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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?
The problem isn't Trump, it is all the people who voted for Trump.
If we take the election back from Trump under the theory that the constitution is not a suicide pact, that won't address the issue of all the people who voted for Trump. In 1824, when electoral college did the same thing to Andrew Jackson (who was a similar combination of demagoguery, narcissism and ignorance) the result was counterproductive. Adams was selected by congress over Jackson. But was a very ineffective president because the circumstances of his selection negated any mandate to lead.
However the effect of "taking" the election from Jackson was to hypermotivate people who had previously been lukewarm or neutral and 4 years later Jackson won handily. He then went on to do all the terrible things people were worried about but now he had a lot of support not for his policies but as a reaction to what happened in 1824. So despite fucking up, he was still elected for a second term.
We are faced with no good choices with Trump. Just lesser evils. Nobody can see the future, but an unpopular Trump entering office today, with no honeymoon period and the press raring to hold him accountable could be a lot better than a popular Trump (or Ivanka) entering office 4 years from now.
I wish a knew for sure.
Stop bitching about how unfair the electoral college is. Go through the legal process to change/eliminate it so this it doesn't happen again, if that's what the people want.
Right! And also, it's bizarre how electors of a state, say ID, are supposed to turn against the voters of their state and vote for Hilary just b'cos CA has given Hilary a margin that erases Trump's margin in the rest of the country. If they wanna do that, increase CA's #electoral votes in future elections.
The Clinton campaign announced today they're joining the recount process: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11...
I'm in favour of recounts in general, and for this election in particular. It tells us about the reliability of the election process, and hopefully might shed light on hacking and other skulduggery. The information will be used to fix future problems.
As to Clinton, she's joining because Jill Stein can't call for a recount. In at least one of the states (probably all of them) you can't call for a recount unless you are aggrieved, which means that you think the recount would change the outcome.
Jill Stein can't reasonably say that she might have won, so she officially can't be aggrieved.
Hillary most certainly *can* make that claim, since the margins for her loss are so slim in those states.
That's why she joined the process. For the recounts to happen, she's the one to request them.