I’ve been thinking about the election. I know, who hasn’t been thinking about it? But not just this election, all of our elections. I have two suggestions.

Donald Trump has been crowing about a landslide. It’s not. In actual votes, 48.4% of Americans voted for Kamala Harris and 50% voted for Trump (the numbers as I write this on Nov. 27). The difference between them was 1.6%. Harris, a Black woman, had 107 days to run a presidential campaign against a man who had been revving up his campaign for four years. Hardly a landslide.

In 2020, Biden won 4% more than Trump. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had 2% more votes than Trump, but thanks to our Electoral College, Trump won anyway. And it was the same with Bush and Gore. Gore had slightly more votes, which in the crazy talk of the Electoral College meant that Bush won.

Over the last 200 years, 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College. Any conversation about the Electoral College ends with normal humans’ eyes glazed over as they are subdued by the complexity of it. It’s not complex. It’s smoke and mirrors that originated with slaveholding states and something about the unfairness of sparsely populated states not having equal representation. It’s not true and we should scrap it.

That’s the first suggestion.

My second suggestion is to make voting easier for everyone. We should either hold the presidential Election Day on Saturday or make Election Day a national holiday. We all need equal access to voting, with enough polling sites and time away from work.

How does Australia approach voting? Since 1924, every adult citizen is required to vote in elections. It’s a national holiday and it appears to be cause for celebration. Their voting turnout is over 90% (people have medical exceptions.) The percentage of eligible people who vote in the U.S. presidential elections since 1992 ranges from 49% to 62%.

Since every Aussie is required to vote, the effort of cajoling people to vote is not part of campaign strategies. And because you are required to vote, the government is obliged to make voting as easy as possible. Voter suppression is not part of the strategy. No one has to stand in line for six hours to vote.

I wonder if we scrapped the Electoral College, required all eligible citizens to vote, and made it a national holiday, if some of the ugliness of the process would get cleaned up. The same way that cities in the 19th century changed for the better when municipal sewer systems were built. No more open sewage running down the streets and no more outhouses behind every tenement building. Waterborne diseases disappeared. Suddenly everything smelled a lot sweeter.

Maybe we’re at the tipping point of smelling sweeter, because I don’t think we can bear the stench of our presidential campaigns much longer. There was no landslide. There’s never been a landslide. There’s just us tricked into agreeing with the Electoral College.

Jacqueline Sheehan lives in Florence.