electoral college

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promote 2nd on asymmetry gop and polarization!

see minority rules

popular vote vs winner? dems v gop?

dirty tricks?

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AN 5 26

President Donald Trump's gerrymandering crusade has been a "disaster for our democracy," but according to one political scientist who spoke with the New York Times, there is a fix that could undo the damage.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at the New America public policy institute, and on Tuesday, the Times published a video interview with him conducted by journalist and author, Ezra Klein. The Times described Drutman as "one of the most persistent and thoughtful advocates for proportional representation," an idea that "might be the answer we need to turn to here" in the face of Trump's redistricting blitz.

"Proportional representation describes a family of voting systems widely used throughout the world in which the party gets seats in the legislature in direct proportion to the vote share," Drutman said.

Under a system like this, Drutman explained, states would implement larger congressional districts that each have a larger number of seats, rather than the current system, where numerous districts each get one. With proportional representation, an eight-seat district, for example, would send four Democrats and four Republicans to Congress if a district split the vote between each party 50/50.

"So you could imagine New York State, instead of being 26 districts, maybe being three districts, split between the north, the mid and the New York City area," Drutman explained. "You might have an eight-member district, a nine-member district and a nine-member district. And then parties would put forward lists of candidates. Say, in a midstate eight-member district, if Republicans get 50 percent of the vote, their top four candidates on their party list go to Congress. And if Democrats get 50 percent of the vote, their top four candidates go to Congress."

By contrast, he added, the current system awards 100 percent of the representation for a district to the candidate and party who gets at least a little bit over 50 percent of the vote. Proportional representation, then, is a much more "intuitively fair" way of conducting politics.

"There are a bunch of different ways to do proportional representation, and there are better ways to do it and worse ways to do it," Drutman continued. "But the big thing that people should know is that this is a system in which we are mechanically doing what we think is fair, which is that parties should get seats in the legislature in direct proportion to the share of votes that they get in the election."

He added later: "[The] thing that we don’t like about gerrymandering is that it’s highly disproportional. Take Louisiana: You have six districts, and you can draw them in a whole lot of different ways to maximize your advantage if you’re the Republican State Legislature. If you make Louisiana one six-member proportional district, there are no lines to draw. There’s no possibility for gerrymandering."

Larger states like California and Texas would still have multiple districts that could conceivably still be gerrymandered, Drutman noted, but proportional representation would still blunt the impact of those tactics by allowing in some representatives from the minority vote-share party.

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5094602-a-landslide-just-0-15-percent-of-all-voters-determined-trumps-2024-victory

How close, exactly, was the 2024 election?

President Donald Trump and his allies have called his win a “landslide” and “blowout.” From their telling, Trump’s “sweeping,” “historic” victory has given MAGA a “powerful mandate” to govern.

:{Some commentators have pushed back, noting, for instance, that Trump’s 1.5 percent popular vote victory is one of the smallest ever — just a fraction of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 22.6 percent landslide win in 1964.

Trump failed to secure a majority of the popular vote, at 49.7 percent, unlike George W. Bush in 2004 (50.3 percent), Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 (52.9 percent and 51 percent) and Joe Bidenin 2020 (51.3 percent). And while Trump won all seven swing states, his 312 electoral votes were only a handful more than Biden’s 306 in 2020 — and far less than Obama’s 365 in 2008 or Ronald Reagan’s 525 in 1984.}:

These rebuttals are all true. Yet they obscure a deeper point. If the size of your mandate is the size of your win, neither popular vote margins nor electoral vote totals are the best place to look.

Take first the national popular vote margin. This number tells us how divided voters are across the country, but it is simply not how we pick winners under the Electoral College system. In the starkest example, Hillary Clintonwon nearly 3 million more votes than Trump did in 2016, an apparent Democratic blowout — except for the fact that she lost.

The electoral vote total isn’t much more illuminating. While electoral votes do decide who becomes the president, the winning candidate’s margin is easily inflated by most states’ winner-take-all rules. In 2000, had Gore gained an additional 538 votes out of the 6 million cast in Florida, he would have won 25 more electoral votes (and the election).

Ultimately, both measures miss the heart of what it means for an election to be “close”: How far was the nation from a different election outcome?

To precisely answer that question, we developed a new measure that we call the Determinative Popular Vote (DPV). As we describe in a forthcoming article in Election Law Journal, DPV is the minimum number of votes — placed across the right states — that a candidate would have needed to change the Electoral College outcome.

If you’re a political junkie, you probably saw something like DPV discussed informally after the past few elections. In 2016, for example, despite winning the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, Clinton lost to Trump in the Electoral College. Had Clinton won just 77,000 more votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, she would have won the Electoral College. (In fact, had Clinton flipped one district in Nebraska instead of Wisconsin, a mere 62,000 voters would have also thrown the contest to the House of Representatives).

In 2020, though Biden won by an even bigger popular vote margin of 7 million, just 43,000 additional Trump votes across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin would have tied the Electoral College and chaotically thrown the election to the House.

Those tiny fractions of voters — 0.04 percent in 2016 and 0.03 percent in 2020 — determined the election, irrespective of millions of others. In 2016, these determinative voters broke against the popular vote winner, choosing Trump; in 2020, they broke with the popular vote winner, choosing Biden. Everyone’s vote counted, but the real outcome came down to the choices of just a sliver of swing state voters.

A similar story happened in 2024. Trump defeated Harris 312 to 226 in the Electoral College and won 2.3 million more popular votes. But had Harris won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — which Trump won by just 230,000 votes — then she would have secured exactly the 270 electoral votes needed for the win.

A mere 0.15 percent of voters nationwide was the difference between Trump’s second term and Harris’s first. Is that really a mandate?

The point is not a partisan one. As DPV reveals, Biden’s win in 2020 was closer than Trump’s in 2024, even as Biden’s popular vote margin more than tripled Trump’s. That is the sober clarity only a measure like DPV can provide, since it accounts for where votes are cast — which, for better or worse, is pertinent in our Electoral College system.

Looking at DPV historically further reveals the relative closeness of the 2024 election. In our article, we calculated DPV for every presidential election since 1836. 2024 is the 13th closest among these 48 elections. If the 2024 election was a landslide, then so too must be the other 35.

Under the Electoral College — where a handful of swing states are central to the outcome — a small number of fortunate, “determinative” voters ultimately pick the president. Politicians will always have an incentive to overstate their margin of victory. Determinative Popular Vote now makes it harder to do so, as it puts into plain sight how close we actually were to a different election outcome.

So yes, Trump clearly won the 2024 election. But it was no blowout — and he has no major mandate.

