The Electoral College Is Completely Useless (Part Deux)

Psst....wanna know a secret about the Electoral College?

As I noted in the previous post, one of the reasons the Founders, especially Alexander Hamilton, designed the Electoral College was as a supposed fail-safe to prevent a dangerous and unqualified demagogue (especially one with foreign entanglements) from becoming President of the United States. (The 2016 election most ironically proved otherwise) Hamilton basically laid out the Federalist case for the Electoral College thusly, albeit combined with the sort of sneering elitism that even the most rabid Trump supporters would ironically claim to dislike today.

But there was also a much darker reason behind the creation of the Electoral College.  To put it bluntly, it was explicitly designed to protect--wait for it--SLAVERY.  In fact, that was the only way to get the Anti-Federalists in the southern slave states to sign on to the Constitution at all.  That is why less-populous states get a disproportionately large amount of electoral votes (since slave states often had as many slaves as free citizens and each slave only counted as 3/5 of a person in the census and was not allowed to vote).  And to this day, the Electoral College remains a bastion of white (sorry, "rural") privilege for the same reason.

Thus, the Electoral College is obsolete and currently serves no useful purpose anymore.  In fact, the winner-take-all aspect, over and above the small state bias, was the primary reason Trump won the election despite getting nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary, so it actually does more harm than good to this country.  Allocating electoral votes proportionally in each state instead of winner-take-all would go a long way to fixing it, and indeed Hillary would have won the electoral vote by changing just this aspect of the system.  It would also make it harder to effectively cheat as well.  But it would not solve all problems, and would in fact create a new problem--third-party candidates throwing the election into the House of Representatives when no one gets 270 majority--unless candidates with a de minimis amount of the popular vote (say, 5%) are then denied any electoral votes and/or only the top two or three candidates actually counting.  Therefore, all things considered, the very best and simplest solution is to abolish the Electoral College altogether, and elect the president by straight national popular vote going forward.

Of course, abolishing it entirely would require a constitutional amendment, and would thus be quite a long shot indeed, but there is a way to make it irrelevant by 2020.  The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is the way to do it, making it so that that only the winner of the national popular vote would win 270 electoral votes and become President, while still technically keeping the Electoral College in place.  Sign and share!

The Electoral College Is Completely Useless

On December 19, 2016, that 18th century relic known as the Electoral College effectively rubber-stamped Donald Trump as the 45th POTUS, proving that it is utterly useless in what Alexander Hamilton designed it for, i.e. preventing dangerous demagogues (especially with foreign entanglements) from ascending to the highest office in the land.  Only six Electors defected (four from Hillary, two from the Donald), which was nowhere near the 38 required to flip the election or 37 required to throw it to the House of Representatives.  Thus, no overall change.

Hillary won the popular vote by nearly 3 million, but still lost the electoral vote due to the winner-take-all aspect of the way electoral votes are allocated to the states.  As a result, barring a miracle of miracles involving Congress and/or the courts, we will end up exactly the type of president that the Founders warned about.  Thus, going forward we at the TSAP have this to say to the Electoral College:  YOU'RE FIRED!  (As your buddy would say)

Here is the letter I wrote to the Electors that were pledged to Trump, in an attempt to sway them:

Dear Electors,

My name is [Redacted] from [Redacted], NY.

I am gravely concerned about the clear and present danger that Donald Trump poses to the United States of America as well as globally. He has shown reckless disregard for even the most rudimentary responsibilities that come with the awesome power of the office of the presidency. He has behaved in a blatantly racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, narcissistic, and dictatorial manner. He has ignored intelligence briefings, recklessly pokes every proverbial angry bear he can find globally with his tweets, nominated the worst possible candidates to his cabinet, avoids the media, reneged (or plans on reneging) on most of his campaign promises, and has apparently received help via hacking, propaganda, and election sabotage from his buddy Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian dictator who is clearly no friend of the United States as of late. FBI director James Comey also played his own role in sabotage his opponent with a phony scandal while simultaneously ignoring Russian hacking. In spite of such sabotage and skulduggery, Hillary Clinton still managed to win the national popular vote nonetheless by nearly three million votes--just not where those votes really mattered due to the winner-takes-all aspect of the Electoral College system. And while the (curiously aborted) recount efforts have not proven anything, they have not actually disproven anything either, and several "irregularites" benefiting Trump in crucial swing states have been found to one degree or another. In other words, a dangerous demagogue who is woefully unqualified and unfit for command--the kind that the Founders warned about and in fact created the Electoral College in order to prevent--ironically has managed to ascend to the presidency thus far.

