I’m feeling a bit puny today, so a repeat is in order. If anything, this 2020 post is more important now because of the cheesy fake electors scheme cooked up by Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman.
I’ve tweaked a few things but what’s a little tweaking among friends? I’ll save the twerking for another day.
Repeat after me: Civilized countries elect their president by direct election.
Set the Wayback Machine to 9/18/2020.
I realize that I’ve said it before and that I’m preaching to the choir but it’s high time to abolish the electoral college. It’s done nothing but cause mischief in both the 19th Century and early 21st Century.
The electoral college is not only anti-democratic, it focuses candidates on specific often unrepresentative states. Just think of all the times candidates have been obliged to support ethanol subsidies to win votes in Iowa. It even happened to fictional candidates such as Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) in The West Wing episode King Corn.
The loser of the popular vote has won the electoral vote five times in our history. It didn’t happen for 112 years after Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote by 90,956 to Grover Cleveland. We all know what happened in 2000 when one of the best qualified candidates in American history, Al Gore, won the popular vote by 543, 985 votes, but lost the electoral college to dipshit nepo baby George W. Bush. History repeated itself in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2,868,518 but lost the electoral to dipshit criminal Donald J. Trump.
The Bush-Cheney administration played favorites at times, but the Trump regime has gone to extremes in favoring “their people” and “their voters.” As we’ve seen time and time again, President* Pennywise only cares about his people, his voters. Any time there’s an issue in a blue state, he has no interest in addressing it. If the electoral college were abolished even Trump would have to think about Republican voters in blue states.
Here are the Top Six Trump Popular Vote States:
- TEXAS 4,685,047
- FLORIDA 4,617,886
- CALIFORNIA 4,483,814
- PENNSLYVANIA 2,907,441
- OHIO 2,841,006
- NEW YORK 2,819,557
If the electoral college did not exist, Trump would have been obliged to deal fairly with the states he won his 3rd and 6th most votes in instead of focusing on the 31.49% and 36.51% of the vote he received in California and New York respectively.
Democrats have suffered as a result of the current system BUT this is about democracy, not partisan advantage. The Republicans won’t see it that way, but this is about truth, justice, and the American way. I’m not sure what the exact mechanism would be but there’s a long article by Lee Drutman in the Washington Monthly that looks at the issue in historical context.
It’s time for the electoral college to go. It was nearly abolished in 1970 but fell prey to a filibuster by Southern Senators. It’s also time for the filibuster to go. It’s done in more progressive legislation than Mitch McConnell.
It’s time for a change. The last word goes to Sam Cooke: