Electoral College -- Faithless Electors Encouraged | National Review

Electoral College -- Faithless Electors Encouraged | National Review

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The hypocrisy is rather astonishing. A major theme of the Democrats and the press during the election was the absolute imperative of accepting the results. This lasted as a bedrock principle of democratic governance all the way until roughly 4 a.m. Wednesday, November 9, when it became clear that Trump had won and angry protests in the streets, pointless, harassing recounts, and calls for an Electoral College coup became the order of the day.

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More than anything else, the calls for an Electoral College coup expose a standardless will to power of a Left that professes to value democratic procedure. What else to make of opponents of the Electoral College urging the Electoral College to overthrow an election? The University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson has called the Electoral College a “menace to the American polity.” Yet he is now a signer of a public letter urging members of this menace to re-engineer the November election to his liking.

The electors do have the power to act as a last check on a presidential tyrant. But the norm of electors rubber-stamping the election’s winner is so ingrained in our system that any deviation from it would constitute a revolutionary act. The rationales advanced for a radical departure from the practice as established over a couple of centuries are tinny and unconvincing at best.

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The Buckley Rule

PowerLine has a discussion on the "Buckley Rule" and the "Limbaugh Rule".

Buckley rule followed here
Rush suspends the Buckley Rule
Thinking about the Buckley Rule

The Buckley Rule is, "Vote for the most conservative viable candidate".

One of the things I'd like to note is that we seem to have a hard time telling who is, and who is not viable.

Was McCain a viable candidate? He lost.

How about Bob Dole? I never considered him viable. I thought his campaign slogan should have been "Dole as dishwater". But someone voted for him.

Bill Clinton was not viable; he was merely the only candidate willing to waste time running against an incumbent riding high after the first Gulf War. When George HW Bush torpedoed his chances by violating his "no new taxes" pledge, Clinton was the only one in position to take advantage.

I think the point is, we need to be a little skeptical about claims of who is, and who isn't "viable".

The Boxer Blimp

Help curb voter fraud in California

Help curb voter fraud in California

One of the things the last few elections has revealed is escalating voter fraud in America, fraud of the type that aligns us more closely with a banana republic than with a traditional Western nation.  Thus, we know that groups such as ACORN have registered thousands of non-existent people.  And because America has traditionally had an honor system at the ballot box ("If you say you're Minnie Mouse, than I guess you're Minnie Mouse.  Please, go vote."), little has been done to stem the impact at the ballot of those fraudulently registered voters.

There is now a ballot initiative circulating in California that officially concedes that the honor system no longer works.  It will require all California voters to show photo ID at the polling place, and it mandates steps to protect against voter fraud in absentee ballots too.  Lastly, as a little extra benefit, it allows an extra 15 days for votes sent in by overseas troops.  In other words, the whole ballot is meant to slow down fraud and allow every vote to be counted.

I only heard about this ballot initiative today, but I can assure you that the Democrats will hate it.  They'll waffle on about the fact that poor people just can't manage to obtain government ID, making this an impossible hurdle between themselves and democratic participation.  That this argument is demeaning is obvious.  It also makes no sense when one considers that these same people are able to handle the system with some level of skill when it comes to collecting government benefits.  (And I speak with solid second hand knowledge about this, since someone close to me lives at that level, as do her friends.  Whacked out on perpetual 60s head trips they may be, but they know how to get their welfare checks and food stamps.)

If you are a California voter who is interested in making this initiative a reality on California's ballot, go here, print-up the petition you'll see, sign it, and mail it to

Vote SAFE
925 University Avenue
Sacramento, CA  95825

A couple more things:  First, time is of the essence, since all petitions must be received 131 days before the election.  Second, each petition is written so that two people from the same county can sign it.  Of those two, though, one must not only sign it, but also fill out the "circulator" declaration.

How does ACORN benefit?