Mark Haidar is an associate at Elias Law Group. Aidan Calvelli is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.}:

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an 10 24 truthdig

Donald Trump owes the Founding Fathers a deep debt of gratitude for making his past and present election-subversion plots possible. In particular, he should thank them for creating the Electoral College.

*:{This article originally appeared on Truthdig.

Most of the 55 white men of property who convened in Philadelphia in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation held a deep distrust of the masses. No less than 25 of them were slave owners. They considered but quickly rejected the possibility of electing the president by direct popular vote as excessively democratic. Instead, the national charter they produced embodied a host of compromises that were at their core profoundly racist and anti-democratic. These “Faustian bargains,” as many legal commentators have called them, included the structural design of the Senate, which accords each state two members regardless of population; the protection of slavery and states’ rights with the notorious “three-fifths” compromise, which allowed three-fifths of the enslaved populations of the Southern states to be counted for purposes of determining representation in the House of Representatives; and above all, the Electoral College.

As set forth in Article II of the Constitution, the Electoral College allocates “electors” to each state based on the size of each state’s House delegation, plus two senators. The three-fifths clause was necessary to secure support for the system from slave states, as it increased their number of electors. The candidate who wins a majority of the college becomes the president.

In the event that no candidate secures a majority, Article II as modified by the 12^th Amendment (ratified in 1804) requires the House to conduct a “contingent election,” in which each state delegation, rather than each individual representative, gets one vote to determine the presidency. And under both the 12^th Amendment and the 20^th (ratified in 1933, and which moved the inauguration from March to January), it is the newly elected Congress, not the outgoing one, that makes the determination.

As Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains in his latest book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever,” no other putative democracy in the world selects its chief executive in such a blatantly undemocratic manner. Because of the Electoral College, the United States has elected a president who lost the national popular vote five times — in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and most egregiously, in 2016, when Trump claimed the Oval Office despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million ballots. The country has conducted contingent elections for the president twice — in 1800, when the House handed the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, and in 1824, when the House selected John Quincy Adams.

Without the Electoral College and its rejection of popular democracy, Trump’s 2020 election-subversion plot, as well as the efforts currently underway, would have been unthinkable. The 2020 plan was built on a series of memos drafted by attorney Kenneth Chesebro and law professor John Eastman that called for the creation of “alternate” slates of Republican electors in swing states where Joe Biden won the popular vote. Under the plan, Vice President Mike Pence as president of the Senate would either accept the alternate slates as genuine during the joint session of Congress convened on Jan. 6, 2021, to confirm the winner; send the election back to state legislatures to reexamine their electoral certifications; or send the election to the House for a contingent ballot that would end in Trump’s favor.

The plan also called for invalidating the Election Count Act of 1887, which Congress adopted in the aftermath of the disputed 1876 contest between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden. Like 2020, the 1876 election was plagued by allegations of fraud, and dual sets of electors from four states were submitted to Congress. Rather than forward the vote to the House, however, a special commission was appointed to determine the winner. In return for agreeing to end Reconstruction, Hayes was chosen.

The ECA spelled out in greater detail than the Constitution the procedure for tallying electoral votes. Although intended to minimize confusion and subversion, it was poorly drafted and provided inadequate safeguards. It permitted a state’s electoral votes to be challenged at the joint session if just two members of Congress, one from the House and one from the Senate, filed written objections. Once such objections were lodged, the ECA required the session to be suspended while the two chambers separated and debated the merits of the objections. If both chambers sustained the objections to a state’s votes, those votes were to be thrown out and not considered in the final electoral count. If the revised count still showed no candidate winning a majority, a contingent election in the House would ensue.

The plot failed and the ECA survived, but not before the country was nearly brought to its knees with the Jan. 6 insurrection that disrupted the joint session and the peaceful transfer of power. Pence held firm to his position that the vice president had a ministerial role limited to opening and counting electoral votes, and that he lacked the unilateral power to invalidate votes. Although objections were made to Arizona’s electoral certification, the Senate rebuffed the challenge by a vote of 93-6, and the House by a margin of 303-121.

Hoping to avoid another insurrection, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022, correcting some of the ECA’s massive deficiencies. Among other provisions, the reform act clarifies the vice president’s role as strictly ministerial and provides that states may only submit a single, conclusive slate of electors certified by the governor or other designated executive official. The new act also raises the objection threshold from one representative of each chamber to one-fifth of the members of each body and it offers expedited review in federal court of election lawsuits.

The reform act will make it harder, but by no means impossible, for Trump’s current subversion scheme to work. The new plan is unfolding before our eyes, paralleling the 2020 plot with a flood of litigation contesting voting procedures in swing states, with the ultimate aim of getting at least one case before the Supreme Court, which has moved ever more sharply to the right and become little more than a tool of the MAGA movement.

Compounding the danger of renewed subversion, there is nothing in the Reform Act to prevent a far-right governor from colluding with similarly extreme state legislators to overturn the will of state voters and send a single fake slate of electors to the next joint session in 2025. Nor will the GOP be hard-pressed to meet the new 20% objection threshold if it controls both chambers of Congress come January. Most foreboding, the reform act also does nothing to alter the rules governing contingent elections in the House.

With the polls showing the race between Trump and Kamala Harris coming down to the wire, no amount of subversion from Trump and his party can be ruled out. The plot this time is far more sophisticated and informed than its 2020 predecessor. If it succeeds, we can blame the Founding Fathers for creating a system that contained the seeds of its own destruction with the deeply anti-democratic Electoral College.

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8 22 reform act

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/preventing-theft-whack-a-mole/

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an 7 22

wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's flurry of controversial rulings, a new analysis is highlighting some of the deeply flawed aspects of the U.S. Constitution. The piece, published by The Root, also raises the question of why a document co-written by oppressors is still considered a framework for a country deemed to be the "land of the free."

In her op-ed, The Root's Candace McDuffie began with a brief overview of the Supreme Court justices' erosion of multiple legal landmarks over the last several days.

"Last week, the Supreme Court eviscerated a woman’s right to abortion, undermined Miranda rights, expanded gun rights and allowed border patrol agents to operate with even further impunity," McDuffie wrote. "Today, it ruled that a former Washington state high school football coach can pray on the field immediately after games—regardless of the religious backgrounds of the students."

Offering historical highlights about the U.S. Constitution, McDuffie noted that the 235-year-old document was also co-authored by two oppressors who owned slaves as she emphasized that the document was not written for the purpose of inclusion for all people. "The primary authors consisted of: John Adams, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The last two men on that list owned slaves," she wrote. How can this set of laws still guide a nation when it was concocted by white men who looked at Black people as property and not as human?"

