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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?
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.
Clinton and Trump campaigned in the swing states because that is what the Electoral College encourages. The popular vote "imbalance" is a mirage. If they had been campaigning for the popular vote, if there had been no Electoral College, the campaigns and the results would have been different in ways we can't imagine.
To change the Electoral College process now, after the popular vote is over, is sour grapes.
Infuriate left and right
The vote of each state.
There are many reasons why a straight popular vote is bad and the electoral college is better but the best one I can think of is what happened in the recent election. Hillary Clinton won 300 counties while Trump won 5000. If you think that the election of a nation should be swayed by a handful of cities while the rest of the nation is completely ignored, well, you're an idiot.
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.
Sure. Nothing except the large majority of food, farms, guns, and factories. You coastals have a monopoly on Hollywood actors and expensive beachfront property. Not much else.
I'm not a fan of the Electoral College, and I'd be pleased to see it go away. However. . .
The shortcomings of the Electoral College are *trivial* in comparison with the broken and dysfunctional primary system that gave us Clinton and Trump as our major-party candidates. It's utter madness. That's where we should focus our reform efforts.
On the one hand, Lessig relies (correctly) on the fact that the Constitution places no restrictions on how electors vote and that it was expected that they would be citizens exercising judgement.
On the other hand, he disagrees with a very fundamental feature of the Constitution -- that states, by the fact they are states, have power beyond just the mass of their population. This is directly evidenced in the Constitution as it defines how the Electoral College and Senate work. The Founders felt so strongly that each state have an equal vote in the Senate independent of the population of the state that the ONLY thing that can't be amended in the Constitution with approval of ¾ of the states (NO state can lose equal suffrage in the Senate without approval of that state).
It seems quite odd to rely on the Constitution for one argument and then completely dismiss one of its most fundamental concepts that protected the less populous states from being run roughshod over at the Federal level by the more populous states. One might go so far as to label such a viewpoint as hypocritical.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
And that attitude is exactly why Hillary lost. The party that preaches inclusiveness and claims to look out for the common folk, dismissed the common folk and took them for granted. The ivory tower progressive elites forgot what the Democratic party was actually built on. The further they go left and progressive, the more votes they'll lose.
These people want to scrap the system that has been in place since the whole thing began because things didn't turn out in their favor ?
It seems that the current generation just can't handle defeat ( they've been insulated against it their entire lives ) so when things don't go
their way, the best course of action is to loudly demand that the rules be changed ? If that doesn't work, organize protests and maybe
cry on camera a bit ? Perhaps hire a celebrity to be " The voice for the unheard " or some other silly attention seeking behavior.
Welcome to reality kids. Where life is cold, uncaring, unfair and, occasionally, absolutely horrific.
By the time you become an adult, we've flat run out of consolation and / or participation prizes.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
So strap yourselves in, because it's going to be a rough ride.
For anyone who argues Trump supporters would be doing the same thing were the situation reversed, I call out your bullshit and will say
it's pure speculation on your part. Right now the only folks who are actively participating in the riots and general stupidity are those who
claim to be the " more educated, intelligent and / or informed " than those " Deplorable " Trump Supporters ( Hillary's description of them I believe ).
I don't recall any of this sort of bullshit when Obama got elected.
( Or any President in recent history for that matter. Republican or Democrat )
So, other than dealing with the most coddled, spoiled, insulated and catered-to generation of all time, what do you believe has changed to
cause such behavior issues from the very folks who own words claim intellectual superiority over everyone else, while their actions say otherwise ?
Cook up all the justifications you want about why Trump 'won' the election and why he should be president.
How about -- he won the electoral contest? You know, the one set of rules that actually counts? The one system that was perfectly okay before the election, until now that some of the losers are sore and are concocting all the justifications for a change in the outcome after-the-fact?
Democracy is a system whereby elected representatives are chosen by winning the popular vote not a gerrymandered system where you elect a group of functionaries who then vote for the runner up.
Actually, if you live in the United States, then you don't live in a pure democracy. You are in a democratically elected representative republic. This means, by design, that sometimes the majority does not get its way.
If Clinton had won the Electoral College but Trump had won the popular vote, would you have taken the time to write up an op-ed outlining the flaws of the Electoral College, would you have protested in the streets, would you be demanding Trump be made President? If not, then you are simply being partisan, and your support for this is out of self-interest rather than truly wishing to improve the system.
Someone truly wishing to reform the Electoral College would be for such reform regardless of who won. If you truly believe a change is for the better, you support it even when it works against your own self interests. I think Merkley made a mistake dismantling one of the checks and balances the Founding Fathers put into the system to prevent a simple majority from having too much power, but I respect him for not changing his position even though he now finds himself on the disadvantaged side of his rule change.
(And if you're one of the people who believe Merkley's rule change was necessary because the Republicans were stonewalling in the Senate, the Washington Post keeps a database of how often each Senator votes with his/her party. Here are the stats for the 108th, 109th, 110th, 111th, 112th, and 113th Senates, spanning 2002-2015 with Senate control by both parties, covering both a Republican President and Democrat President. Click on the Party column to sort it by Senators most likely to vote for their party. You'll see it's actually the Democrats who most frequently vote as a block, and the Republicans who are more willing to cross the party line. The meme that Republicans refused to compromise was fake news spread by the mainstream media without any statistical evidence to back it up.)
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.
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.
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