Electoral College = Minority Rule
Question- What is the largest difference in voter margin possible when the winner of the Electoral College loses the popular vote.
Answer- 116,999,963 or 117,000,000 loser vs 37 winner
As we sit and ponder how one candidate
who received nearly 4 million more votes than
the other candidate can win by just the narrowest
of margins in the Electoral College.
The answer is rather simple if one looks at the mathematical foundation
of the system used to elect our president. (Talk about a bug in the system!
or is it an intentional means of keeping the powerful in control?)
It could be a whole lot worse.
Is it easier to get the support of 37 people or 117 million people?
The mathematical structure of the Electoral College makes this a reality;
Unity=loser Division=Winner
The above scenario is based on the following set of assumptions:
The winning candidate gets the support of 1 voter from each of the
37 smallest states, minus 4 of the 3EV states. Putting them at 270
Electoral Votes. The losing candidate gets the support of 100% of registered voters
from the 10 largest states (4 3EV states) putting them at 256 Electoral Votes.
Seems outrageous? That is a emotional value judgement, it wouldn't
carry much weight in front of SCOTUS.
This particular scenario is an extremely unlikely one,
but there is a whole lot of grey area in-between.
Remember:
1. The SCOTUS is dominated by "Originalists" who claim to stick
narrowly to the text of the Constitution, vaguely tempered in some way
by their own individual interpretation of the mores during the
time the Constitution was written.
2. The Constitution does not dictate that Electors are selected
by means of the popular vote.
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct"
So in theory a state could assign one person
to decide who their Electoral votes will go to or simply
have such extreme voter suppression that only one person is qualified
to vote.
3. The Constitution does allow states to select their Electors via
popular vote if they chose to. (Most states do that now, but it is not
required).
Conclusion: based on this, someone like Trump is simply a product
of the Electoral System under which someone like him prospers. There will
be others like Trump even if he loses this particular election because
the mathematical structure of the Electoral College favors dividers over
uniters.
That is why phrases like: Southern Strategy, Welfare Queen, Red States vs Blue States,
Coastal Elites, Fly-over country, "we're a republic not a democracy",
systemic racism, gerrymandering, small state senators, the 2nd amendment,
pro-life, etc, etc have featured so prominently in our political discourse.
Our country has gone through many decades where the winner of the overall
popular vote has usually ended up as the winner of the presidential
election. This is because most states select their Electors via popular vote
and only practice minimal voter suppression strategies, but this is a rather
naïve approach. Once more candidates for elected office see the advantages
of gaming a poorly designed electoral system this will get worse.
If I wanted to game the system; my bedrock policy would be to tax the
10 largest states (+4) and give that money to the 37 smallest states (there
is enough cushion in the EC to leave out the 4 smallest states,
like DC, Vermont or Hawaii) (or alternatively you could do the opposite).
But before that, I'd make sure I belonged to the party that controlled the
majority of small states.That party would then get the legislatures
of each state to decide where its Electoral Votes would go rather than
the popular vote or practice extreme voter suppression. Alternative
I could just try to form a coalition of states willing to go along with
my scheme in hopes it will add up to
270 EC votes. If you think about it, the Republican party is well on its way to achieving this goal.
The Electoral College’s Racist Origins
For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.
Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.
But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:
There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.
Which US states make it hardest to vote?
The hardest places to vote in America, considering the strictness of voter identification laws, voter roll purges and felon disenfranchisement.
Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions the vote?
The United States is ranked 57th in electoral integrity in the world. Compared to other liberal democracies, it is ranked second to last.
These copycat bills on Sharia law and terrorism have no effect. So why do states keep passing them?
The use of copy-and-paste legislation – on topics as varied as asbestos liability and used car sales – is the subject of an investigation by USA TODAY, the Center for Public Integrity and The Arizona Republic. USA TODAY and the Republic found that at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law. In a separate analysis, the Center for Public Integrity identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country.
How to Game the US Electoral System (Electoral College Version)
How to Game the US Electoral System by Kirk Garber 03/2019
The Electoral College has two major weaknesses as an electoral system so I simply calculated the worst case scenario assuming these two weaknesses were taken to their extreme.
1- It incentivizes voter suppression, so if only one person votes in a state, that person's choice receives all of the Electoral College votes. 2 It's formula for deciding how many Electoral Votes are allotted to each state favors small states over large states (by population). So---- if there is only one person from each of the 41 smallest states (including DC) voting and those 41 people all vote for Candidate #2, that candidate would receive 282 Electoral votes, enough to win the Presidency. It wouldn't matter if all the registered voters from the 10 largest states- 81,000,000 (vs 76,600,000 in the 41 smallest states with DC) vote for Candidate #1, their votes are tossed out.
