Rigging the vote is TOTALLY fair
I thought this was just some random (albeit blue-checked) person on Twitter responding to a Fox News tweet about Ocasio-Cortez’s saying the Electoral College is a scam.
Actually @AOC, eliminating the Electoral College would silence our voices here in Iowa and in many other states across the country.
This is just more evidence of how out of touch the Democrats have become.
So I pointed out that an equal vote doesn’t silence anyone and it’s the outsize vote for less populated states that’s the real silencing, and then I looked to see who she is.
She’s a senator! A US senator!
And it’s the Democrats who are out of touch. Oy.
Iowa has two senators; California also has two senators. Who doesn’t have a voice again?
Well, to be as charitable as possible, it could be the result of conceiving of one’s state as the unit of political identity. In such a view, the argument makes sense.
It’s a stupid viewpoint, but it’s not utterly unintelligible.
You’d hope the bar for a senator would be slightly higher than “not utterly unintelligible”, though.
Well, according to NBC, a [quot]federal appeals court ruled late Tuesday that presidential electors who cast the actual ballots for president and vice president are free to vote as they wish and cannot be required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states.[/quot]
Which basically means that your vote doesn’t really matter, all that matters are the votes of the electors. So much for democracy.
Electors have long been free to vote as they wish, I thought. They were pledged to one candidate or another. But the freedom of electors is a deliberate feature of the electoral college, intended to avoid situations like the one we find ourselves in, where a madman was selected. It failed miserably.
The Senator from Iowa brings to mind a conflict regarding the purpose of the Senate. Are they to serve the country or their state? It is not in the interest of the country to have outsize representation, but in some issues the voices of small states are important. Here in Alabama, senators have a record of bringing home the military contracts but screwing up national legislation.
I’m not sure the “but” is appropriate here. The military contracts are also often screwing things up federally, because they encourage huge spending on the state level that is often less accountable than other agencies, and is frequently wasteful. So I would put an “and” in that sentence.
And that is an interesting question, because we are supposedly United States, where the states are in a cooperative agreement for the good of everyone. But the idea of the way we are set up is to give a lot of autonomy to the smaller actors. I am not sure it is a truly workable system, but I’m not sure any other system is, either, when you have a country as large and diverse as the US.
The real problem is that we get a form of nationalism about our states. Some states are worse than others (Texas comes to mind) and will do everything they can to glom onto all the goodies and promote their state at the expense of others. I think all states have it to some extent, but the larger states (Texas comes to mind) may have certain advantages…or they may not in the Senate.
In short, we are not United States but actually Untied States, all of us trying to get ours, screw our neighbors, and remain self-righteous about our goodness. In fact, some of us will manage to avoid getting ours if it allows us to screw our neighbors. We will vote against our own best self interest in order to make sure we inflict maximum pain on someone else.
I am usually not a big believer in the phrase “State’s Rights” because it has for so long been a euphemism for slavery and then Jim Crow and racial segregation. Sometimes it’s tempting to be in favor of State’s Rights, like when states work against the awfulness of a Bush or a Trump.
Here’s an article about the elector case:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/faithless-elector-court-ruling-just-changed-how-we-pick-our-n1044961
Apparently Hillary lost by one more electoral vote than we realized. 2016 continues to get worse.
The article says “when an elector refuses to follow the results of a state’s popular vote, the state simply throws the ballot away”. That’s not always true, since there were 7 faithless electors in 2006–3 for Powell and 1 each for Kasich, Paul, Sanders, and Spotted Eagle. In this case there should have been 1 more for Kasich from a Colorado elector.
@iknklast #6
Well put. I agree that military contracts do often screw up the country. The military says they don’t need this fighter jet, but we’re going to build it anyway in my state, by golly.
Re States’ Rights: it certainly stinks of slavery and Jim Crow. In a more general sense, it supports a state’s desire to ignore any action of the federal government it does not like. Alabama politicians have a long history of refusing to do anything humanitarian until forced to do so by the federal government, so they could shift “blame”.
The Alabama state motto? We Dare Defend Our Rights.
In Alabama it’s the state above all else; counties and municipalities have relatively little power.
It’s times like these, with malevolent actors at various levels of government, that I see value in less centralized government, and I see value in trying to convince smaller entities to enact reforms themselves, rather than forcing the issue. But there is so much malevolence.
Yes, and when you live in a red state (like both you and I do) that wants to enact its malevolence so brutally and broadly against anyone they dislike (which includes anyone not white, male, Christian, native-born), it is easy to not want the state to be in charge. My state is full of Trumpophiles, and our state government looks not dissimilar to the current state of the federal government, so state’s rights doesn’t help, and when the feds are better, it hurts.
It’s very easy to get discouraged about the human condition.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a US Representative, in House district NY-14 (Bronx and Queens).
She has made some videos about the Electoral College that I find delightful. Like a snarky one from a car going past a Midwestern wheat field (?) where she says “We’re coming to you live from the Electoral College – many votes here, as you can see. Very efficient way to choose leadership of the country. I mean, I can’t think of any other way, can you?”
She followed up with calling it a “scam” and posting screenshots of “Why Every Defense of the Electoral College Is Wrong” (New York Intelligencer), some more snark at the expense of the EC.
After she returned home, she made a video of herself in her kitchen calling the EC “bogus” and a “scam”. She notes that the EC helps only some rural people, and that it is “affirmative action” for a certain small segment of the population – why them and not blacks or Native Americans or Puerto Ricans?
Some of you might enjoy watching some of AOC’s videos – on her Instagram page or else on YouTube – she projects a strong “Ms. Smith Goes to Washington” vibe.
Here’s a workaround for the electoral vote: National Popular Vote It has gotten most of the blue states, and it still needs some more states.
It is a workaround, where if enough states sign on, they will award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.
A lot of defenders of the EC seem to think that it is an assembly of political wise people who carefully consider several candidates for president before making their choice – a sort of Presidential search committee. That was how Alexander Hamilton pictured the EC in Federalist Paper #68.
But that is not the reality of the EC – it soon became a rubber-stamp body, and with the election of Donald Trump, its failure became complete.