Election day has come and gone. And Texans have re-elected incumbent Rick Perry, but without a majority. Republican candidates Rick Perry and Carole Keeton Strayhorn took 41 percent and 18 percent respectively and Democratic candidates Chris Bell and Kinky Friedman took 28 percent and 11 percent respectively. Ed Board disagrees with electing a candidate into office with out a majority, over 50 percent.

A closer look at these numbers shows that the majority of the state didn’t vote for Rick Perry. Ed Board is not sure (especially in a state with the sixth largest economy in the world) that winning an election when half of the state doesn’t want you is prudent. In fact, it seems to fly in the face of the voters’ wishes.

Sure, the position of governor doesn’t have as much power in Texas as it does in other states. But that doesn’t mean it’s an office that should be taken lightly or that it doesn’t matter if someone who wins only a minority of votes is elected.

It’s important, too, to distinguish between criticizing the Texas’ voting system and the national electoral system, which also allows candidates to win without achieving the majority. In the federal system, the few candidates who have won the office without getting the minority lost by a far slimmer margin than Perry did. And they’re still required to win the majority in a state to carry it (with the exception of Nebraska and Maine).

In this long, odd campaign season, Rick Perry had every advantage imaginable. He raised far more money than the other candidates combined. He was an incumbent. He’s a Republican in a red state. And yet three candidates ran on very similar platforms: they all distanced themselves dramatically from the ideas and cronyism of Rick Perry.

We’re getting the sinking feeling that had only one candidate – say, a Chris Bell – run against Perry, the Republican would have gotten a sound beating. Here in Dallas, at any rate, Bell topped Perry by three percentage points.

Even if a challenger couldn’t beat Perry in a runoff, voters would have a stronger voice in who their elected officials are and Perry would have a stronger mandate as governor.

A few weeks ago, Ed Board said Kinky Friedman shouldn’t drop out of the race even though Chris Bell asked him to. We still stand by that opinion. Every person who wants to run for an office should have an opportunity to do so. What we are saying is that if the people of this state truly wanted Perry to be governor, it would be evident in a runoff. So why doesn’t the state hold one?