The College No One Should Attend

For the second time in five Presidential elections, America is rewarding the White House to the candidate who lost the popular vote. When all the ballots are counted, Mr. Trump will have fallen 2.3 to 2.5 MILLION votes short. Just as in 2000, when Mr. Gore defeated Mr. Bush in the popular vote, apologists are emerging for the Electoral College. They are dead wrong, and  they are taking the Electoral College out of historical context. 

Hit back, but put it in context. The original Constitution had...er...no faith in the average citizen. It was a baby step toward a Democracy and was more of a "hey, this divine right of Kings thing needs to go, so let's gingerly try something new" document rather than a recipe for the 21st Century. We've eliminated most of the anti-Democratic tendencies of the 18th Century and taken the Constitution into the 21st. The Electoral College, in this light, is just the last shoe that needs to drop not some sacred institution we need or want any longer.

Let's look at what the Founder's intent was for the common voter and see what seems fair today, two and a half centuries later.

The Constitution forbade women, blacks, and non property owning whites from voting, and it counted slaves as 3/5 of a person in assigning US House districts so that the population-poor south could keep slavery legal. Raise your hand, in the 21st Century, if you think these are things you'd like to bring back.

The Constitution forbade popular election of US Senators. They were elected by members of the various state legislatures. Raise your hand, in the 21st Century, if you would like to give up voting for your Senators by popular vote.

The Constitution gave the District of Columbia no Electoral Votes in the Presidential race. Now, It has  three.  Raise your hand, in the 21st century, if you would like to disenfranchise the 690,000 residents of DC.

The Electoral College was, in part, put together to OVERTURN the vote of the people if they voted for someone....unfortunate.  Raise your hand if you want an elector, whom you've never met, to vote THEIR conscious and not yours, for the President of the United States.

The population distribution of the US has never been more uneven. A guy in Wyoming has his vote rolled into 187,000 vote blocks to make one electoral vote. Eligible voters in California have their vote rolled into blocks of 592,000. In the 21st Century, everyone should be equal; a vote in Wyoming should NOT carry three times the weight as a vote in California. The Electoral College is one of the leading reasons voting participation lags behind Europe. GOP voters in California believe (justifiably) that their vote for President "won't matter" just as Democratic voters in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma or Texas feel likewise disenfranchised. The students marching on America's college campuses should be praised, not condemned. They know systemic disenfranchisement when they see it. We tell them "vote, it matters." We don't tell them..."your vote matters...er....depending upon where you live and how you vote." They are trying to hold us to our words.

The population distribution is getting worse every year. In some scenarios, by 2024 it will be quite possible for the Democrats to win the popular vote by 10 million votes (a larger victory than President Obama garnered in 2008) and still lose the Electoral College.

Finally, let's have a moral discussion about racial equality. Is it fair for a women in Brooklyn, whose father was beaten by police in Alabama in the 1960s trying win suffrage for African Americans, to have her vote, today, counted at less than 1/3 the value of a rancher in lilly white Wyoming? Keeping the Electoral College has become inadvertently racist. It is time for it to go.

Raise your hand, in the 21st century, if you think one person, one vote should extend to the only place it's forbidden: the Presidential vote. We've eliminated the notion that citizen votes don't matter everywhere else in the Constitution; for every other elected office in America we have one person, one vote.  EVERY CITIZEN SHOULD HAVE PRECISELY THE SAME SAY IN THE ELECTION OF THE PRESIDENT. No one deserves special privileges because of where they live. It's time for equality.

 No, the Founders didn't trust the citizenry, but this isn't the 18th Century and the Founders weren't perfect. Hamilton and Madison were elitist snobs and Jefferson had children with his slaves; times have changed. A lot of folks toiled very hard to build on the original Constitution and to expand the suffrage. Eliminating the Electoral College is part of the new Civil Rights struggle. Make a joyful noise, America, and rid ourselves of this outmoded relic. Removing the Electoral College will not be easy, but that doesn't make it a less moral, or imperative, task. 

