Democrat Colorado Governor Would Sign Bill Circumventing The Electoral College

So the next presidents will be chosen by California and New York!

  Daily Wire  "On Sunday, the Democratic governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, stated that he would sign a bill allowing his state to circumvent the Electoral College, giving his state’s electoral votes to whomever won the national popular vote, thus allowing population heavy areas to determine the presidential election."
Polis told The Hill that he viewed the Electoral College as an “undemocratic relic,” adding, “I’ve long supported electing the president by who gets the most votes. It’s a way to move towards direct election of the president.” . . .



Why We Need the Electoral College  

Those who complain now that it is unfair for Donald Trump to become president when he received fewer votes than Hillary Clinton have not considered either the implications of what they are proposing or the genius of the Framers.

. . . "Many people who are currently calling for the abolition of the Electoral College, however, don’t realize the chaos that would result.

"Two elements of the “Great Compromise” among the large and small states led to the ratification of the Constitution. A House of Representatives would reflect the popular vote—disadvantaging the small states—but a Senate would give the small states equal representation with the large ones.
"This idea was carried through to the Electoral College, where each state’s allocation of electoral votes is simply the total of its representation in the House and Senate. This again gave the smaller states some additional power in the important choice of the president.
"Leaving aside the fact that a deal is a deal, there are very practical reasons why we will always need the Electoral College under our current constitutional system." . . . 

Electoral College History

Dem introduces bills to eliminate Electoral College, stop presidents from pardoning themselves

Was Hillary Clinton really worth committing violence to the Constitution?

The Constitutional provision for the Electoral College  Article II

Section 1. The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. . . .

The Hill

Weasel Zippers

"Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a vocal critic of President Trump, on Thursday introduced two bills to eliminate the Electoral College and prevent presidents from pardoning themselves or their family members.

"Cohen introduced the constitutional amendments on the first night of the 116th Congress, both digs at Trump. 

Cohen of Tennessee

“ 'Presidents should not pardon themselves, their families, their administration or campaign staff," Cohen said in a statement. "This constitutional amendment would expressly prohibit this and any future president, from abusing the pardon power.”

"The amendments are unlikely to pass since they require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress and then must be ratified by three-fourths of the states." . . .

"More than a century ago, we amended our Constitution to provide for the direct election of U.S. Senators," he added. "It is past time to directly elect our President and Vice President.”

Because each Senator represents only their own state. A President represents each and every state and this politician knows that. He appears to want every president elected by the liberal coasts, placing every legislative branch under the rule of coastal elites.
The Electoral College makes the President the choice of the entire nation, from coast to coast. TD

In defense of the Electoral College
"If anything, it was the Electoral College that made it possible to end slavery, since Abraham Lincoln earned only 39 percent of the popular vote in the election of 1860, but won a crushing victory in the Electoral College. This, in large measure, was why Southern slaveholders stampeded to secession in 1860-61. They could do the numbers as well as anyone, and realized that the electoral college would only produce more anti-slavery Northern presidents.' "  Refute that, if you can.

On the Electoral College: UPDATED

"The case against America’s idiosyncratic election system isn’t as simple as you think." 

 Four Theses on the Electoral College  . . . "Democrats are seething at having lost the presidency while winning the popular vote for the second time in the twenty-first century. Liberal media outlets are publishing a flurry of pieces attacking America’s allegedly antiquated system for electing its presidents, and social media is abuzz with petitions to replace it with a national popular vote system. This reaction is understandable: Our democratic instincts tells us that all votes should count exactly equally, and that the person who gets the most total votes should win.

"But the case against James Madison’s original design isn’t quite that simple. Here are four points that liberals upset with the outcome might weigh against the visceral indignation of an electoral-popular vote split." . . .

You should know the above map was prior to the election and contained this:

Hillary wins the popular vote – not  . . . "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."

NRO: Why We Have an Electoral College  . . . "Every state gets one electoral vote for each of its congressional representatives. This means that the larger states have more say in electing a president, but no state has no say — each, no matter how sparsely populated, gets at least three votes, one for the minimum congressman-at-large and one for each senator." . . .

UPDATE: The Electoral College is ‘Absolutely Brilliant’ Nationally, But Mob Rule Remains at State Level 

 "There have been countless stories, news clips, soc media vids etc of liberals whining and complaining about the electoral system. It’s very existence is to prevent what these sore losers are demanding, mob rule. If the electoral college was not in place a handful of states would decide elections for the entire nation. Do you want New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois, California or even Texas deciding who the next President is? If democrats and all the snowflakes, participating in Soros organized protests coast-to-coast, were to get their way that is exactly what will happen!"

