It's Past Time For The National Popular Vote (NPV) To Replace The Electoral College

By now every manjack and his dog knows about the electoral dumpster fire that led to the madman swine now in power and befouling our land. In the end, the great Electoral College misfired by rubber stamping a know nothing, morally bankrupt stooge for a hostile foreign power, when it should have prevented that.

Worse, the resistance and supposed  'fail safe' check on Trump's ascension to power went out more with a whimper than a bang. This as all  efforts by anti-Trump activists to stop him reaching 270 electoral votes fell pathetically short. Activists who'd urged electors to back efforts led by academics (e.g. Prof. Lawrence Lessig) to cast their ballots at variance with the rubber stamping misfits in the states, were largely ignored. E.g.  "Our state was won by the Donald so we gotta give the votes to him!"

The system the Founders set up to protect the White House from being occupied by an agent of a foreign government was straightforward, Hamilton insisted. The choice of president would not “depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes.”  Instead, the Electoral College would be made up of “persons [selected] for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment.”

The electors would be apolitical because it would be illegal for a Senator or House member to become one.  Thus Hamilton wrote:

And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office. No senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States, can be of the numbers of the electors.

This, Hamilton was certain, would eliminate “any sinister bias.”  Nice assumption but it didn't work out that way, and we've been left to ponder why. But more importantly it's necessary to ensure this farce never happens again. That's why we need to support the movement for a National Popular Vote (NPV) to eradicate an anachronism that no longer functions.  With the NPV in place state electors  pledge  their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote.  

Here one may inquire: How did Hamilton's original grand idea go so far south back in 2016? Basically,  a combination of too little will to overturn the Electoral College as a mere rubber stamp, and too little actual strategy. Specifically, I place the preponderance of blame on two factors: 1) A disorganized effort to thwart the fascists with too many distracting and unrealistic alternative choices, and 2) An unwillingness to rock the boat and just play it safe, especially among Republican state electors.  As for the much ballyhooed "Hamilton electors', they turned out to be more a myth than reality.  If a person had to, he might have counted them on one hand, if that.

The result was predictable: with only external protests erupting - as in Madison, WI-  so the morally  bankrupt Trump cakewalked to his official electoral victory as millions tuned in to updated tallies, aghast.  

Hamilton and James Madison originally had high confidence the Electoral College would function to stop a deranged maggot like Trump, with the morals to match, from gaining office. So that leads us to ask what the hell happened?  Basically neither Madison or Hamilton ever envisioned a day when a man so entangled in financial affairs with foreign governments as is Donald Trump could even be seriously considered, because (in their minds), the electors would carefully investigate the candidate. That hasn’t happened in over a century, so, by those standards, the electors totally failed in their job in the 2016 election.

Taking a stroll down American history lane we also understand that The Electoral College was a compromise designed to keep the president above political considerations, and sold to the public as a way to prevent an agent (witting or unwitting) of a foreign power from becoming president. We now see it has failed on both counts.

Tracking back to the beginning we can even put the more direct source of our current  electoral morass on a bastardized element of the Constitution - a poison pill if you will -  called  Three-Fifths Compromise.  Because of the Three-Fifths Compromise (found in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution,):

"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

The Electoral College thereby handed the White House to four Virginia slaveholders among our first five presidents. Since that compromise has been eliminated, it continues to wreak havoc, i.e. in having put George W. Bush and Donald Trump into office. Each state was then awarded the same number of presidential electors as it has legislators (senators plus representatives), applying the outcome of the compromises to the presidential race. After some debate, the Founding Fathers left it to each state’s legislature to decide how to award its electoral votes — a power that has been confirmed repeatedly by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Currently, 48 of 50 states, including Colorado, have a winner-take-all model. This means if a majority of Colorado voters fill in a bubble on their ballot for, say, Beto O'Rourke, all the state’s electoral votes are awarded to his electors. Presumably, those electors cast a ballot for Beto. In fact, in some states, including Colorado, state law requires they do so. (In some other states, however, electors are not “pledged” and may decide to vote for another candidate, though such a move remains rare.  But this is what the activist effort in 2016 to prevent Trump's ascension was based upon.)