In light of the above facts, please do the right thing and vote for Hillary. Doing so would be good for America and good for democracy overall. And if you somehow can't bring yourself to do that, at least vote for someone other than Trump. Our nation and world literally depend on it. Whether you vote for Trump or not, your decision is certain to anger roughly half of the population either way, so you might as well do it for good and vote your conscience.

Thank you for your time and consideration, I appreciate and respect the role you serve in our electoral process.

Sincerely,
[Redacted]

(Ajax the Great)

Clearly, if that couldn't sway them, nothing would.  They clearly had their minds made up.    But truly hindsight is 2020--pun intended, of course.  That is the year we must RE-DEFEAT TRUMP.  Bigly.  If he is still even in office at that point, that is.  At the rate he is going, if he is not disqualified before taking office, he is very likely to get himself impeached, resign in disgrace, or even die in office due to either poking the wrong angry bear one too many times (which he apparently luuurrrves to do) or simply having a massive heart attack from his fiery temper, stress, junk food diet, obesity, and sedentary lifestyle.  Believe me.

The Real Election-Rigging Scandal You Probably Don't Know About

Though there is already plenty of evidence of "irregularities" and "errors", nearly all of which favoring Trump, in key swing states, and even some evidence of possible machine tampering in Wisconsin, the truth is that tampering and hacking are really NOT the biggest problems in terms of potential election rigging.  As author and pundit Greg Palast notes, much, much larger are the problems of voter suppression, discarded votes, and related systemic issues that worked in Trump's favor.  Such problems tend to be far more prevalent in Republican-controlled states, and (not coincidentally) tend to disproportionately disenfranchise people of color and other voters who are statistically likely to vote Democrat.  And most of it is effectively legal.

Note that Republicans are always the ones who push for suppressive and overly stringent voter ID laws, which are basically a solution in search of a problem given that in-person voter fraud is much too rare to have meaningfully affected any election thus far.  They even repeat the same tired, old debunked canards about illegal immigrants and dead people voting in order to justify both voter ID laws as well as other suppressive measures like Crosscheck, a computer which is used to purge "questionable" voters from the election rolls.  And purged voters who find their names mysteriously missing on the rolls are either turned away or, if they request it, given "provisional" ballots that all too often end up in the trash and are thus "placebo" ballots.  Also, many states permanently revoke the right to vote from convicted felons even after they have paid their debt to society--and due to institutional racism, this disproportionately affects people of color.  Add to this the fact that poor people and people of color statistically tend to get the worst voting machines (i.e. more likely to malfunction) at their polling places, voter intimidation, and stuff like that, and you have a recipe for massive disenfranchisement of likely Democratic voters.  And make no mistake, none of this is any sort of accident, this is all by design.

And since the Supreme Court essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, things have only gotten that much worse since. That was done despite common knowledge that racial gerrymandering and voter suppression of people of color would most likely increase as a result of such safeguards becoming unenforceable in practice.

So yes, the 2016 election was rigged, even if there was no tampering.  Just like every election before it, to one degree or another.  And it was rigged in favor of the party of the privileged, which is none other than the GOP.   After all, as Greg Palast famously said, America is "the best democracy money can buy".