McDuffie also pointed out a number of flaws and contradictions in the Constitution as it relates to modern-day issues currently plaguing American citizens."The Fifteenth Amendment gave Black people the right to vote," she noted. "However, last year nineteen states passed laws that restricted access to voting. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, but America’s mass incarceration problem proves this as untrue."

She also noted the basis of the Constitution and the irony in Justice Clarence Thomas' stance as he has been a vocal advocate of the latest, controversial rulings.

"The fact that a Black man—Justice Clarence Thomas—is working to erode the rights of millions of people is more than ironic: it’s downright pathetic. In a concurring opinion Thomas wrote Friday, he claimed that the Supreme Court’s controversial June decisions aimed to weaken substantive due process which protects certain rights even if they’re not listed in the Constitution."

“As I have previously explained, ‘substantive due process’ is an oxymoron that ‘lack[s] any basis in the Constitution,’” Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion on Roe v. Wade.

According to McDuffie, Thomas also claimed that it’s “'legal fiction' that is 'particularly dangerous.' Even more ironically, how is it up to the states to decide a woman’s right to abortion yet not interfere with a person’s right to carry a concealed firearm?"

The writer also noted the deeply flawed issue with the justices' appointments. The majority of them on the bench was actually nominated by Republican presidents who only won elections by way of the Electoral College. In short, the majority of American voters did not vote for them so the Supreme Court's rulings are based predominantly on the beliefs of a smaller minority as opposed to being a reflection of the country, collectively.

She went on to raise a question that many have posed: whether or not the basis of the Electoral College needs to be revisited.

"Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices were put there by presidents from a party who haven’t won a popular vote more than once in three decades," she wrote. "Shouldn’t the Twelfth Amendment, which established the electoral college, be revisited?"

She concluded, "It’s clear that the right will continue to twist and contort anything they can to carry out their agenda—an agenda that has and will always harm this country’s most marginalized and vulnerable populations. And honestly, the Constitution will always be a hell of an excuse to oppress Black folks on behalf of white supremacy."

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last update after 1870 disasters?

an 6 22

Pennsylvania state legislator Russ Diamond had a problem. Joe Biden carried the commonwealth by 80,000 votes, thereby securing its 20 electors. According to a newly released trove of emails, Diamond and fellow Republican state legislators wanted instead to send electors dedicated to Donald Trump. They just needed the right excuse.

If that sounds outrageous, that’s because it is.

At first, it seemed allegations of electoral fraud might do the trick. Trump and his lawyers blanketed the airwaves with outlandish claims about fraud at the polls. But when the Trump legal team made their case to the Pennsylvania legislature, their efforts struck Diamond as unconvincing and frankly incompetent. If there was no fraud, how could they justify overriding the will of the voters?

Luckily for Diamond, an obscure conservative law professor had recently said in testimony that state legislatures didn’t need evidence of fraud to disregard the will of the people. It was enough, Professor John Eastman said, that the legislature objected to the rules under which the election was conducted. [SCOTT PERRY NOW?] After watching Eastman’s testimony, Diamond decided Eastman was just the man to help him write a resolution purporting to nullify the will of his state’s voters.

“Honestly, the Trump legal team was not exactly stellar at PA's hearing, failed to provide the affidavits of their witnesses, and made a glaring error by purporting that more ballots had been returned than mailed out,” Diamond admitted in an email to Eastman. “It is for this reason that I latched onto your comments that actual fraud is irrelevant when the election itself is unlawful.”

Diamond sent Eastman a draft resolution predicated on Eastman’s crackpot theory that the US Constitution gives state legislatures the unchecked power to disenfranchise their own voters after the fact if legislators don’t like the results of an election.

Eastman praised Diamond’s efforts but urged his protegé to go still further and actually name Trump electors in the resolution, as opposed to simply announcing their intent to do so.

“One big question, though. Do you want to only go half way, and require another resolution to actually choose a slate of electors? Or should you do it all in one resolution?,” Eastman wrote. “I don't know the dynamic of your Legislature, so can't answer that. But my intuition is that it would be better to do what you need to do in one fell swoop.”

The Pennsylvania Secretary of State and the courts had made some tweaks to facilitate voting during the pandemic. Republicans challenged these changes in court and lost. But Eastman promised that these changes could give the Pennsylvania legislature the excuse it needed to throw out the election, even without any evidence of fraud.

Eastman argued that it would be more politically palatable if the legislature could claim that the new rules cost Trump the election and they as legislators were simply righting that wrong by nullifying the election and replacing Biden’s electors with Trump’s.

Knowing that the mail-in vote favored Biden, Eastman suggested that the legislature pass a resolution arbitrarily declaring a certain percentage of perfectly legal mail-in ballots to be illegal based on a convoluted formula Eastman made up.

That way, Eastman said, the legislature could claim Trump won. “That would help provide some cover,” he asserted. (In fact, Trump would still have lost under Eastman’s metric, but that’s beside the point.)

Ultimately, Pennsylvania state legislators did not pass a resolution openly nullifying the results of their state’s election and naming alternative electors. Instead, at the urging of Trump’s legal team, Pennsylvania Republicans secretly named a slate of pseudo-electors, as did Republicans in six other states that Biden won.

The threat of an Eastman gambit has not passed.

If anything, it has gotten worse.

Republicans who take Eastman’s arguments seriously are gaining ground in state legislatures and key election administration posts.

The GOP may retake the House and Senate this year, which could put GOP legislators in charge of certifying the next presidential election.

A bolder state legislature could still attempt the Eastman gambit in 2024. A GOP-controlled Congress might agree to count the illegitimate electors chosen by politicians, instead of those chosen by the people.

That is why Congress must reform the Electoral Count Actto specify that if there are two slates of electors claiming to represent a state, Congress must only count electors courts have affirmed as legitimate.

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On Valentine’s Day 2022, the New York Times published an op-ed by conservative attorney and former federal judge J. Michael Luttig — who called for the U.S. to strengthen the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and warned that failing to do so could make it easier for former President Donald Trump to steal the 2024 election. One of the people who took notice of Luttig’s op-ed was liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent, who applauds Luttig for speaking out in his Valentine’s Day column.

“Luttig minces no words, declaring that Trump and his allies pose a ‘clear and present danger to our democracy,’” Sargent explains. “Luttig says they are preparing to ‘exploit’ the ECA to ‘seize the presidency in 2024’ if Trump or his ‘anointed candidate is not elected by the American people.’ We know Trump is doing this, because he told us so.”

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bipartisan Michigan politicos launch effort to elect president by national popular vote: 'It only makes sense'

Alex Henderson

September 28, 2021

The United States' Electoral College is puzzling to residents of other democracies, as they use the popular vote to elect their presidents or prime ministers. The most outspoken defenders of the Electoral College...

