President Trump is considering endorsing . . . JD Vance ???

Mike Gibbons is running for Rob Portman’s US Senate seat.  So is J.D. Vance, who is running as a "conservative outsider."  "Outsider," ok.  But "conservative"?  Here’s what candidate Mike Gibbons has to say about Vance:

My bumbling opponent JD Vance has shown how incompetent he is. In a recent tweet, he called for America to abolish the electoral college!

In advocating for France’s national popular voting system, J.D. Vance not only called for automatic voter registration and proxy voting—which would gut the integrity of our elections—but for one-party rule by the same coastal elites that he worked side by side with his entire adult life.

Your representative should understand our election process so they can work to ensure their integrity. I do, but obviously, Vance doesn’t.

Vance’s comments showcase his disregard for our electoral system, his lack of understanding of how to secure our elections, and how he is clearly not ready to take on the many constitutional issues faced in the U.S. Senate.

The Electoral College shouldn’t be abolished. Our elections need protection!

This blog posted earlier on why President Trump’s controversial endorsement of Dr. Oz makes some sense; click here.  However, I do hope he does not endorse Vance.

Bad news.  According to the American Greatness blog, President Trump is considering doing just that.

BTW, click here for Mr. Gibbons’s recent column in the Washington Examiner on the subject of China.

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Think Piece of The Day: Victor Davis Hanson

 

This blog is a huge fan of Victor David Hanson. His perspectives as a specialist in classical history always gets my attention.  In his column at American Greatness, ("Trump Winds and Biden Whirlwinds"), he starts off:

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

. . .

What was the catalyst that turned a left-wing Democratic Party into a cultural revolutionary mob? In other words, why in our 233rd year of the republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, junk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws? What was so wrong with assimilation, integration, intermarriage, the “content of our character,” and race as incidental rather than essential to who we are? What has the woke revolution offered us instead?

. . .

What are the lasting consequences of all this madness? 

The Left should hope that House Republicans are Marquess of Queensberry players and do not emulate the Democrats’ behavior. They should hope that a Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee would not monitor the phone records of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). For if the opposition did gain the majority in November 2022, Joe Biden’s past involvement with foreign monied interests, and the evidence of his shady behavior from his own son’s laptop texts offer a far more convincing case of impeachable offenses—failure to report to the IRS off-the-books income, influence peddling, and abject lying about foreign quid pro quo involvement—than does a single Ukrainian phone call.  All that exposure is well aside from Biden’s deliberate decision not to enforce, as his job requires, federal immigration law. 

Do read the rest here.

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It’s not over till it’s over

Streiff at Red State reports on “The Congressional Inaugural Committee Adjourns After It Fails To Agree Joe Biden Is President-Elect.” 

To date, only a relatively small number, about 27, Vichy Conservatives have lined up to welcome their new master. That any have done so just shows the absolute cravenness of a small but, I predict, a growing number of Republicans who will find life without invitations to the right parties to be just too much to bear. It would have cost them nothing to say nothing until the Electoral College votes and it would have shown solidarity with that 70+% of Republicans and 50% of all Americans who believe Joe Biden is the beneficiary of a fraudulent election. The only conceivable reason to proclaim allegiance to some guy who chases his dog around while buck naked is to just cast one final insult at a president they never truly accepted as legitimate and who, as a newcomer to politics, understood the mood of the American people and the issues of importance to them better than the professional vote-chasers.

Eventually, there will be a president-elect, but it will be one decided by the Electoral College, not one appointed by the news media and demanded by geriatric Democrats.

Full report is here.

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Real Clear Politics update: 2020 election Undecided

The Liberty Daily links to Real Clear Politics’ map (as of Nov. 11) indicating the Electoral College results.  The headline/link:  “Real Clear Politics Quietly Moves Georgia Away From Biden — and Below 270 — to Undecided”.  Notice that Pennsylvania is also gray.  (Note: image will be updated automatically).

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Media tries to drag Biden over the finish line

We were in a Sportsbar over the weekend, and the TV screen dialed to CNN had a headline on the crawl to the effect that Joe Biden is declared President.  Huh?  Since when does the media declare the winner of a Presidential election?  Later on Saturday evening, Greg Gutfield opened his show by making jokes about what a Biden presidency would do.  So he was framing the question in terms of a probable Biden Presidency – as in a done deal.  Nuts.  To frame the questions that way is to give up on Trump’s re-election, to fall victim to the media propaganda to take the air out of our tires, so to speak.  We changed channels. 

On Sunday, many bloggers and commentators enumerated the procedural steps involved in a contested election.  We all know that the respective Secretaries of State have first to certify the vote counts.  Some of those SOSs may be reluctant to certify tallies they know to be fraudulent.  So that’s one potential check on the process.