The winner-take-all model is so ingrained in our culture that calls to change it are often painted as unAmerican, but winner-take-all isn’t in the Constitution, nor has the Electoral College always functioned that way. In fact, only three states cast their votes winner-take-all style in the country’s first election, and a little more than a decade later, every state dropped the system. 

States adopted winner-take-all laws again starting in the 1800s in an effort to have a greater influence on elections. That led to a domino effect that has now swept up every state except Maine and Nebraska.

In 2016, despite a massive increase in support for the Electoral College by Republicans following Trump’s win, Gallup found that most Americans preferred amending the Constitution to do away with the College rather than keeping the current system, 49 to 47 percent.   This polling has paved the way for the National Popular Vote (NPV) movement today - as people realize we cannot have another clusterfuck such as transpired in 2016.  We do not need yet another Bob Woodward effort such as Fear: Trump in the White House  to remind us how bad things can get if the wheels of democracy fly off.

Before the NPV, it was generally assumed that ditching the Electoral College would take a constitutional amendment, which must be either approved by two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-fourths of the states or proposed by a Constitutional Convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures and approved by three-fourths of the states. (Notably, ditching equal state representation in the Senate, on the other hand, requires the consent of every state.) 

But NPV gets around the amendment process by using an interstate compact — an agreement amongst states. It’s the brainchild of Dr. John Koza, who created a board game about the Electoral College when he was a young man (it never really took off) and authored the book, Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote. Now the chair of NPV, Koza had a career with the lottery, where he dealt with interstate compacts, and taught for a time at Stanford University.

Let's also note there is a logical basis for changing to the NPV. Namely, that the respective party nominees then have to go throughout the country campaigning to win voters, as opposed to cherry picking a minority  of states. To grasp my point just look now at how presidential candidates campaign in battleground states, or how gubernatorial candidates campaign.

Doubt the  rhetoric about the importance of battleground states in the current system?  Then  consider this: The NPV campaign found general election events really only happen in battlegrounds. In 2012, for instance, 12 states saw almost all the general election campaign events.  Of 253 events, Ohio saw 73, Florida 40, Virginia 36, and Iowa 27. In 2016, the NPV claims, 94 percent of general campaign events were held in 12 battleground states.   This, my friends, is absurd. 

As one Colorado State Senator put it:  “We should elect the president of the United States, not the president of the battleground states.”

Under a National popular vote,  every vote would count in every state, and every vote in every state would thus be worth courting.  Currently, Republican presidential candidates aren’t even trying to win the popular vote right now; they’re trying to win the Electoral College.  

Instead of this perfidy it's time for a truly rational system, the National Popular Vote.  It returns the ideal of one man, one vote, and has state electors  pledging  their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote .   This mechanism would introduce finally a fail safe mechanism to preventing a minority faction  of deplorables from enacting their rage against the rest of us.  

That includes the current gaggle of buffoons - such as at Trump's rally in El Paso two nights ago - wearing red MAGA hats and chanting nutso bollocks that would embarrass a vociferous chimp. Instead of seeing this spectacle repeated over and over we could again take control of the nation's future direction and halt a travesty of destructive minority rule.    

In this case a minority of  morons and imbeciles who believe anything their mutant twit says - even that an invisible wall has already been erected at the border.  The danger triggered by this faction is that their virus of practiced and proud ignorance - including reinforcement by Trump's incessant lies- can metastasize to the normal populace and begin to convert segments into dumkopfs as well.  See e.g.

Donald Trump

Resisting the Weaponization of Ignorance in the Age of Trump

by Henry Giroux | February 14, 2019 - 7:17am | permalink

— from Truthout

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Update:  As reported in The Denver Post (2/14, p. 8 A) the Colorado House Committee has now passed the resolution to implement the NPV here in Colorado.  