Jay Tea, again, at Wizbang, looking at how ACORN might intend to benefit from its shennanigans:

...When the first video came out, my initial analysis would be that it would be no big deal. Such tactics have been used against Planned Parenthood, when an actress pretending to be an underage girl would confess to being pregnant by a much-older man -- and, instead of obeying state laws requiring that the statutory rape to the authorities, they conspired to plan the girl's abortion so that the police or her parents would never know about it.

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I thought the same principle would hold for the ACORN videos. What I apparently didn't take into account was what I believe was a key element here -- the utterly unsympathetic nature of the actors' characters.

With Planned Parenthood, the people caught breaking the law on tape could say they were acting to help a terrified underage pregnant girl. With ACORN, though, the people they thought were helping were utterly despicable -- a prostitute and a pimp with political ambitions, who planned to set up a brothel and bring in underage girls from Latin America to work in it.

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Just why would ACORN be interested in working on the census, anyway? And how does it relate to their extensive record of voter registration fraud?

Now, this is just speculation. I have no deeply-placed sources, no secret documents, just a bunch of imagining and drawing together tidbits of data and a healthy dose of paranoid analysis applied to commonly-known facts. But, as Yogi Berra famously said, "you can observe a lot just by watching."

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...Why would ACORN (or anyone) want to flood the voter rolls with false registrations? What would be gained by doing that?

The simplest answer just isn't plausible: to steal the election. To have people show up on election day, claim to be the voter named on the forged form, and cast a ballot. That is just too much work at too much risk. All it would take would be a few of them to be caught and tell where they got the false identity information. Such a scandal would destroy the organization, and quite possibly destroy the political party that benefited from it.

So, why do it at all? What would they gain in exchange for the legal risks and the public disgrace of the scandals?

Simply put, they are planting seeds for future actions.

Let's say that in one close election, ACORN's candidate loses in a district where they submitted 5,000 fraudulent voter registration forms. (This is not so far-fetched. In Lake County, Indiana, in 2008, ACORN submitted 5,000 forms. Election officials checked 2,100 of them without finding a single valid one -- so just dumped all 5,000 of them.) The bogus voters will be counted as having not voted, meaning they have driven down the voter turnout -- cheapening any mandate the winning candiate might claim.

Further, should ACORN or the losing candidate choose to accuse the winning side of "voter suppression," that low turnout will be cited as evidence that voters were kept away from the polls.

This explanation ties in perfectly with ACORN's interest in helping run the census. The main purpose of the census is to determine congressional representation.

While the Senate is apportioned equally to the several states (two each), the House of Representatives is divided up among the states by population. ...

Right now, the population in the United States is shifting. The current projections are that several traditionally Republican states will pick up seats, at the expense of several Democratic seats.

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So, what could they do about it?

Well, it would certainly help if there were a whole bunch more people reported as living in inner cities and other urban areas. Whether or not they really exist doesn't matter -- they'll be "real" enough on the census forms, and that will help shape the House of Representatives for the next decade.

As shown above, a dozen seats are likely to change states after next year. With ACORN doing the counting, they might have been able to save a few of those seats for the Democrats.

 

Half a century's regress

From the Worldwide Standard blog:

You know what I miss? I miss 1960. Not the part about my face turning overnight into the world's most productive zit farm. What I miss is the way the grown-ups acted about the Kennedy-Nixon race. Like the McCain-Obama race, that was a big historic deal that aroused strong feelings in the voters. This included my parents and their friends, who were fairly evenly divided, and very passionate. They'd have these major honking arguments at their cocktail parties. But unlike today, when people wear out their upper lips sneering at those who disagree with them, the 1960s grown-ups of my memory, whoever they voted for, continued to respect each other and remain good friends.

What was their secret? Gin. On any given Saturday night they consumed enough martinis to fuel an assault helicopter. But also they were capable of understanding a concept that we seem to have lost, which is that people who disagree with you politically are not necessarily evil or stupid. My parents and their friends took it for granted that most people were fundamentally decent and wanted the best for the country. So they argued by sincerely (if loudly) trying to persuade each other. They did not argue by calling each other names, which is pointless and childish, and which constitutes I would estimate 97 percent of what passes for political debate today.

