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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?
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?
supposedly argued in IIRC The Federalist #68 that one purpose of the Electoral College was to prevent anyone who was unqualified or beholden to a foreign power from becoming President.
IMO both are applicable now, but defecting electors could set a precedent that might come back and bite us later.
I can't imagine that Republican electors would defect to Clinton. AIUI, all they have to do is prevent anyone from getting 270 EV, in which case the selection would fall to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The House Democrats might all go for Clinton, and the Republicans would be very divided, but they tend to get in line when the chips are down, so we'd surely get a Republican. Romney would be my best guess, but they might decide that the appearance of legitimacy requires choosing someone who actually ran, maybe Bush or that guy from Utah, or even Pence.
I don't expect any of that to happen, and I'm trying not to get my hopes up, but then I've been wrong about everything else concerning this election, so who knows...
As for switching from the Electoral College to the popular vote, the low-population states will be very much against this. I suspect it was designed as a deliberate attempt to keep the high-population states from dominating the low-population states, but now that we have 50 with a great deal of variety, maybe that motivation isn't relevant any more.
Also, if the EC should be replaced by proportional representation or direct popular vote, where does that leave the Senate? Should it be converted to proportional representation as well? Would it be any good to us if it was just a clone of the House of Representatives?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What happened to this place?
All I have to say is "good luck with that." There have never been more than a few, some electors are legally bound to vote with their state, etc.
Still, surprised he'd do that given what they really think about him
That becomes the tyranny of the majority. In fact, in this election, the entire lead that Hillary has is covered by her lead in Los Angeles County. Basically a single county dictates the entire election of the President? Sucks if you live anywhere else, huh...
Instead of a popular vote, do like Nebraska and Maine. Proportional votes. Each district gets their own winner - and the overall State winner gets the two extra electoral votes. Eliminate "winner take all" - that is the TRUE discrimination. Let each district vote how it wants and cast its own elector.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I need to show various forms of ID to open a bank account or buy a beer.
Right now all I have to do to vote in my state is to simply say who I am and where I live.
I find this a bit ridiculous regardless whether it's the electoral college or popular vote.
And why should Alaska and Wyoming with its over-privileged voters should decide how California runs?
Trust me, no one decides how California runs. That fucked up state is fucked up due to its own ideology.
It is against both the spirit and the rules at the time of the campaign. If you change the rules of the election because you don't like the result per the existing rules, you create chaos from now on with people wanting to change the rules ad hoc after every election they don't agree with. Dangerous precedent to start.
Personally, I see the wisdom in the electoral college in making sure populous states like California don't dominate smaller states with different values and needs. Our Republic is based on a coalition of the states, not on the general populace. If people want to change our type of government, then they need to amend the Constitution through the proper means.
Uhm, if you're calling a consistent budget surplus and healthy economic growth a "fucked up state" then I shudder to think of what you call "success". Detroit, perhaps?
It is specially ironic considering how dems went after Trump after he insinuated wouldn't accept the election results.
Don't take me wrong, I'm terrified about the prospect of the orange sexist taking office as much as anyone else, but he won the elections. These talks about having the EC changing their vote, or recounts are delusional.
It's not ironic at all. The democrats weren't the ones that started the recount process, it was a third party candidate after reading a study that showed a marked discrepancy in votes between paper districts and e-voting districts. Regardless of the outcome of a recount, if a recount is what it takes for people to finally accept the results of the election then that's a good thing.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
To clarify, I think far better of him than that, but I'm somewhat surprised he would be eager to fight for a group who treats him that way.
What he is advocating will result in nothing less than civil war, and that's just foolishness.
WHAT? You mean Trump supporters would get violent? Say it isn't so! Haven't they been complaining about liberal "violence"?
Since when is America a democracy?
It's a Constitutional Republic. Not a democracy.
What happened to civics classes?
Very few countries elect their chief executive with a popular vote.
A parliamentary system is probably the most common (perhaps after dictatorships). It's similar to the Electoral College, except the MPs do the voting.
The Clinton campaign announced today they're joining the recount process: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11...
some electors are legally bound to vote with their state, etc.
False. Some states require electors to sign a pledge agreeing to vote however the state says. They can require them to sign the pledge but they can't require them to honor the pledge.
The Electors are free to elect any eligible person to the office of the President.
The US is a representative republic. It is not now and never has been a democracy.
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
We are faced with no good choices with Trump. Just lesser evils.
That's just your point of view. Some of us voted for Trump.
And Trump did some very good things for the country:
He ran the Bush Dynasty out of power. They're pretty much done.
He defeated the Clinton Family and now all we have to worry about is they'll probably pull some shit in a decade or so with Chelsea.
No matter what Trump accomplishes as president, those are two good things that came out of this election.
The term "Democracy" is an umbrella term that represents all systems of "rule by the people", including representative democracies like ours (also known as a republic). While its true that our founding fathers tended to mean "direct democracy" when speaking of "democracy", that's no longer the case. From Wikipedia:
The Founding Fathers of the United States rarely praised and often criticised democracy, which in their time tended to specifically mean direct democracy, often without the protection of a constitution enshrining basic rights
But, as we all know, language changes over time. It's worthwhile to understand the history of these terms, but really, you're pissing against the wind if you think people are not going to continue to call our government a "democracy". According to Google:
democracy
dmäkrs/
noun
noun: democracy
a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
FTFY. Looks like it's working as intended. Check.
Well, lucky then that Republicans took care of that problem more than a century ago.