Put the shoe on the other foot: if Hillary Clinton won the White House by losing the popular vote by over 2 million popular votes, the GOP would be raising a hue and cry all over this country and they wouldn't let up for a New York minute. We don't do that. We kvetch on Facebook and have a glass of wine and call it a night. That's why they win and we lose. Ape the GOP. Make noise. Write a letter to the editor of your paper. Call the Senate and ask them to support Boxer's bill to kill the Electoral Congress. And EVERY time you complain to a GOP lawmaker in the next four years, absolutely EVERY TIME, mention the popular vote totals. No, we won't overturn the Electoral College any time soon, but we can erase the notion of a GOP mandate. IF WE TRY. Given Trump's histrionics about "election fraud" over the last week, we need to let the Congress know that we expect them to disown Trump's lies and refocus them on the real inequality here: awarding the White House to the loser. So, come armed with facts, and get busy, people.

The Electoral College: A Brief History

From Dr. Michael Green, Professor of History, UNLV

The Electoral Collage

The British Prime Minister William Gladstone once described the United States Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” It IS wonderful, but wonderful and perfect aren’t the same thing. The original document had its flaws involving the protection and perpetuation of slavery, and the absence of guidance for federal courts (technically, under the Constitution, you don’t have to be a lawyer to be a Supreme Court justice—really). Its biggest surviving flaw is the system it created for choosing a president.

When the framers emerged with the Constitution, a woman asked one of the delegates, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Benjamin Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” It certainly was no democracy. The Constitution left open the questions of who would vote, and where and how. At the time, property-owning adult white men comprised most of the population that could vote.

Long before he became a rapper, Alexander Hamilton described the public as “a great beast.” Although he was among the more conservative founding fathers on that score, his disdain for democracy was nothing unusual. They could not envision that, in 2016, any citizen at least 18 years old and meeting certain requirements—in some states, not being a convicted felon, for example—would have the right to vote. Since they made it possible to amend their own document, they might have been less surprised that, 125 years after ratification, Americans decided that they should elect their U.S. senators directly instead of leaving it up to their state legislators. The expansion of suffrage has been sometimes violent and rarely pretty, but the arc of history has bent toward its growth.

Yet the Electoral College survives. It has changed from its origins, constitutionally and politically. At first, electors met and chose the best candidates. The top vote-getter became president, and the runner-up became vice-president. The problems became apparent when George Washington retired and presidential elections became competitive. In 1796, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson ran against each other and wound up as president and vice-president respectively, despite deep ideological differences. In 1800, Jefferson clearly was his party’s presidential candidate, and Aaron Burr was just as clearly his running-mate, but their electors voted equally for both of them, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. The 12th Amendment made clear that there would be votes for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates, and that problem was solved.

But why does it exist at all? The traditional view has been that the founding fathers, generally if not completely sharing Hamilton’s attitude toward democracy, wanted to leave the decision to the elite—maybe the financial and propertied elite, but certainly the elite who were educated and thoughtful enough to make more informed decisions.

Except that while legislators chose electors, caucuses and popular votes soon became part of the process in most states, and the electors often ratified those choices. This tendency grew as political parties became more important with the rise of the Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs by the 1830s.

Yet electors kept choosing presidents, and sometimes the system ran aground. In 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote by about 250,000 nationally against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. But with Democrats having regained control in most southern states, and the three southern states that Republicans still controlled submitting two sets of returns, the result wound up in the hands of an Electoral Commission created by Congress. The Republicans who controlled the commission managed to decide in favor of Hayes. A dozen years later, Democrat Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by just under 100,000 votes, but the Electoral College gave the victory—233-168—to Republican Benjamin Harrison.

As for the 2000 election, we may never know all that happened. Here’s what we do know: Al Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 but lost the Electoral College, 271-266, after a Supreme Court ruling on the 25 disputed electoral votes from Florida. But if Gore had carried New Hampshire, Nevada, or his home state of Tennessee, he would have had the required 270, and Florida wouldn’t have mattered.

Why Florida or any of the others mattered at all may have had nothing to do with the fear of democracy the Constitution’s framers shared. Akhil Reed Amar, one of the nation’s most distinguished scholars of the Constitution and the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, is among the leaders of a group of experts arguing that the reason for the Electoral College was not a fear of democracy, but in fact the most undemocratic and unappealing aspect of the origins of American society.

Slavery.

Amar has noted that one of the most important figures at the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, suggested the direct election of the president. The “father of the Constitution,” James Madison, perhaps the key figure at the convention and one of the most subtle thinkers of that gifted generation, said, “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.”

At the convention, the 3/5 Compromise counted five slaves as three residents for the purposes of determining a state’s delegation in the House of Representatives. But it served an additional purpose: a state’s vote in the Electoral College equaled the number in its congressional delegation. Thus, the South derived an important benefit from using the Electoral College.