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1120 art an why to keep it?

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an 121

A small group of far right GOP members of Congress were getting some initial praise after announcing they would not be joining Republicans contesting the presidential election – until they released a statement explaining why.

Essentially, the seven lawmakers are explicitly warning their Republican colleagues to not challenge or disrupt the Electoral College, because that is likely the only way America will see another Republican president.

"Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the last 32 years," they freely admit. "They have therefore depended on the electoral college for nearly all presidential victories in the last generation."

"If we perpetuate the notion that Congress may disregard certified electoral votes—based solely on its own assessment that one or more states mishandled the presidential election—we will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that could provide the only path to victory in 2024."

In other words, they expect Republicans will continue to lose the national popular vote in presidential elections, and future GOP candidates will have to game the Electoral College to win the White House.

Rutgers Law law professor David Noll called it an "incredible statement."

The seven lawmakers are Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY), Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), Ken Buck (R-CO), Mike Gallagher (R-WI) Nancy Mace (R-SC), Tom McClintock (R-CA), and Chip Roy (R-TX).

Congressman Roy (photo) may be best known as being the Congressman who in 2019 blocked a 5-month overdue disaster aid relief bill, saying it was "fine" that migrant children were dying at the border. That same year he also broke down, appeared to cry, and yelled during a House hearing, during which he supported the exorbitant and growing prices pharmaceutical companies are charging Americans.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

catastrophic failure of the Electoral College has brought us to the brink

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1120 an

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/a-far-right-radio-host-promoted-an-authoritarian-plan-to-steal-the-election-and-donald-trump-jr-signed-off-on-it/

Thursday, former Vice President Joe Biden had won 253 electoral votes in the U.S. presidential race compared to 214 for President Donald Trump — and as the vote-counting continued in Pennsylvania, Nevada and other battleground states, Biden's chances of a victory looked better and better.

In response to this dismal situation for the president, far-right radio host Mark R. Levin responded with a tweet suggesting a plan to overturn the results. Mother Jones' Tim Murphy denounced the idea as an authoritarian idea for trying to steal the election if Biden is declared the winner, and Murphy noted that Donald Trump, Jr. has signed off on Levin's idea.

Levin, typing in all caps, tweeted:[wacko rant re electors]

Murphy explains: "With Pennsylvania on the verge of flipping into the Democratic column — the remaining uncounted ballots appear to heavily favor Biden — Levin was promoting a legal theory that drew some attention before the election. Because state governments have to formally certify results and then formally send electors to the Electoral College, the Republicans who control the state legislatures of Pennsylvania and several other swing states could, in this theory, simply send their own set of rival electors and force Congress to choose — potentially tipping the election to Trump."

Trump, Jr., Murphy notes, signed off on Levin's idea for an authoritarian power grab by forwarding his tweet.But the Mother Jones reporter also points out that Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent has explained why there are many reasons to be skeptical of such a strategy from a legal and constitutional standpoint.

"Changing the process by which Pennsylvania appoints its electors requires changing Pennsylvania law, which the Democratic governor (Tom Wolf) would veto," Murphy writes. "If Biden goes on to win enough of the remaining uncalled states, perhaps his sizable Electoral College and popular vote lead will dissuade Republicans from attempting to deploy such chicanery."

Murphy also points out that Republican Jake Corman, majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, "wants nothing to do with" that type of power grab.

twt:

For anyone wondering: spokesperson for Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman reiterated just now that the Republican controlled state legislature will NOT move to appoint electors to override popular vote, despite concerns about PA electoral process.

Nonetheless, Murphy stresses, it is disturbing when a well-known radio host wants to brazenly defy the will of the voters and the president's son signs off on it.

"The thing about going into untrodden territory is that no one really knows what it's like; the only sure thing is that it's not where you want to be," Murphy warns. "Even President Trump hasn't gone this far yet. But his son's promotion of such a plan is an ominous development as the campaign seeks to claw its way back by taking away people's votes."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/electoral-college-nightmare-legal-scholars-warn-about-the-potential-for-a-new-constitutional-crisis

matt r?

Both of the two major parties' presidential candidates are septuagenarians; one of them, former Vice President Joe Biden, was recently in close proximity to a group of coronavirus-positive people, while the other, President Donald Trump, has contracted COVID-19 and is currently in the most crucial phase of infection. The two men's age, and their proximity to a disease that kills about 12% of those in their mid-70s and older, has prompted many outside observers and legal experts to be forced to confront the unthinkable: if President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden dies before Election Day — or after the election but before the Electoral College convenes — will America enter a constitutional crisis?

As such a horrific scenario has suddenly entered the realm of possibility, Salon posed the question to several experts. The answer, as it turns out, is startling.

Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, when asked what might happenif Donald Trump were to pass before Election Day,warned that things could get messy. "The likeliest outcome of the death you're imagining is that the Republican National Committee would convene in an emergency session," and, utilizing the best legal advice available to them, would "decide how best to accommodate their respective deadlines for qualifying candidates, or more precisely the electoral slates committed to particular candidates, for the presidential election to be held this November 3," Tribe said over email.

This process would be complicated, of course, by the fact that millions of Americans have already voted by mail — and their ballots cannot be retroactively changed. To accommodate this, and since it would be "lunacy" to ask people to resubmit their ballots, "my hope would be that the state chapters of the RNC would all agree simply to revise the instructions given to the electors committed at that time to the Trump/Pence slate in each of those States so as to conform those instructions to whatever new ticket the RNC were to choose – say, [Vice President] Mike Pence and [former United Nations Ambassador] Nikki Haley."

Yet according to Tribe, that might not be the end of the matter. He noted that some electors could declare that they are only legally bound to support a Trump-Pence ticket and, if they do not want Pence to be president, resign rather than be compelled to cast their ballot for him.

He cited the July Supreme Court case of Chiafalo v. Washington, in which the unanimous ruling was that states can legally force electors to back the candidates they had previously pledged to support. That case came about because a group of Democratic electors known as the Hamilton Electors attempted to convince enough Republicans to abandon Trump after he won the 2016 election, so that he would not receive an Electoral College majority of 270 votes. That, in turn, would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives, where each state would have one vote to cast among the top three candidates. The Hamilton Electors had tried to convince Republican electors to back a member of their party who isn't Trump, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich or former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Robert Alexander, a political scientist at Ohio Northern University, told Salon by email that the attorney who represented the Hamilton Electors at the Supreme Court had anticipated a scenario similar to the one that would unfold if Trump or Biden dies between now and the start of the new presidential term.

