Thread: CA. Barbara Boxer wants to abolish the Electoral College

"The Associated Press has not yet called the last states standing, Michigan and New Hampshire, because recounts in both are still possible. Michigan and New Hampshire’s unofficial vote tallies, however, are in, and the margins are slim."
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Trump, Clinton 2016 Election Results: Are All Votes Counted? Popular Vote and Electoral College Final Totals

BY JULIANA ROSE PIGNATARO @JULIE_PIGNATARO ON 11/14/16 AT 1:45 PM

Almost a week has passed since the presidential election and still all the votes have not officially been counted. The Associated Press has not yet called the last states standing, Michigan and New Hampshire, because recounts in both are still possible. Michigan and New Hampshire’s unofficial vote tallies, however, are in, and the margins are slim.

President-elect Donald Trump is currently winning Michigan by 13,107 votes and at 47.6 percent, compared to Hillary Clinton at 47.3 percent. Clinton leads New Hampshire by 2,701 votes at 47.6 percent, compared to Trump at 47.2 percent.

If these margins hold, Trump will officially take 306 Electoral College votes from 30 states and Clinton will take 232 Electoral College votes from 20 states plus Washington, D.C. Though Trump has well surpassed the 270 electoral votes need to win the election, Clinton has undoubtedly won the popular vote. Clinton currently leads the popular vote with 61,039,676 votes to Trump’s 60,371,193, according to the Associated Press’ latest numbers.

There have been four other elections, most recently during President George W. Bush's election in 2000, when a president has been elected without the support of the popular vote. Trump took issue with the Electoral College during his campaign, calling the system “disastrous” and repeatedly suggesting a rigged election. Despite his win, he said he stands by his opinion of the Electoral College.
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“I hated, well you know, I’m not going to change my mind just because I won,” Trump told Lesley Stahl while appearing on “60 Minutes” Sunday night. “But I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.”

Clinton winning the popular vote has prompted many of her supporters to implore the Electoral College to step in and change the outcome of the election. An online petition asking electors to switch their votes from Trump to Clinton has garnered around 4 million signatures.

As of Friday, voter turnout for the 2016 presidential election was lower than during both of the previous elections, according to Five Thirty Eight. Though the number of votes rose by about 1.4 million from 2012, the population grew. That means only 57 percent of those eligible voted this year as compared with 58.6 percent in 2012 and 61.6 percent in 2008.

Clinton did not pick up any states won by 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Trump carried five states that President Barack Obama won in 2012: Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which carried a total of 81 electoral votes.

http://www.ibtimes.com/trump-clinton...ctoral-2445866

MSNBC reported today that California has so far only counted 70% of its votes.

Originally Posted by Judy

MSNBC reported today that California has so far only counted 70% of its votes.

Do you have a link to that article?

As of yesterday at 5 pm:

http://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/stat...ots-report.pdf

http://vote.sos.ca.gov/unprocessed-ballots-status/

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Do you have a like to that article?

It was on the MSNBC news show on cable this afternoon.

I think it is hilarious that Boxer is so upset, considering that California has so many Electoral votes because of all the illegal immigrants on the census. I do not think California should be able to count anyone but American citizens towards electoral votes. California is a winner take all state. I think the Electoral votes should be divided by district. This would make it more fair to the large rural areas of California that vote Republican.

People have to remember that we are not a democracy as such, that while we subscribe to many democratic principles, we are not a democracy, we're a Republic of now 50 states. The Electoral College was put into effect to preserve that.

Ex-Attorney General Eric Holder wants to abolish the Electoral College

BY TIM PERONE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, November 12, 2016, 3:46 PM

Former Attorney General Eric Holder said he's making a push to end the Electoral College.

The nation's former top law enforcement official made the announcement Friday on "Real Time With Bill Maher."

Maher began his interview noting that Hillary Clinton's Election Day loss to Donald Trump — despite her winning the popular vote — is the second time in 16 years Democrats have been shut out of the White House despite gaining more votes.

"How do we solve this problem?" Maher asked. "We win the election but we don't get to be President. This has happened twice now since 2000, Al Gore and now Hillary Clinton, and it seems to be happening to one party," he noted.

Barack Obama talks the election with Bill Maher
Holder said, "There's a simple solution to that and we have to abolish the Electoral College."

The comedian noted that such a momentous change to American democracy would require a constitutional amendment, but Holder was not deterred.

"So it involves heavy lifting. Let's lift heavy," said Holder, who led the Department of Justice for six years under President Obama.

The Founding Fathers argued the Electoral College was a necessary failsafe from letting the people directly choose their President.

Michael Moore heads to Trump Tower, demands meeting with Donald

Eric Holder says America should abolish the Electoral College on “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

(REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER)

But Professor Akhil Reed Amar, who teaches at Yale University, said the system was instituted to protect slavery.

"In a direct election system, the South would have lost every time because a huge percentage of its population was slaves, and slaves couldn't vote," he told Vox.