How important? In 1800, when Jefferson won, he (and Burr) received 73 electoral votes to 65 for John Adams. If each slave had not counted as three-fifths of a person, the South would have had, Amar estimates, 13 fewer electoral votes. All of those votes went to Jefferson. Remove them, and Adams wins a second term.

Indeed, the history of presidential elections until the Civil War is inseparable from slavery. Slaveowning Virginians served as president for 32 of the republic’s first 36 years. Until 1850, the Adamses were the only presidents who didn’t own at least one slave. And in the 1850s, the two presidents who were elected, Democrats Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, were acceptable because they fit the definition of a “Doughface,” a term used to describe “northern men with southern principles.” When the North’s population, already too large for Madison’s taste in 1787, grew enough, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln could win the Electoral College without a southern vote. The South’s response was to secede from the Union.

As Amar noted, “After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive.” He added, “In light of this more complete (if less flattering) account of the electoral college in the late 18th and early 19th century, Americans should ask themselves whether we want to maintain this odd—dare I say peculiar?—institution in the 21st century.”

Amar’s droll question requires an answer. Courts have interpreted the Thirteenth Amendment, which ends slavery and empowers Congress to enforce abolition, as giving the legislative branch the right to attack “the badges and incidents of slavery.” The Electoral College is not only undemocratic in an increasingly democratic republic. It also is a badge and incident of slavery.  

Decision 2016

I'll be updating this blog tonight with election returns and data crunching, but first I have to run my slightly under the weather pup, Fennel,  to the vet.

Just barely settled in here....

FL looks good; unless we see a tsunami in the Panhandle for Trump, it's looking good.

PA and NH aren't too shabby either.

NV turnout is about 70....it was 81% in 2012....slightly smaller turnout doesn't necessarily hurt HRC...indeed, it makes those early votes that were banked very useful (field and ground game matter).

And yikes, FL is tight and the panhandle is not reporting. One not so fabulous stat from the exit polls: folks who mark the economy as the number issue favor HRC 50 to 43 but trump kills for voters who mark immigration as the number one issue.

Florida will be a nail biting photo finish. Romney's highest vote margins came in places like Okaloosa, Collier, Clay, Lee and St. John's counties, in the panhandle. These counties have barely reported vote results, while the high performing urban Democratic counties are 80-90 in.

Those urban counties are bigger, but we are looking at a nail biter of 2000 year proportions, I fear.

With the Panhandle coming in FL is now looking like a close to lost cause.

OH, on the other hand, is looking more hopeful. Who would've guessed it. FL latino turnout was huge but african american turnout fell off, which is what is given us the bad vote spread here.

Counties to watch for TRUMP and CLINTON (based on 2012)

Butler, which Romney carried by 42,944
Warren, which Romney carried by 42,719
Cleremont which Romney carried by 33,193
Delaware which Romney carried by 22,849

HRC must do very well in Cleveland (Cuyahoga) where Obama cashed in a 236,478 vote margin and Franklin (Columbus) which Obama carried by 117,713.

African American turnout is crucial for HRC to carry the Buckeye state....

At this point, HRC will win popular vote by 3.5 but may well lose electoral college.

Eleciton 2016 Updates

I'll be updating this blog tonight with election returns and data crunching, but first I have to run my slightly under the weather pup, Fennel,  to the vet.

Just barely settled in here....

FL looks good; unless we see a tsunami in the Panhandle for Trump, it's looking good.

PA and NH aren't too shabby either.

NV turnout is about 70....it was 81% in 2012....slightly smaller turnout doesn't necessarily hurt HRC...indeed, it makes those early votes that were banked very useful (field and ground game matter).

And yikes, FL is tight and the panhandle is not reporting. One not so fabulous stat from the exit polls: folks who mark the economy as the number issue favor HRC 50 to 43 but trump kills for voters who mark immigration as the number one issue.

Florida will be a nail biting photo finish. Romney's highest vote margins came in places like Okaloosa, Collier, Clay, Lee and St. John's counties, in the panhandle. These counties have barely reported vote results, while the high performing urban Democratic counties are 80-90 in.

Those urban counties are bigger, but we are looking at a nail biter of 2000 year proportions, I fear.

With the Panhandle coming in FL is now looking like a close to lost cause.

OH, on the other hand, is looking more hopeful. Who would've guessed it. FL latino turnout was huge but african american turnout fell off, which is what is given us the bad vote spread here.