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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

What we’re experiencing is a group exploiting the biggest vulnerability in the American system, one that was known to the founding fathers. If you can get enough people to vote for you and your friends, then all of the checks and balances will eventually fail against you, because in the end they’re all dependent on the populace not voting for people who corrupt the system.

It probably wouldn’t have seemed plausible to them that someone could be impeached twice and convicted of fraud, then win the popular vote.

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Not entirely true, they did consider that possibility, and their solution was the electoral college: the only reason for its existence is as a safeguard against installing a populist president that would corrupt the system.

If anything, it enabled it through acts like gerrymandering. That's how Trump won the first term in the 2nd or 3rd time in 250 years the electoral college defied the popular vote.

the electoral college exists because small states wouldnt sign the constitution without it

> It probably wouldn’t have seemed plausible to them

Or more like there is no solution to this besides telling people to be vigilant about protecting their democracies.

"A republic, if can keep it".

[0] https://constitutioncenter.org/education/classroom-resource-...

Is your argument that when a political party hold all major branches of government that it is implicitly corrupt? Or are you arguing that one side is corrupt and the other is not?

Is there a theoretical situation where a single party gaining control is simply the will of the voters? That appears to be a potential valid outcome.

In order: no, of course not; neither side is angelic but only one is corrupt and incompetent at a historic level; and yes, the fatal vulnerability in the system is that a demagogue can win a valid election, allowing them to ignore the safeguards and destroy the system.

The issue is not that a single party has control; it’s that a single person has control, having purged that party of all disloyalty or contradiction, and is now proceeding to remake the entire government according to their rather erratic whims, with very little effective restraint.

The argument is that when a corrupt party against all the levers of power, there is little to stop it from doing whatever it wants. The American government is built on some assumptions about keeping nakedly corrupt, amoral authoritarians away from power.

It's one big component of being corrrupt, yes.

>Is there a theoretical situation where a single party gaining control is simply the will of the voters?

Sure. But not with the current electoral college and its exploits, as well as literal election bribery that is publicly admitted to.

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