"Larry Lessigpointed out the potential problems associated with binding electors to vote for the popular vote winner in their state if indeed such a situation were to arise," Alexander explained. "The Court didn't appear to be moved by his concern over potential unanticipated consequences of a ruling removing elector freedom. They indicated that states could handle such a situation if it were to arise. However, I'm not convinced that all states that bind electors have attended to the problem convincingly."

With the Hamilton Electors, however, the so-called "faithless electors" were trying to stop the election of a man they considered unfit to be president. In this theoretical scenario, they'd be trying to figure out what to do after being pledged to vote for a literal dead man.

"Predictably, many of the States will not have been sufficiently far-sighted to have enacted any legislative provisions on point, an eventuality that would trigger litigation," Tribe explained to Salon. "Hopefully .... before November 3, the highest judicial tribunal of each such State would decide what to do on the basis of the background principles of that State's laws, including its constitution." He argued that the Supreme Court's ruling to settle the controversial 2000 election, Bush v. Gore, could arise as precedent. As Tribe notes, there is "at least one possible reading requiring that disputes over the process of choosing electors be resolved strictly in terms of the directives laid down by the State Legislature, without resort to the State Constitution to change outcomes." This would lead to a "legal morass," Tribe explained, "but not necessarily a 'constitutional crisis.'"

Rick Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, wrote to Salon about the possible outcomes if a candidate wins the presidential election but then died before the Electoral College can convene. Pildes thought that because of the nature of the electoral college, it might not be as much of a crisis as one might fear.

"The electors from that state would be able to vote for a different candidate for President," Pildes told Salon. "There is the slight complexity that in around 16 states, state laws require the electors to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote; those laws impose sanctions for failing to do that, but most of those sanctions are minimal fines. So if this happened with President Trump, the Republican electors from states he won would vote for another candidate. If the RNC [Republican National Committee] – which is a 168 member body — voted to anoint another figure, the electors might well coalesce and vote for that figure."

That scenario could be complicated, however, if the Republican Party cannot coalesce behind Vice President Mike Pence or some other alternative. If that resulted in no candidate receiving 270 electoral votes then, once again, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives.

"The House votes one vote, one delegation, and a candidate needs a majority of the delegations to become elected," Pildes told Salon.

There have only been two presidential elections that were thrown into the House of Representatives: the 1800 contest that elected Thomas Jefferson, and the 1824 contest that elected John Quincy Adams. Yet neither of those anomalies occurred because of a candidates' death or incapacitation.

However, America has come close to that situation on one occasion. During the 1872 election, President Ulysses S. Grant ran for reelection on the Republican ticket against newspaper editor Horace Greeley, who had the support of both the Democratic Party and a splinter faction of the Republicans. Greeley died after Election Day but before the Electoral College could meet.

That could have resulted in a constitutional crisis had Greeley won. Fortuitously, Grant won in a landslide, so there was no constitutional crisis and no test of the presidential voting system. Ultimately, Greeley only won 66 electoral votes to Grant's 286 electoral votes, and 63 of Greeley's 66 electors decided to support one of several other Democrats when casting their vote.

"When Congress met, they decided not to count those votes since he was dead and thusly ineligible to serve," Alexander explained. "It would seem to me that a precedent was set. If electors are forced to vote for the candidate who won the vote in their state and that candidate dies before they meet, then I'm not sure the states with binding laws have adequately dealt with such a possibility."

He added, though, that "fourteen states have laws that remove an elector for not voting as anticipated. Among these, only Utah's statute permits an elector to break their pledge in case of a death of a nominee. Arizona, Colorado and Maine require electors to vote for the popular vote winner in their respective states (or districts). This would seem to force them to potentially vote for a deceased candidate if they were to die after the election and before they met."

Because electors could argue that they are actually bound to vote for their party's nominees, they might be able to sidestep accusations of being faithless electors if their party chose a different nominee.

Even so, Alexander explained, "no doubt, legal challenges would ensue as a result."

If there is one thing we can say for certain, it is that any scenario in which Trump or Biden dies before the Electoral College casts its votes would be hell on the electors themselves.

"This helps justify me putting aside my life for a year to try to fight for this country," Hamilton Elector alumnus Chiafalo told Salon about his battle to allow electors the autonomy to vote their conscience. "It's almost been completely proven that we were right to fear exactly what we thought was coming. As for electors this year, I feel horrible for them because if they make the wrong decision — based on the far-right of this country — their lives will probably be forfeit."

He added, "They're going to get more death threats than I did, and I got hundreds. So if I was one of the electors. I'd be terrified. I'd be buying guns and a bulletproof vest."

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Electoral College is surprisingly vulnerable to popular vote changes

Steven Heilman, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Mathematically speaking, the Electoral College is built to virtually ensure narrow victories, making it very susceptible to manipulation and disinformation.

Ingraham: “Powerful globalists including a George Soros-affiliated group” are funding efforts to abolish the Electoral College

https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/laura-ingraham-powerful-globalists-including-george-soros-affiliated-group-are

INGRAHAM (HOST): That could be the definition of, I don't know, today's deep state, cabal, intrigue and corruption, just tripped off my tongue. Well now, largely funded by powerful globalists including a George Soros-affiliated group,dispensing with the Electoral College has become a priority to most of the 2020 Democrats.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trumps-electoral-college-win-was-not-a-fluke-study/

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Trump’s Electoral College win was not a fluke: New study says Republicans will win 65 percent of close elections where they lose the popular vote

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon September 18, 2019

Republicans are expected to win 65 percent of close presidential races in which they lose the popular vote as a result of the Electoral College and the blue-state concentration of Democrats, according to a new working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin looked at the probability of “inversions”in presidential elections, where the popular-vote winner loses the electoral vote. These inversions happened in 2000 and 2016 and twice in the 1800s, meaning that the candidate with the most votes has lost 8 percent of the time in the last 200 years.

Using statistical models that predicted an inversion in the 2000 and 2016 races, the researchers found that the probability of the popular vote winner losing the electoral vote is about 40 percent in races decided by 1 percent (about 1.3 million votes) and roughly 30 percent in races decided by 2 percent (2.6 million votes) or less.

But these probabilities are “not symmetric across political parties,” the researchers say. Over the past 30 to 60 years, this asymmetry has favored Republicans. The statistical models used in the research predict that in the event of an inversion, “the probability that it will be won by a Republican ranges from 69 percent to 93 percent.”

“But conditional on a narrow popular vote loss for Democrats, modern Democratic candidates have had about a 35% chance winning the Presidency via inversion,” the researchers wrote, meaning that Republicans have a 65 percent chance of winning all future narrowly decided elections.

“If elections continue to remain close,” as they have in recent races, the researchers wrote, “inversions will occur with substantially higher frequency” than they have in the past.

