I am flattered that my post has lead to so many responses and frustrated that so many of you apparently weren't paying attention during your high school history and civics classes. I guess I'll just have to pull my academic robe, hood and mortarboard out of the back of my closet and though it over my dress. It could be worse; today's dress is nice enough, but not anything that's going to make the cover of
Vogue. Appropriately enough it is blue and gold, the colors of my alma maters.
Let's see, where to start. As a matter of convenience we'll go last things first:
The presence of the Electoral College is highly divisive -- and thus perfect for deflecting attention away from where the real problem lies, and that's the corrupting influence of money in the electoral process.
There is no question that the role of money in our political process is pervasive and pernicious. In light of the Supreme Court's
Citizen's United decision, what, Carl, is your strategy for reining that money in? Keep in mind, Supreme Court decisions on matters like that have the weight of the Constitution. That is, you either have to be very clever in writing a law to circumvent the decision or pass a Constitutional amendment.
Or, get the Supreme Court to change it's mind by electing a President and Senate that share your feelings about campaign finances, change the political composition of the Court and then pass a law contravening
Citizen's United under the expectations that 1) someone will contest the law (slam-dunk), 2) the case will make its way to the Supreme Court (ditto) and then 3) this new court will throw out
Citizen's United and uphold the new law (crapshoot).
So again Carl, pray tell, how do you propose we all work together to make all that happen?
Perhaps, looking at things that way you'll see that while popular vote vs. electoral college may or may not be a sideshow, it's also a critical piece of the puzzle because the President is the only one who can nominate Supreme Court Justices and only the Senate can award the nominee her seat on the bench.
While we're on the Electoral College vs. Popular vote, Oldsalt1 said,
without the electoral college the whole damn country would be held hostage by New York and California
. I looked up the numbers last night and found that according to the US Census Bureau as of July 1, 2019 they estimate that California has 12% of the population (and presumably the electorate) and New York State has 5.9%. Consequently, even if every single voter in California and New York were to vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate, that would only be 17.9% of the total. Far from a decisive total.
Under the Electoral College system, if the Democratic candidate gets just one vote more than the Republican in both states she gets all 84 electoral votes or 15.6% percent of the total with only 9% of the popular vote.
In the 2016 election just 88,000 voters in 3 states overturned the will of the majority of all of the US voters.
When you look at the actual numbers, it is the Electoral College system that distorts the results out of all reason.
I spent another 2 hours giving thorough answers to a number of other issues that arose, but because our website arbitrarily times out a contributor after they've been on one tropic for an hour, all of that work was LOST. I haven't got the time or interest to recreate all of that lost work so you'll all just have to do without my insights. I have complained to Carl about this before and he can't see why the current system is a real problem. I mean all I have to do is predict how long it is going to take to make all of my responses and draft them in Word -- well actually he thinks I should learn Notebook because HE thinks it's better and draft my posts in Notebook -- and then copy and paste them into the forum forgetting that process requires the poster bounce back and forth between one's wordprocessing program and one's browser.
Tell us Carl, do you want thorough, thought-out posts or just off the cuff crap!
Sparks are flying anyway.