Election Integrity and the Electoral College; One underappreciated benefit of voting by states.

Volokh Conspiracy  "With the Electoral College still in the news, I thought I'd note one small argument for keeping it that I haven't seen much elsewhere. (Though I'm quite sure it isn't original to me.)

"As Ross Douthat suggests, the stakes in the electoral college debate may be smaller than we think. Today's institution may not have the deliberative advantages the Founders hoped for, but it also may not produce quite as many democratic costs as critics fear. (Cf. Lyman Stone's argument that the U.S. electoral system actually has less structural bias than those of peer countries.)

"Ross's claim is that a state-by-state vote in the electoral college encourages broad electoral coalitions, as opposed to regional parties chasing 51% majorities. With the country so polarized, he writes, both parties are chasing 51% anyway—so maybe all the electoral college does is to delegitimize the occasional winner.

"My suspicion, though, is that it's precisely in these circumstances—with high degrees of polarization and partisan distrust—that the electoral college does the most for election integrity.

"In a nationwide popular vote, every false vote that's cast anywhere in the country adds to the vote total in exactly the same way. For the same reason, every true vote that's suppressed anywhere in the country will subtract equally from an opponent's numbers. (Thus the concerns about nationwide recounts: as Keith noted, "we might need to be prepared to deal with the new incentive to shade the vote count in every county in the Union.")

"A world of highly polarized states makes the problem even worse. In a deep-red or deep-blue state, where one party occupies the vast majority of state offices, there'd be means, motive, and opportunity for serious fraud. The whole nation would be at stake, and fewer people would be in positions of power to discover or punish any shenanigans. And if you think your political opponents might be rigging a national election somewhere halfway across the country, well, you're just a sucker if you don't beat them to it.

"By contrast, in a districted system like the electoral college, widespread election fraud in Alabama or Massachusetts would be entirely pointless. " . . .

Colorado Governor Signs National Popular Vote Bill Into Law

Weasel Zippers

"If the Democrats are successful in nullifying the Electoral College, the country will essentially be ruled by the East and West coasts and the urban enclaves in between. They will have almost achieved single party rule."

"Via The Hill:

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed into law Friday a bill that would award the state’s Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote.

Polis signed the measure after both chambers of the state’s legislature passed the bill last month along party lines, with Democrats pulling heavily for the measure.

Colorado now joins 11 other states and the District of Columbia as part of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

“It is important to understand that the National Popular Vote bill significantly amplifies Colorado’s voice in choosing the president of the United States,” John Koza, chairman of National Popular Vote, said in a press release.

The joint agreement only goes into effect if enough states sign on to total the number needed to win the presidency — 270 electoral votes.

The addition of Colorado’s nine electoral votes brings the total to 181.

Keep reading…

In defense of the Electoral College 
"If anything, it was the Electoral College that made it possible to end slavery, since Abraham Lincoln earned only 39 percent of the popular vote in the election of 1860, but won a crushing victory in the Electoral College. This, in large measure, was why Southern slaveholders stampeded to secession in 1860-61. They could do the numbers as well as anyone, and realized that the electoral college would only produce more anti-slavery Northern presidents."  Refute that, if you can.

The blue would have given us Hillary.

The Electoral College dispute exposes the Progressives’ world of lies
With the popular vote system, these states will run our country. And with Texas becoming Californicated, it may not be our bulwark against socialism and foreign colonization for long. TD

Don’t demonize the electoral college — or the framers — as racist

The electoral college is a device that balances nationalism with states’ rights and leavens democracy’s passions with deliberation and reason.

LA Times

. . . "If the American people wanted a direct election for president, they could force their states to divide their electors in proportion to the Republican and Democrat tallies, or even assign their electors to align their votes with the nationwide result. The more states that shifted from winner-takes-all, the more the electoral count would match the national popular vote. But instead, the indirect system, as the republic’s framers conceived it, has endured.

"The framers originally deliberated between selecting the president in Congress or by nationwide vote. As it turned out, the delegates to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention overwhelmingly opposed popular national elections because of the size of the new nation and its relatively poor communications. They feared two types of candidates would come too easily to the fore: “local sons” from the voters’ own state, or “pretended patriots” and “active & designing men” — demagogues who would rule through a tyranny of the majority (a la Nicolas Maduro, in Venezuela). The framers also rejected having Congress select the chief executive, as European parliamentary systems do today, because it would make the latter too dependent upon the former.