The researchers pointed to the Electoral College system and the high concentration of Democratic votes in blue states as the driving force behind this trend. “Democrats have tended to win large states by large margins and lose them by small margins,” the researchers explained, creating an asymmetry in the winner-take-all Electoral College system that favors Republicans. In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton won California by about 3.5 million votes while losing Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by less than 80,000 votes combined.

“Feasible policy changes — including awarding each state’s Electoral College ballots proportionally between parties rather than awarding all to the state winner — could substantially reduce inversion probabilities, though not in close elections,” the researchers concluded.

Michael Geruso, who led the research, told HuffPost that only scrapping the Electoral College system, rather than reforming it, would eliminate the growing chance of inversions in presidential races.

“The only change that would cause the Electoral College to always elect the winner of the national popular vote would be to change the system to have a national popular vote,” he said.

Another researcher, Dean Spears, told the outlet that the paper shows that Trump’s 2016 win was not a fluke, and the chances of a repeat are only increasing.

“I think a lot of people think that there was something special or improbable about the 2016 election. That with the politics of these times, 2016 was somehow a fluke. One of the important things that we learned is that that’s not true,” he said. “Not because it was unlikely, it was an inversion because an inversion is likely in a close election.”

Following Trump’s win, Hillary Clinton called for abolishing the Electoral College while Trump declared the system was “actually genius” despite calling it a “disaster for democracy” after President Obama won in 2012.

Abolishing the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, which would have to be approved by three-fourths of Congress and three-fourths of the states, an unlikely scenario given the Republicans’ recent embrace of the system.

A growing number of states have signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Sixteen states with a combined electoral vote total of 196 have pledged to award all their electoral votes to the popular vote winner once the compact reaches the 270 electoral votes necessary to clinch the election.

John Koza, the founder of the group behind the compact, told the New York Times that eliminating the Electoral College would not just be more democratic but also allow more states, beyond the closely contested battleground states, to have a voice in the presidential race.

“The visible public problem right now with the electoral system is that the candidate who came in second gets the White House,” he said. “But the real problem is that very few states get the attention of the presidential campaigns.”

Fourteen of the 2020 Democratic candidates have called for abolishing the Electoral College, though not former Vice President Joe Biden or Sen. Kamala Harris.

“Every vote matters,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said at a rally in Mississippi earlier this year. “And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting. And that means get rid of the Electoral College.”

Igor Derysh is a New York-based political writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-electoral-college-is-not-what-its-defenders-say-it-is/

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The Electoral College is not what its defenders say it is

Written by The Washington Monthly September 7, 2019

Perhaps sensing that it represents their best chance to win the White House in 2020 and beyond, or because four states joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact this year, conservatives have recently come out in droves to defend the Electoral College. Many of their arguments cannot withstand even the mildest scrutiny.

George Will and former Congressman Raul Labrador say the Electoral College encourages presidential candidates to campaign nationally and prevents small states from being ignored. But in 2016 Trump and Hillary Clinton made 57 percent of their post-primary appearances in just four of the ten most populous states—Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Far from encouraging a national campaign, the Electoral College has consistently narrowed candidates’ focus to the biggest swing states in any given election.

Congressman Dan Crenshaw argued last week that the Electoral College prevents a “tyranny” in which 51 percent of Americans impose their will over the other 49 percent. But a system of government in which an elected executive is checked by two other co-equal branches is not a tyranny. If it were, every American would already be living under the tyrannical rule of our governors. More importantly, why would letting the 49 percent impose their will on the 51 percent be any less tyrannical?

Other arguments for the Electoral College are more cunning, but just as specious. For example, many politicians and pundits argue that a national popular vote would unfairly “silence” rural voters. By framing it that way, they imply that the Electoral College preserves equality and that a popular vote is the enemy of it. In truth, the Electoral College creates inequality by giving voters in sparsely populated states more influence than voters in densely populated ones. If protecting every voter’s voice is one of our goals, a popular vote is actually the best way to achieve it.

No doubt much of the fervor to defend the Electoral College is motivated by the desire to win elections. Polls show that Democrats have long supported a national popular vote, while Republican support dropped from 54 percent to 19 percent after the 2016 election.

But more than partisanship or a misunderstanding of the concept of tyranny, at its core the defense of the Electoral College is based on a lie—the idea that places like states, cities, or counties have opinions, and that the Electoral College is the best way to represent those opinions. This is clear from the way defenders talk about the institution.

For example, Iowa’s U.S. Senator Joni Ernst said that “if we eliminate the Electoral College rural states would be silenced.” The National Review suggested that the Electoral College prevents “New York and California from imposing their will on the rest of the country.” Crenshaw tweeted that “people living in rural areas have different problems than people living in cities” and implied that a popular vote would lead to rural voters being ignored. But this line of argument is wrong for two reasons.

First, states (or cities or counties) are land masses, not people. They don’t have voices to be silenced. Therefore, there is no such thing as a rural state’s opinion or New York’s will. A state’s political identity is derived solely on the people who live there. Second, to the extent that states have residents with voices and opinions, no state is so homogenous that awarding all its electoral votes to whichever candidate wins a majority or plurality of voters accurately represents that state’s political views.

Consider Ernst’s home state of Iowa. In 2016, 51.2 percent of Iowans supported Trump while 48.8 percent supported Clinton or other candidates. If Iowa were a person, it’s opinion would be described as mixed or undecided. A truly accurate representation of Iowa’s “opinion” would reflect that a slim majority supported Trump, but that more than 40 percent supported Clinton as well.

But Trump won all six of Iowa’s electoral votes. On an electoral map, the state is designated entirely as red, as if the other 48.8 percent of Iowa voters don’t exist. Rather than effectively representing Iowan’s voices, the Electoral College distorted them by artificially enhancing the impact of voters in the majority and artificially diminishing the influence of voters in the minority. That is what the Electoral College does in every state (except Maine and Nebraska, which split their electoral votes between congressional districts and the state’s overall total). It takes hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans with diverse opinions within a state, but then lets a majority or plurality of the state’s voters control how every electoral vote is awarded. In other words, it creates the false impression that a state is red or blue when, in truth, every state is closer to purple.

Opponents may try to argue that a popular vote does the same thing, but that’s not true. With a popular vote, citizens vote directly for candidates and every vote is counted toward the ultimate total. Under the Electoral College, however, electors act as an intermediary between voters and candidates. Citizens still vote, but electors cast aside votes for minority candidates before awarding their electoral votes, leaving many or even most of their state’s voters behind. Iowa is not even the worst example.