DOE Defiance of Trump Witch Hunt Shows Charles Blow Is Correct: That Resistance Is Needed

The news yesterday that at least one federal agency, the Department of Energy (DOE),  is resisting pressure from the Trumpists is music to the ears of many. As most may recall, the Trump team had issued orders to the brain trust at DOE to name all those who attended any meetings about climate change. However, those at the agency (mainly scientists) have now declared 'No way!' and they will not cooperate, given this is an obvious witch hunt - analogous to when Hitler's goons demanded the names of all sources who had been spreading "lies" about the Fuhrer to the non-German media in the 1930s.

As ABC's Brian Ross reported last night:

"At the Department of Energy tonight, fears by employees and scientists had spread that they would be targets of witch hunt by a new President who has repeatedly insisted climate change is a scam. Concerns came to a head when the Trump team sent a list of 74 questions to the Department of Energy.  In particular question 27:

Can you provide us a list of all Department of Energy Employees or contractors who have attended any interagency Working Group meeting on the Social Cost of Carbon?"

But now they have refused to comply, the first act of many of multiple resistance which will be needed by courageous citizens under a fascist Trumpista regime. Anthony Reardon, President of the National Treasury Employees Union, gave the reasons in a segment for the same news piece:

"They are scared about the ability to carry out their duties, their work, their research, with integrity. But also with independence."

This is indeed critical, because without independence research teams become merely rubber stampers for whoever is in power.

As Ross at ABC further reported, "In a show of defiance the DOE  responded to the letter and questions: ''We received significant feedback from our workforce  We will be forthcoming with all publicly available information. We will not be providing individual names...' "


This is because individual names are not part of publicly available information. Hence, the Trumpists are not entitled to it and all they really merit is what the DOE is prepared to give, publicly available material.  This also comes as the asshole- in - waiting announced as head of the DOE none other than Reeptardo Rick Perry, e.g.
 
This is the ignorant yokel who in a 2011 Reepo debate could not recall the name of the DOE, which was one of the federal agencies he wanted to eliminate. Process that for a bit!

All of which shows that Trump and team of abominables is merely out to troll decent and rational citizens, and why - more than ever- the Hamilton elector movement must succeed in preventing these degenerates from reaching power. Especially in the wake of Trump's own attack on the intelligence agencies who now - by any register - ought to be willing themselves to take him down.


To put it another way: putting Rick Perry in as Secretary of the Department of Energy is like putting Bozo the Clown in charge of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.    To firm up that analogy, the ignorant dope Perry who couldn't even remember the name of the DOE in 2011, will now take over an office held by....wait for it!....a nuclear physicist!

Despite this, the Trump team and its paid hacks continues to spread offal and false information, like one dimwit bloviating from Trump Tower a few days ago that: "There used to be an overwhelming science that the world was flat". Actually attempting to analogize flat earthers to global warming scientists in a clueless display of astounding ignorance as well as low IQ.

In fact, as far back as 240 B.C. it was known by the much more enlightened Greek astronomers, in particular Eratosthenes, that the Earth was spherical, not flat. This was opposed to the primitive flat Earth perceptions (NOT science!)  embraced by the sheep herder tribes of Judea, many of whom scribbled down their Bronze Age myths in the Bible.


This is all very relevant now as we can expect to hear, as Trumpistas take office, more and more lies try to justify jettisoning existing climate science. But it also alerts us of the need to resist.

NY Times columnist Charles Blow hit the nail on its head in his recent piece that we are obligated as citizens to defy a Trump presidency. Granted, 62 million odd knuckle draggers and imps voted this turd into power but that doesn't mean we have to respect it, or kowtow to their insane impulsive choice. As Blow writes:

"It is not the job of the defiant to conform to a future president who makes them completely uncomfortable. The burden of unity lies with Trump, not his detractors."