"The electoral college was proposed to be representative but also mitigate popular passions, and to prevent giving Congress too strong a hand in presidential selection. In most cases, the winning candidate has had to assemble a geographically broad, and usually ideologically moderate coalition throughout the country.

"Today’s “woke” critique, however, focuses on racism. According to some scholars and commentators, the electoral college purposefully protected slavery by allocating electors based on the number of senators (thereby giving states more voice) and representatives (the Constitution infamously allowed slaves, who could not vote, to count as three-fifths of a person, thus inflating the voting power of slave states). During the Philadelphia Convention, James Madison acknowledged that the electoral college provided a necessary compromise between free states and slave-holding states, where the popular vote was diminished because slaves couldn’t vote. But that was the only time a framer actually connected slavery and the electoral college.

"The racism critique ignores the nuances of history. When one looks closer, as Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has pointed out in disavowing his own earlier thinking, the racism charge related to the electoral college “begins to unravel.' ” . . .

Being the LA Times, one can hope ignorant leftist celebrities might possibly be enlightened. TD

How Small States Lose When They Abandon the Electoral College

Intellectual Takeout

"The question then is this: Will there ever be a coalition of 270 so that America loses the electoral college? And what happens to the American republic if that does come to pass?"

Change our Constitution and upend our electoral process for this woman?

"Calls for the abolition of the Electoral College have persisted in the three years since President Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election without winning the popular vote.

"But abolishing the Electoral College in the normal way – via amending the Constitution – is a bit more arduous than proponents like. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called amending the Constitution to change or eliminate the Electoral College “more theoretical than real” according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

“ 'It’s largely a dream because the Constitution is… hard to amend,” Ginsburg said. “I know that from the experience.”

"Since it is hard to amend the Constitution, some states are trying to circumvent the process by pushing for popular vote presidential elections.

"Since Trump’s election, five states have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC.) States who participate in this pledge agree to award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, but only if the participating states account for an absolute majority of electoral votes.

"The shocking thing is not the fact that this compact exists – it was founded in 2006 – but that so many small states have joined. The Electoral College is meant to ensure that states with small populations are able to have some say in who is president and what the president focuses on. The issues affecting these states stay in play precisely because candidates do need to worry about how these smaller states vote. It is curious then to see small states disregard this safeguard placed in the Constitution.

"One might expect larger states like California and New York to work toward a national popular vote, for doing so would allow presidential candidates to focus on them more. It only takes 11 heavily populated states to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency after all." . . .

Effort to Abandon Electoral College Gains Steam. Here’s What It Would Ruin for America.

Listed as reason #7,387 by Hillary for her loss to Donald Trump  (President Trump, that is)TD

Intellectual Takeout

. . . "While the Constitution, intentionally, gives wide latitude to states to create their own electoral systems, the law passed in Colorado, along with the rest of this effort, would be unprecedented. It would be the first time states potentially outsource their Electoral College votes to the will of the nation as a whole, rather than having elections determined by their own voters. The result of this, ironically, could be very undemocratic.

"For instance, if the people of Colorado vote overwhelmingly for a Democrat, yet the total popular vote of the nation goes Republican, all of the state’s votes would go to the Republican, essentially overturning the will of the people in Colorado.

"The Electoral College is already fairly democratic. Nearly every state switched to direct, democratic elections of electoral votes in the early 19th century, as opposed to selection by state legislatures. What the national popular vote would do is overturn the concept of federalism, which recognizes that states have unique interests that deserve representation in the electoral system. We are not just a nation of individuals, but a nation of communities and states.

"Some have dismissed the Electoral College system as outmoded and unjust. But they are mistaken—the Electoral College system remains highly relevant and necessary today. The 2016 election actually demonstrated that." . . .

"In 2016, states that had gone Democratic in presidential politics for a generation flipped to Republican, in large part because of a unique candidate who appealed to their interests. While one candidate capitalized on their support, the other took them for granted and focused elsewhere. The result was a startling upset that demonstrates why the Framers wanted an Electoral College." . . .