In 2016, Trump or Clinton won all the electoral votes in thirteen states where neither candidate received 50 percent of the vote. In 1992, when Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Ross Perot mounted national campaigns, Clinton won all the electoral votes in four states where he did not even receive 40 percent of the vote. If Ernst or other Electoral College defenders truly cared about representation, they would be deeply troubled by that. But we have become so accustomed to talking about states as if they are human-like individual entities and the idea of “red states” and “blue states” that we forget how fundamentally inaccurate those designations are.

That same fallacy—talking about places as if they are people—is the foundation of nearly every other “argument” in favor of the Electoral College. It is behind the false notion that, without the Electoral College, New York and California would decide every election, as if the two states are thugs trying to shout down forty-eight people who disagree with them. Rather, they are two of the most racially and socioeconomically diverse states in the country, with more than seven million Trump voters in their “sea of blue.” The fallacy also leads to the division of “rural voters” and “urban voters” as if they are two diametrically opposed groups. While it is true that people living in the same area may share some problems in common, that doesn’t mean they agree on how to solve those problems or who should solve them. Once the fallacy is exposed, it becomes clear that the Electoral College doesn’t even serve the interests that supposedly justify its existence.

The Electoral College does not prevent small states from being ignored. It encourages candidates to spend nearly all their time in swing states, most of which are among the most populous, like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The Electoral College does not protect us from tyranny. It creates tyranny by magnifying the influence of voters in the majority in every state. And of course, it has given us a president who did not win the most votes in two of the last five elections. Even if you argue that the Electoral College preserves our federalist system or states’ rights, a popular vote more accurately represents the will of a state’s voters than a winner-take-all Electoral College system.

It’s easy to get entangled in an overly conceptual debate about the Electoral College, especially when so many of its defenders rely on esoteric arguments or rhetorical tricks to make their case. But once you cut through the sophistry, the case for replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote is clear.

Every vote in the country should carry equal weight regardless of where it comes from. Rural and urban communities should be represented in the exact proportion to which people live in those communities. There is no justifiable reason a voter in Colorado or New Hampshire should be more likely to swing an election than a voter in Wyoming or Oklahoma, just because the former are more politically divided. Sooner or later, either by constitutional amendment or the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, fairness will prevail. When it does, every vote in the presidential election will finally be valued exactly as it should.

819 AN

Tuesday night, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal in Denver handed down a ruling in a largely unwatched case that could have massive consequences for American democracy.

The three-judge panel ruled that electors in the Electoral College cannot be bound by states to cast their votes for president to the candidate who won their state. That means that, if, say, the 2020 election results in a 269-269 Electoral College tie — a real, if small, possibility — a single rogue electoral could swing control of the White House from one party to the other.

...

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Ocasio-Cortez lays out why an Electoral College system that perpetuates inequality is a scam

Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams August 21, 2019

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez injected humor into her commentary on the Electoral College, which she posted on Instagram Monday night, but her message was serious: the 232-year-old system which allowed Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump to win their elections with less support from voters than their Democratic opponents, gives precedence to white people’s votes over those of people of color.

The progressive New York Democrat narrated a video taken from a car driving through a stretch of an empty desert road, showing no houses, cars, people, or businesses—saying the image illustrated why the Electoral College should be abolished in favor of of a “one person, one vote” system.

“We’re coming to you live from the Electoral College,” Ocasio-Cortez said in the video. “Many votes here as you can see. Very efficient way to choose leadership of the country.”

Public Citizen

@Public_Citizen

.@AOC: We're coming to you live from the Electoral College - many votes here, as you can see. ??????

Embedded video

The freshman congresswoman went on to call the Electoral College a “scam” and a holdover from the so-called democracy of the 18th and 19th centuries, during which “the Founding Fathers also brought you the 3/5th compromise, [denied] women the right to vote, and wealthy landowners [had] disproportionate political power.”

“The first attempts at establishing our nation actually denied rights to pretty much everyone, including lower-income white men,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in her Instagram Story post.

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would give the electoral votes of all the member-states to the winner of the popular vote in a general election. Currently, the Compact has a total of 196 electoral votes and needs 270 to take effect in the 2020 election.

While proponents of the Electoral College insist that each state must have a set number of votes corresponding to their populations in a national election in order to keep large states from having too much power and ensure that rural voters are not forgotten by candidates, Ocasio-Cortez suggested that conservatives actually want the system kept in place in order to give white voters a greater say in who wins elections.

“Due to severe racial disparities in some states the Electoral College effectively weighs white voters over voters of color,” the congresswoman wrote.

“The rural representation argument doesn’t hold up either,” she added, “as there are rural parts of virtually every state, and popular vote elections show that candidates still visit and center rural communities’ needs.”

“Facts are facts, America,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The Electoral College has to go.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/these-senators-are-proposing-a-constitutional-amendment-to-abolish-electoral-college/

Feeling increasingly frustrated with the United States Electoral College, a group of Democratic senators are planning to introduce a constitutional amendment this week that would abolish it. The proposed amendment, HuffPost is reporting, will be introduced by Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is running for president in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the United States’ last seven presidential elections.Although President George W. Bush won the popular vote when he was reelected in 2004 and defeated Democrat John Kerry, Democrats won the popular vote in the presidential elections of 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012 and 2016 (when Democrat Hillary Clinton lost to President Donald Trump despite receiving three million more votes).

At this point, Schatz’ proposal to abolish the Electoral College is merely symbolic. Ending the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, and amending the U.S. Constitution requires two-thirds approval in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or a constitutional convention. Democrats presently dominate the House, having enjoyed a net gain of 40 seats in the 2018 midterms—whereas Republicans increased their narrow majority in the Senate by two seats last year. And there is little support for ending the Electoral College in the GOP.

Critics of the Electoral College see it as anti-democracy, while its defenders view it as a sort of affirmative action program that prevents Rural America from being overwhelmed by densely populated urban centers such as New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

U.S. presidents who lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote include Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888. And although President George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004, he lost it to Democrat Al Gore in 2000 but won that election anyway because he received more electoral votes.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/4-arguments-youll-hear-from-defenders-of-the-electoral-college-and-why-theyre-wrong/

no lx twt

For the first time in the country’s modern history, the existence of the Electoral College has become a campaign issue.

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren recently called for the abolition of the Electoral College, while other Democratic presidential candidates, including former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Kamala Harris, have said the Electoral College should be re-evaluated.

The Constitution’s framers originally created the Electoral College as a way to filter the “passions” of the people through state-appointed presidential electors with better judgment. They assigned every state a number of electoral votes exactly equal to its number of members in Congress.

But back then, electors weren’t pledged to candidates – so a state might have five votes for one candidate, and four for another. By the 1820s, the system had already evolved beyond what the framers intended. Each party chose pledged electors; if a party’s candidate won the most votes in the state, that party’s electors would get to cast all the votes.