Bingo!

“Just wait and see.” “Give him a chance.” But what if what you’ve already seen is so beyond the pale that it’s irrevocable? What if Trump has already squandered more chances than most of us will ever have?

What if Trump has shown himself beyond doubt and with absolute certainty to be a demagogue and bigot and xenophobe and has given space and voice to concordant voices in the country and in his emerging Legion of Doom cabinet? In that reality, resistance isn’t about mindless obstruction by people blinded by the pain of ideological defeat or people gorging on sour grapes. To the contrary, resistance then is an act of radical, even revolutionary, patriotism. Resistance isn’t about damaging the country, but protecting it.

Blow is also spot on when he writes:

"Furthermore, the emergence of Donald Trump as a political figure has threatened to kill many of the ideals that we hold dear: decency and decorum, inclusion and empathy, truth and facts themselves.

Trump and his agents of idiocracy are now engaged in an all-out crusade to exaggerate the scope of his victory, rewrite racial history, justify their vendettas and hostilities and erase the very distinction between true and false.

At a fiery exchange during a panel at Harvard, Hillary Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, rightly accused the Trump campaign of emboldening “white supremacists and white nationalists.”

The Trump campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway , tried to defend this idiocracy but what would you expect. This harridan is a member of it.  As Blow pointed out, truth and facts are now under major assault, i.e.  "everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true.”

He continued, quoting Conway: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.”  And Blow added:

"Folks, Dimwit-ism is a disease easily spread and denigrators of the absolutism of truth are its vectors.This is why resistance isn’t only principled, but essential and even existential. We are not in an ordinary postelection period of national unity and rapprochement. We are facing the potential abrogation of fundamental American ideals. We stand at the precipice, staring into an abyss that grows darker by the day."

Already, at a meeting this week of climate scientists in San Francisco there is outrage at what is happening. How Trump and his band of appointed assholes are clearly ready to dismantle all progress on global warming research leaving us all for the high jump.  The scenes last night on ABC showed the scientists with signs "Stand up for science!" and shouting "Stand up, fight back!"

This is advice we all need to heed as we lurch ever nearer to zero hour and being hurled back decades in critical climate science and other work. It means we also have to be prepared to resist as the climate scientists and columnist Charles Blow have admonished us to do and forge a consistent and unified means of obstruction. This means never accepting Trump or his administration as our own, and fighting in whatever form we can,  every step of the way. Especially by refusing to swallow the media rot that tries to normalize this swine or that we must now "all come together". No, absolutely not! And we have to hope - if the Hamilton elector movement fails - the Dems grow some balls too (especially Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi) and refuse all enticements to "bipartisanship".  Recall former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) famously said, "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape."

We must be every bit as obstructionist and uncompromising as the Repukes and their followers were after Obama was elected.  Sorry, folks, this is now the Divided States 0f America and it cannot now be otherwise!

See also:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/richard-eskow/70295/by-picking-tillerson-and-perry-trump-s-pretty-much-just-trolling-us-now

Why The "Hamilton Electors" Would Be Right To Reject Trump

Alexander Hamilton - after whom the Hamilton electors derive their name.

Even as Colorado's Republican Secretary of State  Wayne Williams unleashed a mad attack on "unfaithful" electors, calling them "evil" and "arrogant", there is a small but growing movement within all the electors to overturn the designation of Trump as President. As The Denver Post has noted (yesterday, p. 2A) the mission is to "persuade Republican electors in other states to vote for a third option candidate to keep Trump from receiving 270 electoral votes."  The Colo. Dem electors are even offering to shift their votes from HRC to a "consensus pick" if it means stopping Trump.