The difference is in the fact that Trump, even before the voting started, claimed that the system is rigged against him and that he will only accept the results if he won.
I.e. Legality of the election be damned - either HE wins or he wins.
On the other hand... it's not the "dems" who are suggesting that electors should not vote for Trump - THOUGH IT WOULD BE PERFECTLY LEGAL.
Also, there already IS a recount. Or two... maybe three.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Of course they don't stop the counting. The ballots carry far more information than Hillary vs Trump so they have all to be counted in order to count all the other issues in the election. It's just that counting all these ballots takes time so the 100% final result will not be known for some time yet (they have until the 19th of December to count all ballots) at which point the complete result of _all_ ballots will be displayed on http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/elec...
> The irony here is Hillary pursued the "superdelegates" so she could have an Electoral College advantage.
WTF? There are no superdelegates in the general election.
You alt-white fools are fools.
What he is advocating will result in nothing less than civil war
Lessig may be delusional - but what you are suggesting is beyond retarded.
There is no army to fight such a war. It's no longer 1800s.
US military is now a highly trained tiny percent of the whole population - not a bunch of guys marching in a straight like across the field, armed with flintlocks.
The side going against the army of the US government loses even before a single civilian warrior gets his boots on.
Nor could you get anyone to sign up for such a war. Again - only a tiny percentage of US population wishes to serve at all.
And that's without the whole "Going to a war to shoot me some Americans" thing having a chance of being a bit unpopular among Americans.
Beyond. Retarded.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Pure weapons grade bullshit here. A lot of people voted for Trump because they couldn't stand the thought of HRC being prez. Had the DNC/DWS run anyone else, that other person would have won.
This election was not won by Trump, it was lost by HRC.
Well, your obsession with race and status, and your snobbery and arrogance, are certainly typical for Silicon Valley. Fortunately, they haven't infected the rest of the country quite as much yet, as this election shows.
all leftovers go to the Green party, read the fine print
https://jillstein.nationbuilde...
If we raise more than what's needed, the surplus will also go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Trail of Tears.
Jackson was a slaveholder - a vicious slaveholder.
As a person, he was vain and vindictive.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
It is the exact same thing they do with gerrymandering. They go out of their way to draw the map such that there is as few democratic districts as possible, and the democrats there win elections by very high margins, while there is as many republican districts as possible.
Right, it's always "Republicans" gerrymandering, and the poor, unblemished Democrats who are victims of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Apparently you don't believe in democracy. There is no legitimacy in a count that ignores millions of people just because they happen to live in or near one or two cities.
They weren't ignored. Their state elected Clinton. On December 19th, their representatives will vote for Clinton. Their votes were heard loud and clear. What I think you mean to argue is that the electoral college somehow makes their vote less powerful than the vote of someone who lives in say, Iowa. And while that may be true in the executive branch, California has a lot more pull in half of the legislative branch than any other state! So it's not like there aren't balances in the system.
Requiring Electors to vote a certain way is blatantly unconstitutional.
"Blatantly unconstitutional"? Please point to the relevant passage of the Constitution that prohibits it. Oh, well... actually, the Constitution doesn't address that at all. What it DOES say about the requirements for Electors is in Article II, Section 1:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
Basically, state legislatures have authority to appoint Electors however they want, under whatever constraints they wish. This wording was deliberate, since the Founders intended a compromise to allow various states to choose different methods of selecting Electors. Before the Electoral College was settled on, various proposals were put forward for who should elect the President -- some wanted Congress to do it, some wanted Governors to do it, some wanted state legislatures to have a voice, some wanted popular elections. This vague wording deliberately allowed states great leeway in determining the qualifications and methods for selecting Electors -- as long as they weren't people holding an office or employed by the government.
And for roughly 40 years after the Constitution went into effect, states did have various methods for selecting Electors. In some states, the legislature simply appointed them, holding no popular vote at all. In fact, in some early elections, the majority of states chose not to hold a popular vote, instead just appointing Electors. (Under the Constitution, there's no requirement to hold a popular vote for President within any state.) Others had various hybrid systems.
My point is that Electors are basically appointees of the States, and there's no Constitutional proviso that says the Electors can't be put under various constraints for that appointment or required to carry out duties in a particular fashion, just as anybody else given a legal task by a state legislature might be under state law.
It goes against the very purpose of the Electoral College.
The "very purpose" of the Electoral College was rendered obsolete in 1796 after the emergence of political parties. Before political parties, the Founders assumed that there would be no national consensus on candidates, and each state would likely have a "favorite son" whom most of the Electors would vote for. (Hence the provision in the Constitution that each Elector got two votes, and at least one must be cast for a candidate who was NOT from his home state -- this was to ensure that we wouldn't just end up with 13 different candidates, each with a 10% or so of the vote. This was later tweaked with the 12th Amendment after the fiasco in 1800, which separated votes for President vs. VP, but that constraint still applies.)
Anyhow, the "free choice" of Electors basically NEVER worked according to its original purpose. For the first two elections, Washington was assumed to be the winner. After that, the vast majority of Electoral votes have always gone to candidates put forth by parties, not by a "free choice" for some random qualified person by the learned Electors acting on behalf of the people.
The theoretical idea that this COULD happen, though, continued for a few decades. But that ended more-or-less completely by the 1820s, when almost all states adopted a "general ticket" system for choosing Electors, where each party had its "slate" of electors that voters chose from. Any notion of following Hamilton's supposed free choice method from independent thinking Electors was completely done away wi