Card Check and Unions

From Clayton Cramer's blog:

"Card check" is a proposal for streamlining union elections, by deleting the "election" part.

Just to be sure about this, I went and read the version that went nowhere in Congress last year, proposing to amend 29 USC 159(c):

 

(6) Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, whenever a petition shall have been filed by an employee or group of employees or any individual or labor organization acting in their behalf alleging that a majority of employees in a unit appropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining wish to be represented by an individual or labor organization for such purposes, the Board shall investigate the petition. If the Board finds that a majority of the employees in a unit appropriate for bargaining has signed valid authorizations designating the individual or labor organization specified in the petition as their bargaining representative and that no other individual or labor organization is currently certified or recognized as the exclusive representative of any of the employees in the unit, the Board shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual or labor organization as the representative described in subsection (a).

Now, I can somewhat understand the argument that if a majority of the workers have signed union cards, then perhaps there's no need for a union election. (Hence the bill's description of this as "streamlining" the process.) But according to Dr. Lott, the union only wins these elections about 60% of the time. Huh? If a majority are willing to sign union cards, why would a majority not vote for the union at election?

The term "union thug" comes to mind.

 ...from my experiences, and that of many others that I know, I am more inclined to suspect that a lot of people sign the union authorization cards because they are either strongly encouraged or even directly threatened to do so. Labor unions are fundamentally institutions of organized violence. A friend who has since passed on left me this account of working in a union shop in California during World War II (when the federal government leaned pretty heavily on employers to accept unions):

 

Our next problem was that after three months on the job, workers were required to join the paper workers union. Those who did not received disfiguring beatings after hours. Having seen what happened to another girl in same position as Wanda and I, we decided that rather than face the same treatment we would quit our jobs before the three months ended.

I remember being quite young and surprised that my father was home during the day. He explained that his union, the Boilermakers/Blacksmiths, had gone on strike. "Can't you go to work anyway?"

 

"Not if you want to live."

 

And unfortunately, this wasn't just his imagination. There's a fascinating decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. Enmons (1973), that held that the Hobbs Act that "makes it a federal crime to obstruct interstate commerce by robbery or extortion" did not apply to labor unions engaged in destroying power company transformers with rifles and explosives because such use of violence did not qualify as extortion.

AFF-able Republicans?

Steve Sailer has a theory:

My Affordable Family Formation theory isn't about who wins nationally, it's about how, given a particular national level of support, which states will be solid blue (Democrat), which ones purple (mixed), and which ones solid red (Republican).

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Before getting to the results, let me review my AFF theory. It holds that what paints the electoral map red and blue is "affordable family formation" was validated once again. Taking a quick and dirty look at McCain's and Obama's shares in each state (plus DC) with 92% of the national precincts reporting, the same two demographic variables that drove the results in 2000 and 2004 showed startlingly high correlations once again.

 

My basic theory is that Democrats do best in states with metropolitan areas where land for homes is scarce because they are hedged in by oceans or Great Lakes; while Republicans do best in inland areas where homebuyers can look around for homes in a 360 degree radius around job sites. I call this the Dirt Gap: Republicans are found more in areas with more dirt and less water.

 

This means that homes in inland areas tend to be cheaper because the supply of land within a certain commuting time is greater. In turn, cheaper homes mean that non-Hispanic whites tend to marry earlier and have more children, which means they attract family oriented people and their cultures tend to be more family-oriented, making Republican family values appeals more appealing there. In contrast, "Living by the Water," which is #51 on the Stuff White People Like website, correlates with Stuff White People Like political views. (You can read about Affordable Family Formation in detail with graphs here.)

 

The Electoral College

Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek ponders the Electoral College.