Keep in mind that many who want the Constitution changed are those who choose the current crop of Democrats such as AO-C, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Mazie (Men-shut-up!) Hirono, and Kamala Harris. TD

Four Question for Those Who Oppose the Electoral College; What the Electoral College Saves Us From

R. E. Bowse  "Have you heard?  The Electoral College is bad.  Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and others support its abolition.  On March 28, Delaware became the thirteenth state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) in which members agree to award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote.  The compact goes into effect only when the combined number of electoral votes of member states reaches 270, assuring their candidate victory. Legislation affixing New Mexico to the NPVIC sits on the desk of Governor Michelle Grisham (D). She's expected to sign it, giving the coalition 189 votes."
"The debate surrounding this issue is another example of proponents avoiding the salient points.  I pose the following four questions to those would undo the electoral college system, with the goal of promoting clarity and focusing on the nub of the matter."

1. If you support the direct democracy of a popular vote system, do you also reject republicanism as our form of government? . . .
2. If you reject the notion of disproportional representation, do you reject the institution of the U.S. Senate? . . .
3. Parity between the states was key to ratification.  Does parity not matter anymore? . . .
4. Is a popular vote system a cure for the disease? . . .

What the Electoral College Saves Us From;  "The winner of a national office should have nationwide support" . . .

. . . As with all such enthusiasms — expanding the Supreme Court, abolishing the filibuster and the Senate itself, lowering the voting age to 16, letting convicted felons and illegal aliens vote, adding D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, automatic voter registration, abolishing voter ID, etc. — the scarcely concealed argument is that changing the rules will help Democrats and progressives win more.

. . . "Picture a two-candidate election with 2016’s turnout. The Republican wins 54 percent of the vote in 48 states, losing only California, New York, and D.C. That’s a landslide victory, right? But then imagine that the Republican nominee who managed this feat was so unpopular in California, New York, and D.C. that he or she loses all three by a 75 percent–to–25 percent margin. That 451–87 landslide in the Electoral College, built on eight-point wins in 48 states, would also be a popular-vote defeat, with 50.7 percent of the vote for the Democrat to 49.3 percent for the Republican. Out of a total of about 137 million votes, that’s a popular-vote margin of victory of 1.95 million votes for a candidate who was decisively rejected in 48 of the 50 states." . . .

Constitutional amendment introduced to abolish the Electoral College

WCTV

Hat tip: Dallice Hand

"A campaign to get rid of the Electoral College is picking up steam. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, along with fellow Democratic Senators Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein and Kirsten Gillibrand, introduced a constitutional amendment Tuesday to abolish the Electoral College.

" 'In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It's that simple," Schatz said in a statement. "No one's vote should count for more based on where they live. The Electoral College is outdated and it's undemocratic. It's time to end it."

"Other top Democrats, including presidential candidates Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg, have also said the Electoral College should be scrapped. The concept has gained in popularity after both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton lost their respective presidential elections despite winning the popular vote.

"Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said it could happen again in the future.

" 'It's likely that if anything, the incidents of the popular vote being disregarded by the Electoral College will be increasing during the 21st century. Why? Because of the concentration of Democratic votes in a smaller number of states," Sabato told CBSN. "They may be big states like New York and California. But when you put all the electoral votes together, Democrats will have more trouble reaching 270 [electoral votes] than they will winning the popular vote.' " . . .

Sen. Lindsey Graham on Electoral College: 'Democrats want rural America to go away'

The upshot of losing the Electoral College is that voters who chose the California legislature and NY Mayor De Blasio will choose your President. Every morning you will wake up, wondering what your government will do to you next. TD

Washington Times  "Sen. Lindsey Graham slammed progressives Tuesday for pushing to end the Electoral College system, suggesting they want to do away with middle America.

“ 'The desire to abolish the Electoral College is driven by the idea Democrats want rural America to go away politically,” the South Carolina Republican tweeted. 

"His comment comes in response to 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who said in a town hall hosted by CNN Monday the system by which Americans have elected presidents for the past 230 years must come to an end.  

“ 'That means getting rid of the Electoral College,” the Massachusetts Democrat said.

“ 'Everybody ought to come here and ask for your vote,” she told the Mississippi crowd.

"President George W. Bush won the 2000 election against former Vice President Al Gore via the Electoral College, as did President Trump against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016. Both men lost the popular vote.

"Progressive voters, still sour over the 2016 upset, are pushing Democrats to eliminate the system laid out in the Constitution for electing the president and vice president." .  .  .

"Make every vote count", Elizabeth Warren says? If you live in a red state, don't even bother to vote; you'll never see a candidate in your area. TD

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