What if it backfires?
by Big Dog on Mar 20, 2019 at 16:15 Political
There is a national effort to do away with the Electoral College by many states in a manner that circumvents the Constitution. These states want to award their Electoral Votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote.
We do not have a national election in this country. We have 51 separate and individual elections run by each state and the District of Columbia. Each state has a certain number of electors and those are based on the number of Representatives and the two Senators for each state. Most states are winner take all so the candidate who wins the state is awarded all of the Electoral Votes.
With this system it is possible (and has happened five times) that the person who wins the presidency has fewer cumulative votes than the other candidate. This system provides protection for the smaller states and gives them proportional representation.
The liberals proposing the elimination of the EC do not like this system and say it is unfair. They do not think a state with a low population should have an equal weight when it comes to the presidential election. To them it is more fair that several densely populated states can decide for the entire country who gets to be president. They like the idea because they think Democrats would have an edge and they are probably right.
But the problem they face is a Constitutional amendment would be required to get rid of the EC. It is unlikely this would make it out of Congress and even more unlikely that enough states would ratify. This is why states are doing an end run by passing laws saying they will ignore what their citizens vote for and will award their EVs to the person who has the most cumulative votes nationally. The idea is to get states with a total of 271 EVs to commit so they can get their person in, assuming their person is tops in the nation. This has been brewing for a while but came to a head when Hillary Clinton was beaten by the Electoral Vote even though she allegedly had more votes nationally. If Democrats cannot win with the rules in place they will change the rules.
But what happens if this backfire? Suppose a number of states do this and in 2020 Donald Trump wins the national total vote total. Suppose further that many of the states signed on to this new scheme voted for the Democrat candidate. All of those states would be required, by their law, to award their EVs to Donald Trump instead of the Democrat the state’s citizens voted for. The real horror to them would be realizing their candidate would have won if they had not changed the rules.
I like the Electoral College system. It was a great idea by the Founders designed to give the states an equal say in the process. They wanted to make sure a few heavily populated states did not decide for all the others.
I do admit there are issues with the EC. The main problem is the way the EVs are awarded. It is grossly unfair for a state to award ALL of its EVs to the winner of the state when a portion of its population did not vote for that person. Many areas of California vote for the Republican but the Democrat gets all the EVs. The same, in reverse, is true in Texas.
Since Electoral Votes are awarded based on the number of Representatives in each state (I’ll get to the Senators next) and each Representative is in a specific Congressional District then the EV vote for the Congressional District should be awarded to the candidate who wins that district. So if a state has 50 Congressional Districts and the Democrat wins 35 of them and the Republican 15 the EVs would be awarded exactly like that.
The two Senators for each state represent the state’s interests in Congress so the EVs associated with them would go to the candidate who wins the total votes statewide. In the above example the Democrat would end up with 37 and the Republican 15.
This is inherently more fair and allows people to have their votes count the way they intended.
It is unfortunate that the liberal left is working to circumvent the Constitution but this is not something new as they do it all the time (think Second Amendment). So I truly hope that if they implement this new scheme it comes back to bite them in the rear.
Imagine how their heads will explode if their actions lead to a second term for Donald Trump…
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.