These electors call themselves moral electors, also "Hamilton electors"- after Alexander Hamilton - which I will get to in a bit.  This is not based on pique but principle: assessing  the character of the man who would be President,  not to mention his convoluted business entanglements (which violate the emoluments clause of the constitution) pose a clear and present danger to this Republic. Indeed, his military picks for key offices show how close he plans to veer in respect of undermining the Posse Comitatus Act, e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act


The "Hamilton electors" refers to a set of electors from different states, red and blue, now ready to vote against Donald Trump in the Electoral College casting of votes on December 19th. As one pointed out on Chris Hayes two nights ago, there are a number of reasons why these electors believe Trump is unqualified and needs to be prevented from any inauguration on January 20th.  But he particularly pointed out Trump's evident flouting of the Emoluments clause of the Constitution.

Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution states that no American officeholder shall, “without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.” The clause is not a historical quirk. Gordon Wood, an American historian, argues that America’s founding fathers were obsessed with the problem of corruption, which they believed had doomed earlier republics. Hence, they inveighed against even the appearance of being "gifted" by foreign interests, nations.

In the case of Trump, in the last few weeks we've seen move after move that Trump has retained his business interests instead of divesting them (as the Office of Ethics in Government has warned). And hence exposed the nation, his future administration and government to foreign influence.  As President these influences and "emoluments" will reach fever pitch and likely set the future stage for his potential impeachment. For example,  The Industrial and Agricultural Bank of China, whose majority stakeholder is the Chinese government, rents office space in New York City’s Trump Tower. The 35-storey Trump Office Buenos Aires development is awaiting approval from that city’s government.

TIME - which  designated Trump "Person of the Year" -  did the same for Adolf Hitler in its Jan. 2, 1939 issue (the choice is based on the person most impacting the world for good or ill), e.g.



Also exposed (in its Dec. 12, 2016 issue, p. 18) , that Trump in May (and with little fanfare)  invested in a potential hotel in Jedda, Saudi Arabia with the "help of the Saudi Binladen Group". That is the construction firm founded by the father of Osama bin Laden. Make of it what you will.

Then there is the newly announced deal by Trump, with a Japanese outfit - Softbank - which has pledged $50 billion to Trump and also claims to have 50,000 potential jobs for U.S. workers. When or where they will materialize we've no idea, nor how the job number was even determined.  However, it is understood the money will be coming from a $100 billion investment fund the Japanese CEO is setting up with Saudi Arabia' wealth fund.  So does this mean most of the $50 billion coming our way is supposedly coming from Saudi Arabia?  And more importantly, what are they going to want in return for this investment?

These are just a few of the unprecedented conflicts of interest presented by Trump’s decision to retain his business empire and hand its management over to his children. (He claims that doing so is effectively a "blind trust" but it's nothing of the sort. A blind trust means a totally independent entity holds such assets so there is no possibility at all of learning what's in them.)

Of course, Trumpeters will not hesitate to point out there is no law that obliges Trump to sell his assets or place them in a blind trust, though nine of the 12 presidents since the second world war have done so. But when his businesses accept money (or anything of value) from foreign governments or state-owned entities,  Trump may nevertheless be breaking the law. In fact, he may be violating the Constitution of the United States. This very potential ought to raise the hackles of electors of conscience and set off early warning bells.

Beyond the issue of Trump flouting the Emoluments clause in his potential Presidency, there is the issue of his character. It is clear to me, on reading The Federalist  #10 (by James Madison) and #68 (by Alexander Hamilton) last night, that Trump is precisely the type of populist "passion inciting" demagogue that the Founders feared, and trusted the Electoral College to keep from power.  Madison in the Federalist 10 exposed the nature of the problem while Hamilton in Federalist 68 discussed the remedy.

Madison's concern was  "mischief of faction" in an election whereby "citizens - whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole - are united and actuated by a common impulse of passion (to cast their votes) adverse to the rights of other citizens or the permanent and aggregate interests of the community".  This is exactly what the Trump voters did, motivated by passion and recklessness via Trump's often violent rallies to give a middle finger salute to the rest of the country - thereby militating against the majority's interests. And by the latest tally HRC is now a full 2.7 million votes or two pct. points ahead of Trump in the popular vote.

