000. But due to the nature of the electoral system, which grants the number of electoral votes according to the size of population of a state, a populist demagogue has now taken control of the White House.

This has only happened five times since the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. History tells us that when the president is elected without winning the popular vote, periods of instability follow. In 1824 John Quincy Adams took the presidency and lost the popular vote to Andrew Jackson. This became a source of much bitterness for Jackson and his supporters who proclaimed the election a corrupt bargain. The 1876 presidential election was one of the most contentious and controversial presidential elections in American history. The results of the election 1876 saw Rutherford B Hayes claim the White House and was among the most disputed ever. The result led to the The Compromise of 1877 that effectively ceded power in the Southern states to the Democratic Redeemers, who went on to pursue their agenda of returning the South to a political economy resembling that of its pre-war condition, including the disenfranchisement of black voters.

We all remember 2000. Amid shouts of voter fraud and election rigging the result of the election hinged on Florida, where the margin of victory triggered a mandatory recount. Investigative journalist, Greg Palast, reported that 1.9m Americans cast ballots that no one counted. "Spoiled votes" is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: about 1 million of them - half of the rejected ballots - were cast by African Americans, although black voters make up only 12 per cent of the electorate.

Irrespective of this, litigation ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court. The Court's contentious decision in Bush v. Gore, announced on December 12, 2000, ended the recounts, effectively awarding Florida's votes to Bush and granting him the victory. Later studies have reached conflicting opinions on who would have won the recount had it been allowed to proceed. George Bush received 50,456,002 votes, or 47.9 per cent and Gore received 50,999,897, or 48.4 per cent.

Now, I've seen the whites of the eyes of what Noam Chomsky refers to as ‘the crazed Republicans’. Whilst filming in America in 2015 I spent time with the Arizona Border Defenders, a militia patrolling the border with Mexico looking for greenbacks. I met some of the Open Carry movement in Dallas, Texas outside the Republican Party Convention. But perhaps most horrifyingly, I came face-to-face with the pro-life movement outside an already closed Abortion Clinic. In 2015, abortion clinics closed at a rate of more than one per week with 53 abortion clinics shutting down or halting all abortion services.

I watched on as a vigil for the ‘Holocaust of the unborn’ was held. Deeply traumatised women who regretted their abortions were brought to the stage where they wailed and screamed, giving a sort of bizarre confessional speech to the gathered zealots. Cards on the table, I'd like to see white supremacy and the crazed Republicans contained in any way possible. But what particularly rankles is that over 200,000 more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump and yet he has seized control of every instrument of US governance, leaving America’s supposed checks and balances in tatters.

There is absolutely no chance that America will review its voting system in anything other than democratic fringe meetings for the next four years. There's more chance of Donald Trump accepting climate change than the legitimacy of 200,000 voters. Sad then that this quirk of the electoral college system has handed a populist demagogue leading a white supremacists charge the legitimacy to erase American pluralism and reboot isolationism 2.0.