Clarice Feldman at American Thinker has more and is, as usual, one of the best:  

Apparently, they are under the impression that [the media] decide election results. They don’t. On December 14, electors chosen by state legislators cast their votes. No one else but the state legislators have that right. (Article II, Sec. 1,§2 of the Constitution). Certainly not the press, nor state boards of elections, secretaries of state, governors, or courts.

If they have reason to believe the elections in their states were unlawfully conducted and the results fraudulent, they can act to override them. (You can see a detailed history of this section of the Constitution in this fine article by Daniel Horowitz.) The Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania  legislatures are majority Republican. At first glance these states -- particularly the precincts in Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia -- are the most suspect.

Is there ample evidence of fraud sufficient to have altered the will of the legal voters in these states? It sure looks that way.

. . .

If the [Pennsylvania Supreme Court] Court had applied the Constitution, then we wouldn’t have this mess, for it’s clear under Article 1 Sec. 4, cl 1--that the Pennsylvania court had no constitutional power to change the “times, methods, and procedures of elections.” 

That provision specifically applies to the election of senators and representatives, both of whom were on the ballots in question.  And what if there is no clear winner by Inauguration Day?  We’ve been reading a lot about how Mm Pelosi would become President, as the Speaker of the House is third in the line of succession,  But Ms. Feldman again explains:

What if There’s no Winner Declared by Inauguration Day?

I’ve seen lots of assertions that in such a case Nancy Pelosi will be the interim president. Nope. Should that eventuality occur, the House votes for an interim president and the Senate for an interim vice president. (The House votes are by state -- one vote each -- and the Republicans hold a majority of 26 states. Our founders were geniuses. Never forget that.)

As Ms. Feldman closes:  “Never give up the good fight. Never hamstring your will to fight on with pessimism.”

Her article is here.

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Michael Anton on “The Coming Coup”

 

Michael Anton is the author of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. He was interviewed on Mark Levin’s “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox.  He was a great guest, so I looked up his essay on American Mind, “The Coming Coup?”, which starts off:

Democrats are laying the groundwork for revolution right in front of our eyes.

As if 2020 were not insane enough already, we now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup. You might have missed it, what with the riots, lockdowns and other daily mayhem we’re forced to endure in this, the most wretched year of my lifetime. But it’s happening.

It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”

All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds. The former United States Senator (for 26 years) and Vice President (for eight) has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.

One might dismiss such comments as the ravings of a dementia patient and a has-been who never got over his own electoral loss. But before you do, consider also this. Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.

The full essay is here. 

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Update: National Popular Vote Compact

Michael P Ramirez cartoon via scoopnest.com

This blog posted previously on the dangers of the National Popular Vote Compact and its goal of end-running the Electoral College. J.R.Dunn reports on a hopeful development:

. . . on May 30 Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada vetoed the bill, which had been passed by the state senate nine days before. This action may very well break the momentum of the march to 270, marking the high tide of the Democrat’s latest attempt to subvert representative democracy.

The Electoral College has outdone the Founder’s fondest hopes for it. Over the past twenty years alone, in has prevented two utterly unworthy candidates from occupying the White House – Al Gore, a flake at the very least, and Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt American politician since Aaron Burr.

Both, of course, were Democrats, which raises a very interesting question, because so too is Steve Sisolak. The motive behind the national popular vote movement is unquestionably a search for a means for the Dems, who can no longer command a national following, to gain the presidency by hook or by crook. So why did Sisolak turn against his own party and its future presidential hopes? Sisolak gave as his reason the fact that  “Nevada’s interests could diverge from the interests of large states,” which at least shows that he was thinking, unlike the governors of Colorado, New Mexico, or Washington, just to mention three.

It has often been pointed out that the end result of the popular vote movement would be national elections effectively decided by New York, Southern California, D.C., and a handful of other high-density districts. The government of the U.S. would be effectively handed over to the Northeast, a few spots on the West Coast, and a couple of Midwestern cities. As a second-order development, media coverage and interest in any other areas would simply cease. Even today, coverage of the flyover states is as minimal as mass media can get away with. Under the new system, it would be nonexistent.

And so would flyover politics. From that point on, all presidential candidates would come from New York, the Massachusetts Bay area, LA, and perhaps Chicago. Politicians from those areas would be the sole recipients of national coverage. 

Everybody else – all the Trumans, the Jacksons, the Coolidges, the Lincolns – would be as unknown as if they were living in the Mato Grosso.

It’s likely that this occurred to Steven Sisolak.