Lots of sound counterarguments in defense of the Electoral College are possible.  Here I offer just one - namely: if we don't think it undemocratic to elect representatives to Congress to carry out our political desires on tax policy, environmental regulation, national defense, why is it undemocratic to do largely the same when it comes to choosing a President?

LA Times mangles the 2000 election

From Patterico's blog:

The L.A. Times reports:

Obama dispatched Al Gore to Florida — a merging of man and state that served as painful symbolism to Democrats of the need to cast every ballot.

"Vote early. Take people with you to the polls," the former vice president said at a rally in Coconut Creek. Gore's 2000 campaign foundered in Florida after ballot problems led to a long legal standoff. The Supreme Court ultimately determined that Bush had won the presidency with a 537-vote margin in Florida.

No, it didn't.

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But the statement is false. It apparently comes from some reporter who heard too many people say at the water cooler that the Supreme Court awarded the Presidency to George W. Bush.

But that's not what happened. Katherine Harris, Florida's Secretary of State, is the person who certified George W. Bush as the winner, and the margin of victory at 537 votes.

The Supreme Court did no such thing. In its per curiam opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed an order of the Florida Supreme Court ordering a recount to proceed. The Court held that the standardless manual recounts in Florida violated the Equal Protection Clause.

It is true that the Court's actions in halting the recount were a critical factor in the process. But the Supreme Court made no determination as to who had won the presidency. That was Katherine Harris.

You can read the opinion as many times as you like, but you'll see no statement to the effect: "The Court hereby determines that George W. Bush has won the presidency of the United States by a margin of 537 votes." Instead, the Court simply stated: "The judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion."

Winner take all?

Matt Lewis does some thinking about how delegates have been apportioned.

As we've witnessed this year, Democrats employ a Byzantine system of delegate apportionment in order to achieve electoral "fairness" (a candidate who wins a lot of votes, yet loses the state should get something out if it, right?).

The fact that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are currently engaged in political hand-to-hand combat which has featured name calling, including allegations of some of the primary players being a, "Monster," "Judas," and even (gasp!) "McCarthy," illustrates the fact that the Democrats' electoral system has hurt – not helped – their chances.

Republicans, by contrast, use a simpler -- daresay "ruthless" -- winner-take-all system which has allowed John McCain to capture the nomination without enduring the kind of protracted battle the Democrats have had to face. (Of course, some could argue that the Republican rules allowed a candidate who was nobody's favorite to rise from the dead with a 3rd place in Iowa and seal up the whole thing in 30 days.)

And though the Republican system for picking a nominee may not seem as "fair," it actually works. And in the long-run, it is actually less painful -- and fairer to the participants -- than the Democrats' system.

What is more, the Republican model may actually prepare candidates for the future challenges they will face. (After all, if you're going to believe in social engineering, why not encourage the behavior that will lead to victory?)

The bottom line is that it is axiomatic that what gets measured gets accomplished. As such, if one goal of primary elections is to help a party select the best-prepared candidate to win a General Election, then the selection rules ought to reward characteristics and behaviors that are likely to lead to victory in the General Election. But as Gov. Rendell's comments imply, the qualities the Democratic Party is doing just the opposite.

This reminds me an excellent book I read a while back called Moneyball. A major premise of the book is that we should measure -- and reward -- the things that ultimate lead us to achieve our goals.

One of the features of the electoral college is that wins and losses tend to be decisive -- far more than the popular vote margins are. The way the EC is structured, we prevent the kind of problem in the national election that the Democrats are seeing in their nomination process.

Who's your candidate?

Questions for politicians

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline has some questions any candidates for Congress should be pressed to answer.

[The news media's] stated justification for publishing classified information on these matters is the need for debate over the administration's policy. If that, not animus towards the president, is the MSM's real reason, then it should promote such debate through a concerted effort to flush out the position of all those running for Congress in 2006 on the subject of intelligence gathering.

