Day 3 of the New Order:The Electoral College

With the petition currently circulating and already having over 1 million signatures I think we need to have a short civics lesson as it appears from Facebook that many people do not quite understand how all this works.

Nuts and Bolts

When we are voting we are not actually directly voting for a candidate but rather for an elector that presumably will vote for that candidate.  Each state gets as many electors as they have Congressional delegates.  This favors small states as the House representation is based on population every state has two senators.  Thus if a larger state is 10 times the size of a smaller one it will get 12 votes but the smaller one gets 3 so the larger state only gets 4 times as many votes as the smaller one with 10 times the number of people.  You can see this clearly in the current election.  Clinton took the popular vote but lost the electoral college by taking the larger population states and not taking the more numerous smaller ones.  This is also what happened to Gore.  This is one reason the Electoral College exists but there is another one.

When the US Constitution was written only males who owned property had the right to vote.  Even with that elite group being the only voters the framers did not completely trust the electorate and wanted a safeguard in case of complete idiocy on their part.  Thus they incorporated this extra step in the election process to ensure that large mistakes would not be made because the electors are not actually bound to vote anything but their conscience.  The electors themselves are generally party regulars who are expected to vote the party line but there have been exceptions in the past none of which changed the expected outcome.  If the College ties the vote goes to the House to elect the President and the Senate to elect the Vice-President.  

Another thing to note is that when this system was originally designed there were no political parties and the Vice President was for the first three elections the person who garnered the second most votes in the Electoral College.   With the election of 1800 there were in fact newly formed parties involved and each put up a candidate for President and Vice President.  This lead to a mess when the two members of the same party got the same number of votes in the electoral college and the whole thing was thrown into the House of Representatives who had no idea what to do this situation being without precedent.  You can read elsewhere about all the machinations that resulted in Jefferson becoming President.  It did result in a rift between Jefferson and Burr with Jefferson, a master of character assassination, managed to make Burr a pariah to this day.  I don't have the money to see Hamilton the play but it might be covered in part there as it did exacerbate the enmity between Burr and Hamilton that resulted in the sitting VP shooting a past cabinet official dead.  In any case this lead to a hasty amendment to the Constitution redefining how the College works to this day.  

Hope?

Can this be used to derail Trump on his way to the White House.  While it is highly unlikely that it can work it is the best way within the country's laws to accomplish the goal of having him never sworn in.  However it does carry with it the threat of violence in the streets as it will prove to all the rapid Trump supporters that in the end the election was rigged.  You can't blame them for thinking that.  

How do you convince both the Trump supporters and the Electoral College that he is dangerous and must be stopped?  My feeling is that if all the hate talk, incomplete sentences, wishful thinking, outright lies and his narcissism did not accomplish that pointing in that direction is useless.  I think that the Russian connection is the most obvious place to start.  I don't think many Americans are ready to embrace Russia, many still distrust them from the cold war era, others are immigrants from areas that are affected by Russian or past Soviet deprivations and still others see Putin as a thus and a threat to world peace.  The fact that the Trump camp talked to them, that Trump encouraged them to release emails that they had, and that he is such an admirer of Putin and wants to get rid of NATO is flirting with or maybe even over the line of treason.  I think that is the line the press needs to take to help the process.  The press helped us into this mess maybe they can help us out.  I call on the New York Times and Washington Post to do some good investigative reporting on this matter and hope they turn up a smoking gun.

An aside

Did anyone else see the dynamic at the press conference yesterday.  First I feel bad for Trump in a way because like myself his mouth falls into a frown at rest and makes us look grumpy.  He looked like a frog sitting on a lily pad for the whole thing until Obama finally made him laugh at the end.  Ah but I digress.  The dynamic I saw was that Obama was in charge and treated Trump like a schoolkid.  The contrast in demeanor was startling.  It almost looked like he had spent the whole meeting prior to that teaching and occasionally scolding him as Trump sat slouched and frowning while Obama talked smoothly to the press glancing over occasionally to make sure Trump stayed in line and kept quiet.  Trump as per usual said little that was coherent but waved his hands a bit and used plenty of superlatives.  He was showered so many of those on Obama and his accomplishments I was transported back to Star Wars IV when Obi Wan convinces the guard to let them pass and explains to Luke that "The force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded."  Obama clearly has a lot more of the force than his successor-elect does.

Action

Sign the petition to the electoral college with the link from yesterday and get your friends to do the same.  Talk up the Russian connection and lets hope there is something behind it that we find out by December 18th.  If you are religious pray and if not hope.