Don't Fear The Recount

Listen, Donald, you ultimately brought it on yourself.  All of this talk about the election being "rigged" when you thought you were gonna lose, and had lost all three debates, claiming that you may not accept the results of the election.  Then when you surprisingly won by the skin of your teeth due to the mathematical quirks inherent in the Rube Goldberg machine known as the Electoral College, you gloated about your victory.  Even one of your own pollsters said that you literally won by FIVE FREAKING COUNTIES.  Then when you saw that Hillary had won the popular vote by well over 2 million votes, you had to resort to a debunked conspiracy theory to accuse the Democrats of voter fraud by non-citizens in a desperate and disingenuous attempt to explain away the fact that you actually lost to a woman in terms of the popular vote.  BIGLY.  And now you are not only disparaging the recent recount efforts, but you are actually trying to block it by literally making a federal case out of it a la Bush v. Gore.  Honestly, if you are so confident that you have won fair and square (while simultaneously being concerned about alleged skulduggery on the part of the Democrats), you should have absolutely nothing to fear from a recount, and in fact you should welcome it so as to ensure the integrity of our electoral system.  The fact that you are trying to block it will just undermine what little legitimacy you have left. 

We all know that if the situation were reversed, and you had won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, you would not have conceded the election the next day like Hillary did, and in fact you would have been whining and demanding a recount immediately.  So don't give me that.  As you like to say, "Sad."

Congratulations, Donald, you have proven that it is actually possible to be both a sore winner AND a sore loser at the same time.  Seriously.  Keep digging your own grave, as you are doing a truly marvelous job of that.  Believe me.

Oh, and by the way, while there is no credible evidence of Democratic voter fraud in this election, there is indeed plenty of evidence of "irregularites" and "errors" in key swing states.  And practically all of these discrepancies are in one direction--yours.  Things that (should) make you go, hmmmm.

An Open Letter to Women in Politics (Re-post)

(This is a re-post, in honor of the fact that Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination for President in the 2016 election.  The TSAP originally was "feeling the Bern" but now (grudgingly) supports Hillary instead of Donald Chump.  And we believe that she will most likely win, Goddess willing.)

To any Women who are running for office, in office, or considering running for office in the near future:

You have probably noticed that the world is on fire, and has been for quite some time now.   We stand on the verge of World War III as we speak, and our overburdened planet is in grave danger.  We continue to flirt with the prospect of mass extinction (including humans, by the way) in the not-too-distant future, as we continue to cook the planet with reckless abandon.  We know what is causing all of these problems, and we already have the technology and wherewithal to solve them if we really wanted to, yet our current Big Wetiko "leaders" refuse to solve such problems because they are sycophantic lackeys to the parasitic elites, if not the very same elites themselves.  And these plutocrats are hopelesly addicted to "business as usual".

So how did we get here in the first place, exactly?  The answer lies in ancient history, about 7000 years ago or so, when men apparently got the bright idea to take over the (known) world piece by piece, by deposing you from power.  That's right, it was originally Women who were in charge for most of humanity's existence, and us fellas apparently thought we could do a better job as leaders than you ladies did.  Well, history shows us that we were wrong--dead wrong in fact.  Indeed, the best advice that us men can give to Women is "don't be like us", because we f**ked the world up royally. We paved paradise and put up a parking lot, we created a desert and called it "peace".  We have devoured and suffocated our own empire, and now we are all paying a heavy price for it.  That's right--WE did it.  And we're sorry about that--though we can clearly stuff our "sorrys" in a sack! 

And now it is time for you to reclaim your rightful position as the new leaders of the free world once again, starting with the USA and eventually spreading from there.  In fact, it is LONG overdue for you to do so.  We cannot apologize enough for handing you such a monumental clusterf**k of a world for you to fix, of course, but we fellas have plenty of faith that you will be able to do so. We know that Women, not men, are the real natural-born leaders, and you can clearly handle power a lot better without it going to your heads than us.  We know that your preferred paradigm of society, what Riane Eisler calls the "partnership" model, is far better than the "dominator" model that we have been practicing for the past 7000 years.  As the saying goes, never send a boy to do a man's job--send a Woman instead.  Truer words were never spoken, and we need you now more than ever before.

It's now 2016, and there are plenty of elections in which you can win this year.  The highest and tallest "glass ceiling" in the world--President of the United States--is just waiting to be smashed, as are plenty of other important political offices as well.  We wish all of you the very best of luck.  Now, go forth and make old Buckminster Fuller proud!  Vive la femme!

Sincerely,

Ajax the Great, Party Leader of the TSAP