Democracy Diverted: Polling Place Closures and the Right to Vote
The Leadership Council on Human and Civil Rights
Texas, a state where 39 percent of the population is Latino and 12 percent is African American, has closed 750 polling places since Shelby, by far the most of any state in our study. Five of the six largest closers of polling places are in Texas. With 74 closures, Dallas County, which is 41 percent Latino and 22 percent African American, is the second largest closer of polling places, followed by Travis County, which is 34 percent Latino, (–67). Harris County, which is 42 percent Latino and 19 percent African American, (–52) and Brazoria County, which is 13 percent African American and 30 percent Latino (–37) tied with Nueces County, which is 63 percent Latino (–37). Many, but not all, of these polling places were closed as part of a statewide effort to centralize voting into “countywide polling places.” This effort slashed the number of voting locations but allowed voters to cast ballots at any Election Day polling place. Without Section 5 of the VRA, we cannot assess the impact these mass closures have on communities of color.
'Just like propaganda': the three men enabling Trump's voter fraud lies
Now the myth of voter fraud is dominating the election. Trump has questioned the legitimacy of the vote, falsely suggesting it will be “rigged” against him and his campaign has floated using the idea of a fraudulent election as the basis for overriding the popular vote in key states, according to the Atlantic. Despite the pandemic, the president and his campaign have litigated to restrict mail-in voting and expand the use of poll watchers, citing the potential for tampering.
State Republicans have followed suit. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, limited each county to only one place where voters could return their mail-in ballots. South Carolina Republicans successfully fought to preserve a witness requirement for absentee ballots. Alabama Republicans have pointed to the potential for fraud to justify mail-in ballot restrictions. And in Wisconsin, a conservative group is urging the state supreme court to order the swift removal of more than 130,000 people from the voter rolls, citing the need to prevent fraud.
Chief Justice Roberts’s lifelong crusade against voting rights
The House had recently passed legislation extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a seminal civil rights bill that dismantled much of Jim Crow — and shoring up one of its key provisions after a 1980 Supreme Court decision had severely weakened the law. Meanwhile, a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate had co-sponsored the same bill.
Roberts was distraught.
“Something must be done to educate the Senators on the seriousness of this problem,” Roberts wrote his boss, Smith, just a few days before Christmas. In a subsequent memo, he argued that the rapidly advancing bill — which now forms much of the backbone of American voting rights law — was “not only constitutionally suspect, but also contrary to the most fundamental tenants [sic] of the legislative process on which the laws of this country are based.”
Pamela Karlan speaks during impeachment hearing 12/04/19
Pamela Karlan is a professor of law at the Stanford Law School. She has a serious person’s resume—something that most ranking Republicans do not have. She has worked on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and is one of the leading attorneys on voting rights in the country. She took exception to Rep. Collins’ weak-sauce dismissal of her expertise in her opening remarks to the committee.DailyKos 12/04/19 <embed>https://youtu.be/9Wz23qd76QA</embed>
WAPO CHOP photo.jpg| CHOP or CHAZ America's History of Social Experiments Washington Post 6/16/2020
How white supremacy went mainstream in the US: 8chan, Trump, voter suppression
"Law professor Ian Samuel explained, in relation to Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation – Trump’s first appointment – that it was the first time “a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22m fewer – than the senators that voted against him”.
For his second pick, Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s choice to replace the moderate Anthony Kennedy, the senators who voted against him represented 38 million more people than the ones who voted to confirm."
As Jamelle Bouie noted in the New York Times: “Today, the largest state is California, with nearly 40 million residents, and the smallest is Wyoming, with just under 600,000 people, a disparity that gives a person in Wyoming 67 times the voting power of one in California.
The Way the Census Counts Prison Populations Seriously Distorts Redistricting
But the bureau failed to understand the nature of its role. The current census policy leads state administrators to shuttle incarcerated people across states and deposit them in districts where atrophying population counts are bloated by the presence of prisons. One study analyzing state senate districts found that prison populations were often shifted in tandem with the life cycle of legislatures or governorships, conferring partisan advantage after switches in party control over the redistricting process. The bulk of the prison population—which numbers in the millions—is planted in small towns and rural areas, though many individuals hail from cities and surrounding suburbs. The result is that census data—both in terms of redistricting and in terms of an accurate population count—is soiled by the bureau’s own rules on counting people in prison.
To Beat the Gerrymander, Think Outside the Lines
Voters in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maryland deserve fair maps that don’t lock in a partisan advantage for either Republicans or Democrats. Federal courts nationwide had recently begun to insist on that, repeatedly declaring districts tainted with extreme partisan intent unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court put an end to that dream last week. Its 5–4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause closed the federal courts to anyone seeking review of this undemocratic practice, despite those bipartisan panels of judges who repeatedly found they had all the tools and standards they needed to evaluate when district lines egregiously favored one side over the other.
Democrats Can’t Be Afraid to Gerrymander Now
After last week’s Supreme Court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, we find ourselves, again, in an age where anything goes. Thanks to Rucho, there is literally no partisan gerrymander a federal court may strike down—no district plan so politically egregious it may be held to violate the Constitution. So what might today’s mapmakers do now that they’re certain the federal judiciary won’t interfere with their work? Quite a lot, it turns out, including several tactics that, to date, have barely seen the light of day.
Think Progress How Lincoln rigged the Senate for Repubs 5/05/2019