"But an Electoral College allows states to count slaves, albeit at a discount (the three-fifths clause), and that's what gave the South the inside track in presidential elections. And thus it's no surprise that eight of the first nine Presidents come from Virginia (the most populous state at the time)."

Holder and Maher also discussed on the HBO program Republican-led efforts to make it harder for Americans to cast their ballots.

"There's always been an element in our voting system that you had to prove who you were, but they've only recently come up with these more restrictive and prescriptive things that have a negative impact on those people who are less likely to vote for Republicans," Holder said.

"And they also happen to affect disproportionately people of color," added Holder, the country's first African-American Attorney General.

Efforts by GOP leaders in swing states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — all of which went to Trump on Tuesday — seemingly led to a depressed voter turnout in traditionally Democratic strongholds.

Ohio and Wisconsin, two battleground Midwestern states that flipped to the GOP, saw drops in overall voter turnout compared to 2012.

Wisconsin, which Trump won by about 27,000 votes, saw 200,000 fewer ballots cast compared to four years ago. The state had enacted one of the most stringent voter ID laws, requiring a photo ID to vote.

Ohio saw 50,000 fewer voters this year compared to the last presidential election after instituting a law that only allows voters without ID to cast a provisional ballot.

Both states had the laws signed by Republican governors.

"The Republican party has put itself on the wrong side of history here," Holder said.

"Fifty years from now people are going to look back and say this is the party that stood for denying the right to vote. I did a whole bunch of stuff to protect the right to vote. The next Attorney General will not, I suspect, share my values," he said.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/poli...icle-1.2870614

These 3 Common Arguments For Preserving the Electoral College Are Wrong

• Robert Speel, Erie campus, Pennsylvania State University / The Conversation@ConversationUS

1:00 PM ET

PAUL J. RICHARDS—AFP/Getty Images

Signs are seen on a lawn near a US polling place in Arlington, Virginia, November 8, 2016.

Views on the Electoral College are often partisan

In November 2000, newly elected New York Senator Hillary Clinton promised that when she took office in 2001, she would introduce a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, the 18th-century, state-by-state, winner-take-all system for selecting the president.

She never pursued her promise – a decision that must haunt her today. In this year’s election, she won at least 600,000 more votes than Donald Trump, but lost by a significant margin in the Electoral College.

In addition to 2016, there have been four other times in American history – 1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000 – when the candidate who won the Electoral College lost the national popular vote. Each time, a Democratic presidential candidate lost the election due to this system.

For that reason, views on the fairness of the Electoral College are often partisan. Not surprisingly, many Clinton supporters have called for its reform or abolition. But most recent polls indicate that supporters of both parties feel that this 18th-century system of choosing a president should be modified or abolished.

Nonetheless, others continue to make the case for preserving the Electoral College in its current form, usually using one of three arguments. In my course about American elections, we discuss these arguments – and how each has serious flaws.

The evolution of the Electoral College

During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the delegates “distrusted the passions of the people” and particularly distrusted the ability of average voters to choose a president in a national election.

The result was the Electoral College, a system that gave each state a number of electors based on its number of members in Congress. On a date set by Congress, state legislatures would choose a set of electors who would later convene in their respective state capitals to cast votes for president. Because there were no political parties back then, it was assumed that electors would use their best judgment to choose a president.

With the rise of the two-party system, the modern Electoral College continued to evolve. By the 1820s, most states began to pass laws allowing voters, not state legislatures, to choose electors on a winner-take-all basis.

Today, in every state except Nebraska and Maine, whichever candidate wins the most votes in a state wins all the electors from that state, no matter what the margin of victory.

Just look at the impact this system had on the 2016 race: Donald Trump won Pennsylvania and Florida by a combined margin of about 200,000 votes to earn 49 electoral votes. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, won Massachusetts by almost a million votes but earned only 11 electoral votes.

The winner-take-all electoral system explains why one candidate can get more votes nationwide while a different candidate wins in the Electoral College. (Some legal scholars have pointed out that the Electoral College was also created to protect southern slaveholder interests that are irrelevant today.)

Despite these issues, many continue to defend the system. Here’s why they’re wrong.

Myth #1: Electors filter the passions of the people

College students first learning about the Electoral College will often defend the system by citing its original purpose: to provide a check on the public in case they make a poor choice for president.

But electors no longer work as independent agents nor as agents of the state legislature. They’re chosen for their party loyalty by party conventions or party leaders.

In presidential elections between 1992 and 2012, over 99 percent of electors kept their pledges to a candidate, and there were only two “faithless electors.” One Gore elector from Washington, D.C. cast a blank ballot in 2000 to protest a lack of congressional representation for District of Columbia residents. And one Kerry elector in Minnesota in 2004 voted for vice presidential candidate John Edwards for both president and vice president – an apparent mistake, since none of Minnesota’s electors admitted to the action afterward.