Hamilton for his own part was blunt and to the point and his words bear directly on Trump's entanglements with foreign businesses and diplomats:

"Nothing is more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to a cabal, intrigue or corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.

How could they better gratify this than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?

Hamilton then lists the measures to ensure safeguards from overt foreign influence in our councils,  including, e.g.   no senators, representatives or others holding a position of trust shall be named as state electors, i.e. to the Electoral College.

However, later he leaves open the possibility that the same electors can ensure the integrity of the office through their own discretion which may, at some extreme points, diverge from what the people themselves voted for (particularly if motivated by passion as opposed to reason).

Thus we read:

"The process of election (by state electors) affords a moral certainty that the office of President shall never fall to the lot of any man who is not to an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications...It will not be too strong to say that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue."

Would Hamilton (or Madison) regard Trump as such a character? Hardly! His display of rank passion alone - as in his unhinged tweets, would disqualify him. His very campaigning mode in encouraging violence ("punch 'em  in the face"), would leave all the Founders gasping for air, foundering at the spectacle of a madman's approach to power -  as well as the very passions inflamed in his followers to push him there-- that they so feared.

His crude words caught on tape about proudly assaulting women ("ya grab 'em by the pussy') would confirm once and for all that such a character lacked the virtue to hold the highest station. Add in his entanglements with foreign interests and it would be a slam dunk.

The Hamilton electors need to do what Hamilton and Madison would have and reject this unstable, narcissist autocrat whose antics threaten the very foundation of the Republic. And yes, my ancestor Conrad Brumbaugh, who fought in the Revolutionary War (as one of the Pennsylvania Regiment), would side with my stance totally.. Moreover, he'd be appalled that so many Americans could so recklessly toss their franchise away on a character unfit to even run a dog kennel - never mind he claims billionaire status. (Mostly via constant bankruptcies of  his casinos).  Conrad would have no qualms - if he were a state elector- turning the tables on a potential Trump despotic presidency.

The electors of today can do no less. Look at it this way: while we may undergo some upheaval and possibly a constitutional crisis in the wake of upending Trump's ascension to power, it's preferable to the alternative. That is, Trump likely ordering martial law before the next election, shutting down all dissent and imprisoning people by invoking the "continuity of government" provisions in the Patriot Act. Not to mention that, given all his military picks,  one expects the Posse Comitatus Act will have been terminated by then.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/bill-hare/70169/stop-calling-him-president-elect-trump

And:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-rivers-pitt/70181/donald-trump-can-erase-your-rights-with-a-bar-napkin

Excerpt:

"Here is a man who won the election according to the rules as they stand. Donald Trump is about to become president of the United States of America, and yet he cannot stand the fact that he lost the popular vote. Result? He went on a Twitter tirade and completely undermined the validity of his own victory by bleating some balderdash about millions of illegal votes. It wasn't a one-off tweet, either; he just kept going and going and going like some cross between the Energizer Bunny and a character from Mortal Kombat.

Then, out of a clear blue sky, Trump became the defender of the American flag, tweeting that, perhaps, anyone who burns that flag should either be thrown in prison or stripped of their citizenship. The First Amendment, augmented by the Supreme Court's 1989 Texas v. Johnson decision, defends the burning of the flag as an act of free speech. The Fourteenth Amendment specifically prohibits the government from stripping a citizen of their citizenship. This is all black-letter law, making Trump's flag tweet just another burp in the void … but for this: His casual recommendation for addressing something so picayune as a burned flag is imprisonment or exile.

Put it all together. A man with the temperament of an earthquake, utterly devoid of self-control, with no one around him apparently capable of reining him in, a man who admittedly lives for revenge and retribution, who is completely incapable of absorbing criticism without having a very public meltdown, who knows little of the world, and who thinks nothing of throwing people who commit minor acts of dissent in prison … this man is about to be invested with astonishing legal powers."