Tag: electoral college

The Electoral College Is Racist. Here’s How to Kill It…

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The case against the Electoral College is straightforward: Because states are allocated electors based on the size of their congressional delegations, those with smaller populations have an outsize influence on presidential elections. The result is that a small number of voters in certain battleground states become kingmakers. By one analysis of the 2012 presidential election, four out of five voters had virtually zero influence on the outcome.

“It’s really a relic from the past,” says Wilfred Codrington III, an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School and a Brennan Center for Justice fellow. The Electoral College was established by the framers of the Constitution as a last-minute deal, a gift to Southern states trying to protect slaveholders’ power and leverage the three-fifths compromise. “It wasn’t a stroke of genius. It was really just the least objectionable at the time,” Codrington says…

Codrington thinks Electoral College reform is something everyone—even Republicans—could benefit from. “There are millions of Republicans whose votes are wasted, just as there are millions of Democrats whose votes are wasted, because they live in states that are fully red or fully blue, or mostly red or mostly blue,” he says. “They’re being ignored. And I think that it’s in their interest to think about the popular vote as something that will make their political system more responsive to their interests.”

I happen to think Codrington is wrong…for the reasons listed in the article. I distrust the ease by which the compact suggested can be reversed and put out of service. Though the simple exercise of a truly democratic vote for a few elections in a row would probably make a proper change to popular vote rule easy-peasy.

Who invented the electoral college?

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The delegates in Philadelphia agreed, in the summer of 1787, that the new country they were creating would not have a king but rather an elected executive. But they did not agree on how to choose that president.,,

Three approaches were debated during the Constitutional Convention: election by Congress, selection by state legislatures and a popular election – though the right to vote was generally restricted to white, landowning men…

The final approach debated was that of popular election. Some delegates, like New York delegate Gouverneur Morris, viewed the president as the “guardian of the people,” whom the public should elect directly.

The Southern states objected, arguing that they would be disadvantaged in a popular election in proportion to their actual populations because of the large numbers of enslaved people in those states who could not vote. This was eventually resolved – in one of those many compromises – by counting each enslaved person as three-fifths of a free person for the purposes of representation.

An interesting walk through the forest of history. How we got to a system outdated probably by the time of the invention of radio. Not that any of that means much to the self-anointed priests of Freedom and the American Way – otherwise known as Congress.

Republican version of a press conference

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Attorney General William Barr invited the press to ask him questions Thursday morning about the Mueller report. The final question got to the heart of the problem: Reporters didn’t get to read the report first.

“Do you think it creates an appearance of impropriety for you to come out and sort of, what appears to be spinning the report before the public gets a chance to read it?” Ryan Reilly of HuffPost asked, referring to the decision the Trump administration made to hold a news conference about the Mueller report before it was even released to Congress for review.

“No,” Barr replied curtly. He then walked away, ending the news conference.

When you have a job description for someone to be political pimp for a fake president this is, after all, what you get.