There have been scattered faithless electors in past elections, but they’ve never influenced the outcome of a presidential election. Since winner-take-all laws began in the 1820s, electors have rarely acted independently or against the wishes of the party that chose them. A majority of states even have laws requiring the partisan electors to keep their pledges when voting.

Yes, some of this year’s Republican electors may not have been big supporters of Donald Trump’s candidacy. But despite the best efforts of some Clinton voters to get them to switch sides, there’s no evidence that some electors may consider voting for someone like Paul Ryan to prevent a Trump majority and throw the election into the U.S. House of Representatives.

Myth #2: Rural areas would get ignored

Since 2000, a popular argument for the electoral college made on conservative websites and talk radio is that without the Electoral College, candidates would spend all their time campaigning in big cities and would ignore low-population areas.

Other than this odd view of democracy, which advocates spending as much campaign time in areas where few people live as in areas where most Americans live, the argument is simply false. The Electoral College causes candidates to spend all their campaign time in cities in 10 or 12 states rather than in 30, 40 or 50 states.

Presidential candidates don’t campaign in rural areas no matter what system is used, simply because there are not a lot of votes to be gained in those areas.

Data from the 2016 campaign indicate that 53 percent of campaign events for Trump, Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence and Tim Kaine in the two months before the November election were in only four states: Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Ohio. During that time, 87 percent of campaign visits by the four candidates were in 12 battleground states, and none of the four candidates ever went to 27 states, which includes almost all of rural America.

Even in the swing states where they do campaign, the candidates focus on urban areas where most voters live. In Pennsylvania, for example, 72 percent of Pennsylvania campaign visits by Clinton and Trump in the final two months of their campaigns were to the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas.

In Michigan, all eight campaign visits by Clinton and Trump in the final two months of their campaigns were to the Detroit and Grand Rapids areas, with neither candidate visiting the rural parts of the state.

The Electoral College does not create a national campaign inclusive of rural areas. In fact, it does just the opposite.

Myth #3: It creates a mandate to lead

Some have advocated continuation of the Electoral College because its winner-take-all nature at the state level causes the media and the public to see many close elections as landslides, thereby giving a stronger mandate to govern for the winning candidate.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 51 percent of the national popular vote but 91 percent of the electoral vote, giving the impression of a landslide victory and allowing him to convince Congress to approve parts of his agenda. In 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton twice won comfortable majorities in the Electoral College while winning less than half of the national popular vote. (In both years, third party candidate Ross Perot had run.)

In 2016, Trump won by a large margin in the Electoral College, while winning fewer popular votes than Clinton nationwide. Nonetheless, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced that Trump’s Electoral College victory gives him a mandate to govern.

Perhaps for incoming presidents, this artificial perception of landslide support is a good thing. It helps them enact their agenda.

But it can also lead to backlash and resentment in the majority or near-majority of the population whose expressed preferences get ignored. Look no farther than the anti-Trump protests that have erupted across the country since Nov. 8.

A way out?

Some advocate that all 50 states adopt Maine and Nebraska’s system of dividing up electoral votes by congressional district. Yet such a system in larger states would likely lead to increased political conflict and even more claims of rigging due to the extreme gerrymandering often used to create the districts.

Abolishing the Electoral College completely would require a constitutional amendment, involving two-thirds approval from both houses of Congress and approval by 38 states – a process very unlikely to happen in today’s partisan environment.

One way to create a national popular vote election for president without amending the Constitution is a plan called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Created by Stanford University computer science professor John Koza, the idea is to award each state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the winner of the state popular vote.

The proposal has received support in 10 states and the District of Columbia. But these states are all strongly Democratic, and there seems to be no support for the change yet among the majority of states controlled by Republicans.

Because Republicans won the two recent presidential elections where the electoral college winner differed from the national popular vote winner, many party supporters have defended the Electoral College as a way to preserve the role of rural (usually Republican) voters in presidential elections.

Rural states do get a slight boost from the two electoral votes awarded to states due to their two Senate seats. But as stated earlier, the Electoral College does not lead to rural areas getting more attention.

And there is no legitimate reason why a rural vote should count more than an urban vote in a 21st-century national election.

Robert Speel, Associate Professor of Political Science, Erie campus, Pennsylvania State University

http://time.com/4571626/electoral-co...ong-arguments/

The Electoral College has saved our nation in 2016. It's saved our jobs, our borders, our sovereignty, our manufacturing, our trade, our economy, our lives, our futures.

And that is really all anyone needs to know. When the Democrats see that they were lied to, set up, exploited for over 18 months during the 2016 elections, being told Trump was a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, a sexist, a homophobe, an Islamaphobe, a xenophobe, all lies, when there isn't a racist bigoted bone in this man's body, and being told this in such ways as to frighten children, scare college students, worry women .... it's a national disgrace that Hillary Clinton, the DNC and the CORRUPT MEDIA would punk you so badly, but they did, you were punked BIG LEAGUE.

And as time and victory march on, you will see that and when you do, you will thank your lucky stars for the Electoral College, because in this election, it not only saved our nation, it saved you.