Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that America’s democracy survived Donald Trump’s attack on it. But the resilience of our democratic system was hardly as robust as one might have wished.

If Trump had succeeded in forcing the Justice Department to open an investigation of voter fraud in Georgia, thereby putting pressure upon that state to invalidate their election results, there might well have been a cascade of state vote invalidations and Trump might have reversed his loss. Only the threat of a mass resignation of Justice Department officials, it seems, deterred Trump from putting that plan into effect.

Trump’s 2016 victory was itself made possible by our imperfect democratic election system. Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, but the Electoral College and winner-take-all mechanisms allowed him to become the fifth presidential candidate to win despite losing. Trump received 46.1 percent of the popular vote, but 56.1 percent of the electoral vote.

As a result, our vaunted democratic system saddled us with four years of reactionary, incompetent, corrupt and destructive leadership, and it did so not because that’s what most Americans wanted, but because that’s what our flawed system produced.

The two watchwords of any democracy are: “One man, one vote;” and “the majority rules.” Neither condition prevails at crucial levels of our democratic system.

Majority rule does not always prevail in presidential elections, as just noted. Neither does it prevail in the U.S. Senate. The filibuster rule has produced a situation in which, for most legislation, 60 senators must approve a bill if it is to be passed. That’s a supermajority, not a majority.

The practice of electoral vote “winner-take-all” at the state level might seem to be an appropriate case of majority rule, but it isn’t. Only if all relevant votes are ultimately counted is majority rule legitimate. In a presidential election, because the president represents, and has authority over, all U.S. citizens, the votes of all qualified U.S citizens are relevant. But many millions of those votes are never counted at the national level, because they are the votes of the states’ political minorities, which have produced no electoral votes, and only electoral votes elect a president.

As for “one man, one vote,” that phrase implies that one person’s vote should be equal in effectiveness to another’s. The U.S. Supreme Court declared that principle to be constitutionally mandated within states. It ruled that a state’s voting districts must have approximately equal populations, precisely to ensure that one vote weighs as much as another.

Regrettably, equalizing voting district populations fails to guarantee “one man, one vote.” If, within a state, the party in power uses certain well-known tactics to artificially weaken the voting strength of its opposition party, it reduces the value of each opposition-party vote. Gerrymandering is such a tactic. So is voter suppression.

It should also be noted that, for a considerable number of U.S. citizens, it’s “one man, no vote.” There are over 700,000 American citizens in Washington, D.C., who, while they can vote in presidential elections, cannot vote for an actual representative in Congress. And there are over 3 million U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico who are granted neither congressional representation nor the right to vote for president.

On the national level, there is not even the pretense that one man’s vote is equivalent to another’s. States vary substantially in population, but each state has two, and only two, senators in Congress. This ensures that voters in sparsely populated states have far more power over federal legislation than those in highly populated states. It’s been calculated that, in our current senate, which is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, the 50 Democratic senators represent some 41 million more citizens than the Republican senators.

The Electoral College incorporates the inequality produced by the equal allocation of senate seats, because the number of a state’s Electoral College votes is the same as its congressional delegation. It’s estimated that, depending upon the state, an elector could represent more than 700,000 people, or less than 200,000.

Compounding that inequality is the already discussed practice (in 48 states) of awarding all the state’s Electoral College votes to whichever presidential candidate receives the most votes statewide. That practice, as we’ve seen, has the effect of nullifying the votes of minority-party voters.

The Founding Fathers feared that “the masses” could easily be misled by demagogues and therefore the voting system they created permitted electors to use their own judgment in voting for candidates. They could disregard the popular vote if they thought that the public had been deceived. Today, “the masses” are far more well-informed than they were in the 18th century, so states now forbid electors to vote as they wish, making them pledge to vote for the winner of their states’ presidential elections. Thirty-one states have laws to that effect.

Assuming that states have chosen to bind electors to the popular vote because they wish to make the Electoral College system more democratic, it’s hard to ignore the fact that they could have done so far more effectively.

A modest, but significant step forward would be for states to abandon winner-take-all and allocate their Electoral College votes proportional to the popular vote in their respective state elections. That would at least give minority voters in the states a real voice in the election.

A more radical approach would be for states to pledge to cast all their electoral votes for whichever presidential candidate received the most popular votes nationally. This approach already has backers. It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have now provisionally made this pledge, and the total number of electoral votes involved so far is 196. Other states are considering passing legislation to join the compact. If, and when, the participating states’ electoral votes reach 270, the pledges will be activated, and the Electoral College will become nothing but a rubber stamp for the winner of the national popular vote.

Of course, neither of these methods may attract enough support to succeed. But one thing is certain: Our flawed democracy needs some serious work.

Leonard Hitchcock of Pocatello is an alumnus of the University of Iowa and did graduate work at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, San Diego. He taught philosophy in California and Arizona for 15 years. In 1985, after earning a library degree, he was hired by Idaho State University. He retired from ISU’s Oboler Library in 2006.