These are:

• Is the level of peril to the homeland is now significantly less than what it was shortly after 2001?
• Should the government adopt a less intrusive approach to intelligence gathering than the one it now employs?
• What is your position on each controversial provision of the Patriot Act. (Take them point by point.)
• Is there any investigative procedure or device that the federal government should be permitted to use to fight organized crime, but should not be permitted to use against suspected terrorists?
• What is your position on each interrogation technique used on terror suspects?
• Should sleep deprivation be allowed? Under what circumstances?
• Should slapping be allowed? Under what circumstances?
• Should waterboarding be allowed? Under what circumstances?
• (Repeat for all forms of putative "torture".)
• What length of delay is acceptable between the time the government learns about the telephone number of someone in the U.S. with whom a terrorists has been in communication and the time the government taps that phone?
• If it takes longer than that amount of time to obtain a court order, should the government wait for the court order or go ahead and tap the phone?

Paul's suspicion: the mainstream media don't want that debate to happen. And furthermore:

I suspect that, in fact, if Republicans promote such a debate, the MSM will accuse them of playing politics with national security.

The most important election of the century

Last month's election for President may well have been the second most important election of the century. The real biggie is going to be the election in Iraq, at the end of January.

If Iraqi voters choose a government that will perpetuate their right to continue to freely choose their own government, that will represent a radical change and something unique in the history of the entire Arab world. Its repercussions on surrounding Middle East countries could be momentous in the years and generations ahead. On the other hand, depending on who is elected, this could turn out like the first elections held in some African countries after they achieved their independence in the 1960s: "One man, one vote – one time." Too often, the winner of that first election made sure that no one else could ever be elected to replace him.

Yes, the telling point is not so much the results of the first election, but the results of the second one.

Nevertheless, while we can't guarantee success, neither are we assured of failure. The terrorists who are doing their best to blow up soldiers and Iraqi citizens understand that. If democracy works in Iraq, the suffocating feeling they've been feeling will turn into full-blown hypoxia.

Fixing elections (the system, not the vote)

Orson Scott Card, again. This week's column is a laundry list of issues, all of them relating to the process of choosing our leaders. In this column, he addresses:

"Disenfranchisement" and "voter intimidation"

The proper way to counter intimidation from poll watchers is to encourage and teach voters that they have nothing to fear. It's embarrassing that the Democratic Party has concluded that the proper solution to electoral problems is litigation instead of training their voters to follow the rules and fearlessly exercise their franchise. If you sue, you might lose. If you teach voters their rights -- and responsibilities -- then everybody wins. It's also cheaper. And it starts with the assumption that minority voters are smart enough to learn the same voting rules and procedures that everybody else follows. Any other assumption smacks of condescension at best, bigotry at worst.

The electoral college

Getting rid of the electoral college often can sound like a "good idea" -- until you start considering the alternatives.

Gerrymandering

The remedy is simple and obvious: When congressional districts are redrawn after every census, only three principles should be considered: Coherence, compactness, and equality. <snip> Wouldn't the interests of African-Americans be better served, even with fewer blacks in Congress, if most congressional districts contained enough black voters that their votes could swing an election? Instead of having a handful of guaranteed black seats, with all the rest of the House of Representatives owing nothing at all to black voters, we'd have fewer guaranteed black congressmen, but most of Congress would care very much what black voters thought of them -- or risk losing the next election. It doesn't matter, though. Because the group that benefits most from the present anti-democratic system of fixing elections in advance is: incumbents. And by definition, the only people who could change the system are: incumbents.

Voter ignorance

So the only solution is to make sure you aren't one of the ignorant ones. There are websites for most candidates, informing you of their record, their beliefs and principles, and their experience and other qualifications. It's quite easy to find out information about everyone except the handful who don't bother to put up a website.

Counting errors

Sometimes, though, an election might be so tight that a statistically insignificant difference between the spoiled ballots for the two candidates might actually become crucial. In effect, then, the election would have been decided by a coin toss. In such cases, recounts are helpful. Lawsuits are not.

