A Single Person Could Decide the Election

When Republican Senator Mike Lee tweeted last month that “We’re not a democracy,” he wasn’t kidding. He later expanded the thought, saying that it was not “the prerogative of government to reflexively carry out the will of the majority of its citizens” and that “power is not found in mere majorities, but in carefully balanced power.”

Americans are by now familiar with many of those “carefully balanced” elements in the nation’s political system: a Senate that gives equal representation to, despite California having 68 times Wyoming’s population; an Electoral College that has given twice in the past 20 years; gerrymandered congressional districts .