Update: Electoral College in Ohio

Good news, for now. Ohio's presidential votes will not be counted in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact but will continue to cast those votes in the Electoral College. Cleveland.com reports:

Organizers have aborted their attempt to change Ohio’s constitution to award the state’s presidential electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of who wins Ohio.

J. Corey Colombo, a Columbus elections attorney working for the organizers behind the proposal, wrote a brief letter to Secretary of State Frank LaRose on Tuesday saying the group is withdrawing its petitions. The letter (click here for a PDF) did not offer an explanation, but Colombo’s law firm later issued a statement citing time constraints and the large number of signatures required to get the issue on the ballot.

Full report is here.

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Post-election exploding cigars

art credit: The Hockey Writers

Following the Trump win six weeks ago, the Democrat party and its supporters have been apoplectic. And they have been employing all sorts of  tactics to undo the results.

First, the strategy was to claim Hillary won the popular vote, so the electoral vote was not a true measure of the winning campaign. But nobody knows how many illegals voted in California due to Motor Voter laws, and some estimates go as high as 3 million. Without those and other potential illegal votes elsewhere, nobody can say whether Hillary or Trump won the popular vote. (Two short essays on the Electoral College are here and here.)

And when that strategy didn’t get any traction, the Democrats (presumably backed by the Clinton campaign and her financiers) got Green Party candidate Jill Stein to demand recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That blew up in their face, too. Pennsylvania denied Stein legal standing, Wisconsin’s recount yielded an additional 100+ votes for Trump, and the Michigan recount was discredited when something like a third of the tallies in Wayne County (Detroit) showed more votes counted than were actually cast.

So now the Clintons et al are coming out with two more strategies to attempt to either change the results of the election or to de-legitimize to the maximum extent possible, the Trump win. Now, Hillary is blaming Vladimir Putin for hacking the election, even though what is hackable is the emails exchanged within the DNC, not to mention Hillary’s own email server that was notoriously exposed and unprotected. She and Podesta also continue to blame Comey and the FBI. And the lamestream media is repeating this baloney despite the fact that there is NO evidence for these claims. (Anything but the obvious problem of an unlikeable and flawed candidate with a long list of alleged criminal activity who didn’t campaign much in the months leading up to the election…)

DNC supporters are now doing everything they can to intimidate duly chosen electors who will cast their votes in the Electoral College on Monday; many Trump electors are on the receiving end of everything from death threats to mail/telephone/social media pressure to withhold their vote or cast it instead for Hillary, even when many states have laws that require electors to vote for the winning candidate in their respective states.

President Obama piled onto the most recent why-Hillary-lost “narratives” before flouncing off to Hawaii for his final Christmas vacation on the taxpayer’s dime. FLOTUS is already complaining that America now understands what it is like to be “hopeless” – as she joins her family in Hawaii to vacation on the taxpayers’ dime (“Hopeless In Hawaii”).

Despite all the interference in and attempts to undermine the election process, despite all the phony baloney accusations, it is likely that the results of the Electoral College votes on Monday will lead to the Jan. 20 inauguration of Donald J. Trump.

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The Electoral College and the popular vote

Michael Ramirez cartoon (via Bookworm Room)

"The US Election Without the Electoral College"

William Sullivan at The American Thinker has a good article on the subject, well worth reading in light of the ongoing temper tantrums we are seeing:

By now, you’ve heard the disgruntled leftists parroting the sentiment that the Electoral College is an archaic relic that is either racist (what else?), or has obviously outlived any usefulness it may have once had.  Therefore, in the interest of progress, it must be abolished.

Outgoing California Senator Barbara Boxer has recently introduced a doomed-to-fail bill meant to do just that.

This argument is, of course, painfully dim and tiresome.  The Electoral College is one of many safeguards against what de Tocqueville would later describe as the “tyranny of the majority” that our Founders feared, or more specifically, the threat of a concentrated majority in a state that happened to be more populous than another.  After all, it’s doubtful that Rhode Island would have chosen to ratify the Constitution and join these United States if they believed that their state’s unique desires at the federal level would be perpetually overruled by the much more populous New York, for instance.

In the simplest terms, the United States was conceived as a voluntary union of sovereign states which were unified under the limited federal government which bound them -- one which could only act within the very strict guidelines enumerated in our Constitution.  It is very much by design that the prerogative of each sovereign state is influential in the election of our president, and the Electoral College helps to ensure that. 

But I won’t beat that dead horse.  There is ample reading material to inform interested parties about the wisdom of the Electoral College, in contrast to a strictly popular vote where highly-populated urban strongholds located in a minority of states might disenfranchise the will of the large majority of other states in presidential elections. 

Read the rest here.

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The popular vote and the Electoral College

graphic credit: XaniaTube

Mr. Instapundit comments:  

THE NARRATIVE CHANGES TO FIT THE NEEDS OF THE MOMENT: “I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue ‘wall.'”

Dems were praising the Electoral College just before the 2000 election, too, back when they thought Al Gore might win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote. They turned on a dime when the reverse happened, of course.

Not all the votes are tabulated, and not all of them will be, but even if Hillary does win the popular vote, Trump won by a yuge margin in the Electoral College. I was interested to find something of a refresher course in a column (“Hillary wins the Popular Vote – Not”) at American Thinker, by Steve Feinstein. Here are some extracts:

Okay, let’s address this “Hillary might win the popular vote, isn’t that Electoral College situation just awful” thing head on.

No, it’s not awful.  It’s great, and it protects the importance of your vote.  It’s also uniquely American and demonstrates yet again the once-in-creation brilliance of the Founding Fathers.

First of all, she’s probably not going to win the actual number of votes cast.  She may win the number of votes counted, but not the votes cast.

States don’t count their absentee ballots unless the number of outstanding absentee ballots is larger than the state margin of difference.  If there is a margin of 1,000 votes counted and there are 1,300 absentee ballots outstanding, then the state tabulates those.  If the number of outstanding absentee ballots wouldn’t influence the election results, then the absentee ballots aren’t counted. [UPDATE 11/12: this paragraph proves to be incorrect. Absentee ballots ARE counted, but often not until after the Election is called. IOW, the popular vote totals will change.] 

. . .

Getting back to the “win the popular vote/lose the Electoral College” scenario: Thank G-d we have that, or else California and N.Y. would determine every election.  Every time.

. . .

That means that the vast majority of 48 states and their populations will be subject to the whim and desire of just two states.  If those two states have similar demographics and voting preferences at any particular point in time (which they do now), then those two states call the shots for the entire country.

But the Electoral College brilliantly smooths out the variances in the voting proclivities among states and regions.  Farmers in the middle of the country and importers and exporters on the shore get roughly equal say, as do Madison Ave. execs and factory workers in Tennessee.

Shortcomings?  Sure.  The E.C. can make an R vote meaningless in a very few heavily D states or vice versa.  But without the Electoral College, the country’s entire population is subject to the disproportionate voting preferences of the few most populous states.

The entire article is here.

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