The final outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election will, in all likelihood, come down to a few thousand votes in a handful of Midwestern states. Given the broader context of economic hardship and mass death, it’s a state of affairs that deserves to see heads roll at Democratic national headquarters, regardless of whether Joe Biden ultimately squeaks out a victory in the Electoral College. The polling industry, which largely failed to predict a close race, is due for a similar reckoning.

The fact remains that, under a less absurd system, there would be considerably less suspense. At the time of writing, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by more than 2 million votes nationwide — making the possibility that the president will carry the popular vote or pass the 50 percent threshold slim to none. As has been endlessly pointed out for the past four years, Donald Trump received millions fewer votes in 2016 and still carried the day, thanks to the eighteenth-century anachronism of the Electoral College — which remains his only potential path to victory this week.

From its beginning, the entire Trump presidency has drawn its legitimacy from a system that permits election to the country’s highest executive office with a minority of actual votes. Compounding this, the Electoral College inevitably encourages campaigns to ignore large, populous swaths of the country. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop aptly describes it: