Electoral College and Election Fraud
bfi.uchicago.edu
bfi.uchicago.edu
Did you somehow miss 2016-2020?
Am I wearing rose colored glasses, or are there other times in history here and in other places, where the rule of law was either worshipped or feared by everyone enough to stamp out bad actors, or at least seek to, across parties?
Has it really _always_ just been kayfabe[1] and no moral rules apply if I don't get caught?
What we have today, 200+ years later, is a system in which North Dakota’s 800,000 residents get 2 senators and 1 representative and Washington, D.C.’s residents get none. A representative from California represents around 50% more people than one from North Dakota. There are major structural power imbalances in the U.S. that someday will have to be dealt with.
We have crazy things like one senator preventing hundreds of people from being promoted in the Military. The system needs a rewrite (along with the rules of the Senate).
When that changes, the republic ends.
As for a senator blocking military promotions, that's a different matter entirely.
I wrote that the Senate rules need to be adjusted. Senate tradition is part of the political structure of how the U.S. government works at the federal level. It’s not just the Constitution that needs a rewrite.
Your claim that this is why the U.S. is a coast to coast nation isn’t supported by history. You need to demonstrate that in the absence of the system of government created by our founders that there wouldn’t be a coast to coast nation where the U.S. is. There are lots of examples of expansive empires being created from a collection of smaller states that don’t involve systems of governance that the U.S. has.
Polyculture is more robust.
The 2016 and 2020 Presidential contests were actually decided by a relatively small number of votes in precisely the same counties.
As noted by Scott Adams in his podcast, when there is a challenge with massive payoff and relatively scant penalties for shenanigans, it is ludicrous to think that there is NOT game afoot.
Anyone not calling for strongly auditable election systems and a re-emphasis on ballot security is not credible, in my view.
For example, in Muskegon, MI we only just recently learned that an election worker turned in approximately 8,000-10,000 fraudulent voter registrations to the city clerk and nothing was done about it. [0]
> According to the police reports, a woman who said she worked for a Tennessee-based voter registration company called GBI Strategies dropped off an unusually large batch of 8,000 to 10,000 voter registration applications in Muskegon, a traditional Democratic stronghold that had roughly 28,500 registered voters eligible for the 2020 election, including about 11,200 who voted.
Now this article says this story was reported on local Michigan TV news. But did you hear about it? I sure didn't. It took someone filing a FOIA request regarding the police report to even find out what happened here. And it turns out that this case was eventually referred to the FBI and it has been crickets since. This election worker and group to my knowledge has gone uncharged.
But my real question is how many more cases like this are there out there? This article says this is an example of the "system working" because this election fraud attempt was caught, but sweeping a case like this under the rug is not how I would define "Working". Is it possible there are cases that were successful in getting ballots through? Would we ever hope to hear about such cases? Given how the authorities in Michigan handled a case where they successfully prevented election fraud, I highly doubt it.
[0]: https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/muskegon-fake-v...
Where I live, the ruling party is using mass immigraiton as a means to change the makeup of the society so as to secure its tenure at the polls, as votes from poorer and less educated people who fall into a single identity group are cheaper to mobilize and secure. Democracy is an artifact of sovereign nations, and when a party in power can just replace inconvenient constituents by importing foreigners to support their policies, the legitimacy of the process is diminished and people start looking at challenges and alternatives.
The incentives for fraud in both the electoral college system and internet enabled coordination tactics like this voter replacement strategy are so immense that I don't see national borders being the same in 20 years.
During the framing of the constitution, sparsely populated states didn't want to be run rampshod by heavily populated states. The framers made the electoral college system to reduce the impact of populous states and raise the impact of less populous states so everyone gets an equal voice. Without it, you would get heavily populated states like New York and California dictating policy for the rest of the country.
America isn't nor was it ever a democracy but a republic. If and when the country abolishes the electoral college is when America balkanizes.
In short, it is by design. Think of it as affirmative action for less populous states.
Not an overly popular policy these days, even with the Supreme Court.
And what we now have is low population states thwarting the will of the majority due to their numbers in the senate. It’s a major power imbalance. Every time a Democrat is elected President Texas legislators threaten to secede. At some point California and others will also start threatening this unless the power structure is rebalanced.
What part of by design do you not understand?
And if anything, it's a great system because it makes people like you seethe at being thwarted for nonsense policies.
Contra:
> Dependent on a minority of the population to hold national power, Republicans such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah have taken to reminding the public that “we’re not a democracy.” It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.
> The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.
> When founding thinkers such as James Madison spoke of democracy, they were usually referring to direct democracy, what Madison frequently labeled “pure” democracy. Madison made the distinction between a republic and a direct democracy exquisitely clear in “Federalist No. 14”: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” […]
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/yes-consti...
> In short, what we call “representative democracy” today — a system of government where people elect leaders to make policy — is what the founders called a “republic.” Their attacks on “democracy” in the Athenian sense does not mean that America is not a democracy in the contemporary sense.
* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21507713/mike-lee-de...
The use of the term/idea has also been 'weaponized' for a number of decades, and modern usage is just a rehashing:
> Republicans have long proclaimed that “we are not a democracy.” In the 1960s, the distinction became particularly linked with the John Birch Society, an anti-Communist group associated with a rising populist right. The idea offered a historical righteousness for the group’s opposition to desegregation and multi-racial democracy. “For us baby-boomers,” Ed Kilgore noted in New York Magazine in 2019, “the Birchers’ use of the term republic to justify all sorts of artificial restraints on popular majorities rings familiar.”
> As Jamelle Bouie has written for the New York Times, the phrase invokes the idea that the Founders designed our system of government to combat the tyranny of the majority—but it misreads the substance of their arguments and becomes instead an argument for minority rule. “The point of the slogan isn’t to describe who we are but to claim and co-opt the founding for right-wing politics,” Bouie writes, “to naturalize political inequality and make it the proper order of things.”
[…]
> Implicit in the “we are not a democracy” cant is the notion that it doesn’t matter that a majority of Americans disagree with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or that five of the Supreme Court justices who made that decision were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. Instead of “the United States is not a democracy,” Republicans should just say what they mean: “The United States should be governed by minority rule.”
* https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2022/11/democracy-repu...
With it, we have tyranny of the ignorant.
Ignorant is maybe too mean, but if I had to use one catch all word that can apply to policies (not necessarily people), esp regarding things like transgender care, abortion and climate change, I think it fits.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/29/politics/manchin-reelection-b...
Good.
The electoral college was a minor issue that was rubber stamped at the constitutional convention. It was designed to prevent states from increasing their influence by expanding the franchise (remember when the constitution was written only white land owning men could vote). And it was designed for a time when traveling up and down the east coast took weeks instead of hours.
The electoral college has also been distorted by the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 which fixed the size of the house of representatives. As the nation has grown since then, this is caused the inequity created by the electoral college to increase every decade.
At this point the electoral college is outdated, it's served its purpose and it's time to move on. We have an extremely strong national identity, which didn't exist when the Constitution was written. We have lots of migration between the states, why should one persons vote count less simply because of where they live?
America IS a democracy it was an extremely flawed one at its founding and there's been a stead march to improve it ever since.
I believe what you're referring to in your "American is a Republic" statement is the famous quote from Benjamin Franklin. But that quote was an answer to a question and the question was "What kind of government do you give us, a monarch or a Republic?" And Franklin responded " A Republic, if you can keep it". This is a prodemocratic statement not an anti-democratic one.
But at its core, your argument is that the states are the right unit to be protected and catered to rather than the individual/people, and I fundamentally disagree with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Plan
There was lots of back and forth and attempts at cajoling representatives to vote for it, which did end up with a watered down version being passed. I do not see how one could conclude there was a “sincere lack of effort”.
[0]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-probably-not-possib...
They are arbitrary only if you take a look at raw population numbers. Gerrymandering these days is about tweaking urban/rural and ethnic ratios.
I think the way out of this mess is to generate districts algorithmically with well-defined fair constraints. (Minimize perimeter, basically.) But I worry that those setting the constraints will find a set of constraints that codifies gerrymandering.
In the end, I'm not sure how much it matters. I feel like the House of Representatives has pretty much no actual power. At the end of the day, the Senate has to approve everything, and we gerrymandered that 200 years ago. (We could fix that by adding DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam as states, split California into North/South, split Texas into East/West, etc. It will never happen, though, because the goal of Congress is to never change anything, and they already have a nice 50/50 split that assures that.)
Some people have an explicit goal of increasing gerrymandering:
> REDMAP (short for Redistricting Majority Project) is a project of the Republican State Leadership Committee of the United States to increase Republican control of congressional seats as well as state legislatures, largely through determination of electoral district boundaries. The project has made effective use of partisan gerrymandering, by relying on previously unavailable mapping software such as Maptitude to improve the precision with which district lines are strategically drawn.[1] The strategy was focused on swing blue states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin where there was a Democratic majority but which they could swing towards Republican with appropriate redistricting. The project was launched in 2010 and estimated to have cost the Republican party around US$30 million.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP
Certain people want to implement their desired (economic, social) policies, and they need to attain political power to do that, so if the majority of voters do not want those policies, they will ignore / go around the majority to get things done.
David Frum:
> If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/frum-tr...
* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9077312-maybe-you-do-not-ca...