Lawrence Lessig Calls For The Electoral College to Choose Clinton Over Trump (washingtonpost.com)

Lawrence Lessig's new op-ed in the Washington Post argues against the idea "that the person who lost the popular vote this year must nonetheless become our president." (Paywalled version here, free version here.) Lessig points out that the electoral college results have already been ignored twice in U.S. history -- in 1824 and 1876. The Constitution says nothing about "winner take all." It says nothing to suggest that electors' freedom should be constrained in any way...They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel.
Complaining that the electoral college weights the votes in Wyoming roughly four times as heavily as the votes in Michigan, Lessig argues that the popular vote should be respected, and that the authors of the U.S. Constitution "left the electors free to choose. They should exercise that choice by leaving the election as the people decided it: in Clinton's favor."

Meanwhile, Politico is reporting that six electors, "mostly former Bernie Sanders supporters who hail from Washington state and Colorado," are already urging electors pledged to Clinton and Trump to instead coalesce around "a consensus pick like Mitt Romney or John Kasich." And the ethics lawyers for both President Obama and President Bush both told one liberal site "that if Trump continues to retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump." Finally, from the original submission:
Even Donald Trump has called the Electoral College a "total sham." Is it time for the Electoral College to reflect the popular vote?

Comments

Re:So now Clinton supporters can't handle the resu

[quantaman]

For months before the election, the MSM & Hillary supporters hammered about how Trump & his supporters wouldn't accept the results of the election.

The talk about the election was about Trump not accepting the results if he lost, and concerns about what his supporters would do in the aftermath.

Hillary is accepting the results, even though she has damn good reason to be pissed off (leading in the polls going in, won the popular vote, had the FBI director break the law to create an October surprise), she's never said or done anything to signal that she doesn't accept the results.

Now that Hillary has lost, her supports can't accept the results. Death threats to electors. Riots in the street. Offering the pay fines for electors who break the law. MSM story after story about how the circumvent the will of the people. Jill Stein taking donations to force a recount where even she says that there was no fraudulent or illegal activity.

It seems life is not without a sense of irony.

The riots are justified and not an attempt to overturn the results, they're a signal to Trump that there's strong popular resistance to his campaign pledges and the majority of the country does not want him as President.

The recount is also justified, it's unlikely but possible that Russia or some other group did compromise the election in those states. If so it means Trump didn't actually win.

As for Lessig and threats to the electors, that is unjustified. As screwed up as the EC is, it's the system that was in place and everyone else agreed to beforehand, you can't change the rules afterwards. But Clinton, the entire Democratic establishment, and the vast majority of the Democratic party, are completely against the electors changing the result.

That is why you can't hold Clinton accountable for the people asking the electors to change the result, but you can hold Trump accountable for the open Nazis and racists in his camp.