Fingers crossed. Full report at American Thinker is here.

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Circumventing the Electoral College

Jeff Parker cartoon credit: capoliticalreview.com

The 2020 elections will probably involve so many types of corruption that Al Capone would be envious. Stuffing the ballot box. Voters casting ballots more than once, including in different states. Voting early and often. Counting the votes of the deceased. Tampering with electronic voting machines. There are efforts to grant felons the right to vote – while they are serving their sentence. The Democrats don’t play by the rules, so they are busy trying to change the rules.

At American Thinker, David Horowitz of FrontPage Magazine explains the Democrat party’s plan to end-run the Electoral College. It’s a must-read. Here’s the opener:

While you were sleeping, the Democrats (abetted by some deviant Republicans) have been working on a plan that would destroy the diversity of the American political system and bring the nation to the brink of civil war. The plan is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and tens of millions of dollars have already been spent over several decades trying to implement it. Fourteen blue states and the District of Columbia have already joined the Compact, which means they are 70% on the way to making their proposal the law of the land.

The Democrats’ plan is designed to eliminate the influence of the Electoral College in choosing the nation’s president, no doubt because while Hillary won the popular vote she failed [to] win necessary votes in the Electoral College. Eliminating the influence of the Electoral College would end the diversity now embodied in the federal system with its division of powers between Washington and the fifty states. 

The fact that a party which presents itself as a defender of diversity should be leading the charge to eliminate the nation’s most powerful source of diversity should be all that is required to understand the threat their agenda poses to what has been the nation’s constitutional way of life for 232 years.

The Electoral College and the division of powers are features of the Constitution. But the National Popular Vote movement does not propose to amend the Constitution because it doesn’t have the votes to do that. Instead, in the name of “democracy,” it proposes to circumvent the Constitution and its requirement of large national majorities for amending what has been the fundamental law of the land. Think how Orwellian that is, and how concerning it should be for anyone believing the Founders created the most practical, realistic, democratic, diverse and successful polity the world has ever seen.

This is how the Democrats’ circumvention of the Constitution and its provision for an Electoral College would work. Instead of abolishing the College, which would require the support of two-thirds of the states, they are hoping to put together a coalition of states representing 270 electoral votes that would agree to award all their votes to whoever wins the national vote. In other words, if the popular vote is won by 10 votes, every state in the Compact would award 100% of their votes to that party, even if a majority of the voters in their state voted against them.

The bottom line (and goal) of this devious plan is to eliminate the influence of rural voters or “Middle America” and create an electoral lock for the large urban population centers, e.g., California and New York, which would then decide the direction of the country.

The rest of Mr. Horowitz's article is here. The good news: Ohioans dodged a bullet this time, as the organizers dropped plans to try to get the issue on the ballot in November 2019:

[April 2019] Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced in a press release Tuesday that the amendment had been formally withdrawn by its backers, Ohioans For Making Every Vote Matter. The group said in a statement there wasn't sufficient time to gather enough signatures to qualify for the Nov. 5, 2019 ballot.

On Twitter, LaRose called the decision "nothing but good news." 

"The only thing this flawed amendment would have accomplished is to make sure your vote for president is essentially meaningless," he wrote.

The bad news: This issue surely will not go away.

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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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When That Did Not Work …

Historian Victor Davis Hanson is always eloquent, and his column here at American Greatness provides a handy history of the Progressives' efforts to de-legitimize candidate Donald Trump, President-Elect Donald Trump, and President Donald Trump. Hanson starts off:

Right after the 2016 election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein—cheered on by Hillary Clinton dead-enders—sued in three states to recount votes and thereby overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. Before the quixotic effort imploded, Stein was praised as an iconic progressive social justice warrior who might stop the hated Trump from even entering the White House.

When that did not work, B-list Hollywood celebrities mobilized, with television and radio commercials, to shame electors in Trump-won states into not voting for the president-elect during the official Electoral College balloting in December 2016. Their idea was that select morally superior electors should reject their constitutional directives and throw the election into the House of Representatives where even more morally superior NeverTrump Republicans might join with even much more morally superior Democrats to find the perfect morally superior NeverTrump alternative.

Hanson recites all the failed efforts -- “When that did not work” -- to rid this country of its duly-elected President.  The full article is here; it’s a good one to save for future reference. 

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Will Ohio voters support the elimination of the Electoral College?

image credit: calbuzz.com

This blog previously linked to J. Christian Adams’ "How To Steal and Election" – click here. And here's a headline today on cleveland.com:

Ohio’s electoral votes for president

would go to national popular vote winner

under proposed constitutional amendment

From Jeremy Petzer's report:

A proposed Ohio constitutional amendment to award the state’s presidential electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote has cleared an initial hurdle toward making the statewide ballot this November.