This winner-take-all electoral vote system continues today in 48 states. In two states – Maine and Nebraska – presidential candidates win one pledged elector from each U.S. House district they win, and win two pledged electors if the presidential candidate finishes first statewide.

In my class on American elections, we often discuss the flaws of the current version of the Electoral College. Since this issue has been injected into the 2020 presidential campaign, I’ve seen politicians, journalists and social media users advocate for the preservation of the Electoral College. They often repeat arguments that are misleading or outright false.

Here are four of the most common arguments I’ve noticed – and why they’re wrong.

1. Electors filter the passions of the people

Some defend the system by citing its original purpose: to provide a check on the public in case they make a poor choice for president.

But electors no longer work as independent agents nor as agents of the state legislature. They’re chosen for their party loyalty by party conventions or leaders.

Since winner-take-all laws began in the 1820s, electors have rarely acted independently or against the wishes of the party that chose them. A majority of states even have laws requiring the partisan electors to keep their pledges when voting. In presidential elections from 1992 to 2012, over 99 percent of electors kept their pledges to a candidate.

There have been scattered faithless electors in past elections, but they’ve never influenced the outcome. Even in 2016, when seven faithless electors broke their pledges, it didn’t move the needle.

2. It forces candidates to campaign in rural areas

A popular argument on conservative websites and talk radio is that without the Electoral College, candidates would spend all their time campaigning in big cities and would ignore low-population areas.

This is false. In fact, because of the Electoral College, campaigning is generally limited to the urban areas of a handful of states.

Data from the 2016 campaign indicate that 57 percent of general election campaign events for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence and Tim Kaine were in only four states: Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Ohio. During the general election campaign, 94 percent of campaign visits by the four candidates were in 12 battleground states.

And within these battleground states the candidates focused on campaigning in regions where most voters lived. In Pennsylvania, for example, 59 percent of Pennsylvania campaign visits by Clinton and Trump in the final two months of their campaigns were to the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, with all other campaign visits going to other major cities and their suburbs in the state.

Meanwhile, during the entire period after the 2016 national conventions, the four candidates never campaigned at all in 24 states, including rural states like South Dakota, Kansas and Wyoming.

Presidential candidates don’t campaign in rural areas no matter what system is used, simply because there are not a lot of votes to be gained in those areas. Even in the swing states where they do campaign, the candidates focus on urban areas where most voters live.

3. It prohibits a couple of states or cities from picking the winner

Some claim that the Electoral College prevents one state or prohibits a few cities from determining the winner of the presidential election.

With states, the truth is the opposite.

Under the current Electoral College system, one state by itself determined the winner of the last presidential election. Without all of Texas’ 38 electoral votes, Trump would have lost the 2016 election. The same thing happened with Florida in 2000. Without its 25 electoral votes, George W. Bush would have lost the election.

Meanwhile, the combined populations of the three largest U.S. cities – New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago – are less than 5 percent of the country’s population. Their combined metro area populations, including suburbs, are 13 percent of the U.S. population. It’s not clear how 5 percent or 13 percent of the population would outvote the rest of the country in a national vote – and that’s assuming every voter in these metro areas votes the same way.

4. It prevents the chaos of a contested election

Some, including the late historian Theodore H. White, cite the Electoral College as a way to prevent political chaos.

After the 1960 presidential election, John Kennedy’s nationwide share of the vote was only 0.17 percentage points higher than Richard Nixon’s share. If there had been the need for a nationwide recount, there could have been weeks or months of political deadlock. Kennedy’s clearer margin of victory in the Electoral College – 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219 – prevented that.

However, during the 2000 presidential election, the opposite occurred. While Al Gore’s nationwide popular vote victory margin was clear, the number of votes separating Gore from George W. Bush in Florida was minuscule. And because of the Electoral College system, the outcome in Florida became the deciding factor.

After a month of court challenges, a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision awarded the presidency to Bush. In other words, the Electoral College was actually the cause of a chaotic and controversial outcome.

How to fix the system

Campaigning on fixing the Electoral College is one thing. But how could it actually be abolished or amended?

Abolishing the Electoral College entirely would require a constitutional amendment, involving two-thirds approval from both houses of Congress and 38 states. In today’s partisan environment, that’s unlikely to succeed.

Some advocate that all 50 states adopt Maine and Nebraska’s system of dividing up electoral votes by congressional district. But until extreme gerrymandering is addressed, giving congressional districts a bigger role could lead to an even greater loss of voter confidence.

There’s another way to create a national popular vote election for president without amending the Constitution. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact advocates passing legislation at the state level that awards electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the winner of the state popular vote.

The proposal has been enacted into law in 12 states and the District of Columbia, meaning states with a combined 181 electoral votes have signed on. These states, however, are mostly controlled by Democrats. There seems to be less support from Republican-controlled legislatures, probably due to the Electoral College victories by Trump in 2016 and Bush in 2000 in elections where those candidates lost the national popular vote.

Unfortunately, political self-interest seems to be the biggest roadblock to reform. Look no further than President Trump. Back in 2012, he tweeted that the Electoral College was “a disaster for democracy.”

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.

109K

9:45 PM - Nov 6, 2012

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158K people are talking about this

By November 2016 – after winning the presidential election despite losing the nationwide popular vote to Hillary Clinton – he’d changed his tune.

“The Electoral College,” he tweeted, “is actually genius.”

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Paul LePage says whites will become “forgotten people” if the Electoral College is eliminated.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which seeks to nullify the Electoral College, is now being debated in the state of Maine. But the state’s former Republican governor, Paul LePage, opposes it — and gave an eyebrow-raising explanation in an interview with WVOM on Tuesday.

“What would happen if they do what they say they’re gonna do is white people will not have anything to say,” said LePage. “It’s only going to be the minorities that would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida … we’re gonna be forgotten people.”

This is nonsense. Adopting a popular vote would make everyone’s vote count equally. In fact, while the Electoral College does benefit many white voters, it outright disenfranchises tens of millions of others. In California, 4.4 million voters backed Trump, including 45 percent of the non-Hispanic white electorate, and yet California awarded zero of its electoral votes to Trump. Under a popular vote, all of those votes would be counted too.

LePage, who once said drug dealers named “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” were impregnating “young white girl[s]” in his state and implied Hispanics should be shot, is clearly just thinking of how white voters elected Trump while the popular vote as a whole didn’t. But putting white power over democracy is a dangerous game.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/this-governor-takes-a-bold-step-in-a-plan-to-essentially-end-the-undemocratic-electoral-college/

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