. . .

So far, 11 states holding a combined 181 electoral votes have signed the compact. However, the compact doesn’t become binding until it’s joined by states representing at least 270 electoral votes (the minimum needed to win the presidency).

This is scary. Because the Democrat effort to essentially abolish the Electoral College in favor of the National Popular Vote initiative is gaining traction, any number of articles and essays have been popping up on conservative website. Here’s one from a week or so ago on American Thinker.

The latest states to succumb to this misguided attempt to destroy the Electoral College are Delaware and Colorado. If this issue gets enough signatures to get onto the Ohio ballot, Cleveland Tea Party will be sending out Action Alerts so we can let our representatives in Columbus know what we think.

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Election ‘reform’ encourages voter fraud

image credit: zazzle.com

A couple of days ago, I posted “How To Steal An Election,” highlighting analyses by J. Christian Adams at PJ Media. Today at Fox News, John Fund is sounding the alarm as well:

Pelosi's election ‘reform’ encourages voter fraud to benefit Dems

When Democrats reclaimed majority control of the House of Representatives under Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California this month, they had many choices on what to make their top legislative priority.

It says a lot that the new majority made a bill to upend federal election law House Resolution 1. The measure would give Democrats a partisan advantage over Republicans in everything from campaign finance to regulating online political ads.

Democrats would even go after the right of states to set “the time, manner and place” of elections that is guaranteed to them by the Constitution. States would be required to automatically register everyone in government databases as a voter unless individuals explicitly opted out.

In 2012, the Pew Research Center found that more than 3 million people were registered to vote in more than one state. In addition, 1.8 million dead people were on the voter registration rolls.

Requiring automatic voter registration would inject even more errors and potential for fraud into our already dubious voter rolls.

Under the Democratic bill, states would be required to offer voter registration online. They would also be required to offer at least 15 days of early voting and unlimited absentee balloting.

All of these so-called “reforms” trample on the rights of local election officials and raise the risk of fraud. And there is no crying need for such federal big-footing.

. . .

Please read the rest here. The group “MassFiscal” attempted to identify election and voter irregularities in Massachusetts and encountered considerable resistance. The report concludes that

other Democrats may not be concerned about evidence of possible voter fraud, but MassFiscal is hoping the local U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI may be. The group has sent its findings to the federal officials and is hoping someone in government will listen.

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How To Steal An Election

image credit: iowalabornews.com

The Electoral College is one of our guardians of states’ rights. J. Christian Adams reported on another priority of the Democrat-majority House of Representatives:

If you thought the midterm elections had problems, wait until you learn about Nancy Pelosi’s plan to terminate state control over American elections.

Democrats in Congress have announced their top legislative priority, and it isn’t health care, immigration, or taxes. Instead, they want to centralize power over elections in Washington, D.C. H.R. 1 is number one on the legislative agenda because it is the number one priority of House Democrats, leftist groups, deep-pocketed dark money, and those who use election process rules to help win elections -- or at least to cause chaos.

The bill is a 571-page dreamscape of wild wishes and federal mandates on states. The Constitution decentralizes power over American elections and puts states in charge. H.R. 1 would undo that.

Decentralization promotes individual liberty. When power over elections is centralized, it is easier for that power to be abused. When power over elections is decentralized, no single malevolent actor can exert improper control over the process. That is precisely why Democrats are so eager for Washington, D.C., to have more power over our elections.

H.R. 1 has 218 cosponsors. It forces states to implement mandatory voter registration. If someone is on a government list -- such as receiving welfare benefits or rental subsidies -- then they would be automatically registered to vote.

Few states have enacted these systems because Americans still view civic participation as a voluntary choice. Moreover, aggregated government lists always contain duplicates and errors that states, even without mandatory voter registration, frequently fail to catch and fix.

H.R. 1 also mandates that states allow all felons to vote. . . .

H.R. 1 would also force states to have extended periods of early voting, and mandates that early voting sites be near bus or subway routes. . . .

H.R. 1 mandates same-day voter registration and would obliterate state registration procedures. 

The full report is at PJ Media here. I doubt this will ever pass, but it certainly exposes the Progressive Left’s agenda.

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Ohio Electoral College votes for Trump

image credit: insider.foxnews.com

From The Columbus Dispatch earlier today: 

Ohio members of Electoral College cast all 18 of their votes this afternoon to formally elect Republicans Donald Trump and Mike Pence as president and vice president. 

None of the electors strayed from the GOP ticket despite protests from some of those who oppose Trump.

# # #

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.

# # #

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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