There's lots more. Read the whole thing.

College for 430 semesters

From the Weekly Standard news e-mail:

Here's why the Electoral College is important, no matter which party it helps:

1. America is a big country, and when it comes to methods of governance, size matters. It's fine for a small country, like Israel or Sweden, to have a relatively turbulent democracy because their size allows for the relatively quick correction of legislative mistakes. Imagine what governing America would be like with a parliamentary system where 18 different political parties were constantly shifting alliances and calling for votes of confidence. It would be a mess. Because of our size, we need the relatively strong system we have: An executive who serves four years at a stretch and a bicameral legislature which serves in two- and six-year stretches. This system modulates the intensity of political change automatically--which is a good thing.
2. But that check on the pace of our politics isn't enough. The second engine governor on the line is our two-party system. The two party system is enormously important, because, instead of having an entire galaxy of single-issue parties--the green party, the anti-abortion party, the stem-cell party, the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, etc.--we force all of these issues into the main corpus of our two parties. These two giant organisms digest the issues, moderate the extremists, and present fairly middle-of-the-road opposing views to the electorate, allowing the body politic to decide what it thinks. (Yes, America has had third parties, but they have always either been so strong that they forced one of the two parties out, or so weak that they soon withered away.)
3. The Electoral College is the guarantor of this two-party system. Because of the winner-take-all format in the states, and the sublimating of the popular vote, the Electoral College all but guarantees that America will have only two political parties. No third party can compete in the Electoral College the way it can in the straight popular vote: In 1992, for instance, Ross Perot garnered 19 percent of the popular vote, but won not a single Electoral Vote.
4. People who disparage the Electoral College claim that it is an anti-democratic institution, but in actuality, it is a breakman on our democracy. It helps push all of our politics toward the center. It is a moderating force which helps dampen the more extremist and passionate fringes which sometimes seek to sway a democracy. I don't know about you, but I'm all for moderating forces in a country with 260 million people and the world's most powerful military.

The Electoral College is yet another gift from our Founding Fathers; a precious, ingenious contraption which has stood us in excellent stead for more than two centuries. We would be fools to meddle with it for cheap, temporary, political advantage.

Lex tibii, non mihi

(Hat tip: The Command Post.)

In California, at least, this behavior would be illegal. California has laws against campaigning within 100 feet of a polling place.

One woman who voted early in Boca Raton, at the Southwest County Regional Library, complained that as she stood in line, two men behind her were "trashing our president," Fletcher said, declining to identify the woman. She tried to ignore them. Then the man touched her arm and said, "Who are you voting for?" "I said, `I don't think that's an appropriate question,'" the woman said she responded. "Uh oh! We have a Bush supporter here," screamed the man behind her. For the 2 1/2 hours she had to wait in line, she was heckled by the man. As they neared the voting room, someone in the rear of the line yelled, "I sure hope everyone here is voting for Kerry!" she reported. That's when the man behind her held his hand over her head and screamed, "We have a Republican right here!" There were "boos and jeers" from the crowd. "I felt intimidated, harassed and threatened!" the woman wrote in her complaint to the Republican Party.

I suspect this kind of thing is illegal in Florida as well. But then, try and get it enforced.

A nice example of the leftist belief that "the law is for you, not for me."

(10/25/04 – fixed the Latin in the title.)

The importance of the electoral college

Many people would like to see the electoral college done away with. Jonah Goldberg disagrees.

The ABA said the electoral college system was "ambiguous," "complex" and "dangerous." It's not complex. Each state decides democratically who it wants to be president, the winner gets that state's electoral votes, which are allotted proportionally based on population. Whoever wins the majority of electoral votes wins. If you think that's too complex to grasp, I'm not sure you're qualified to vote in the first place. It's not ambiguous either. Indeed, one of its chief benefits is that historically it has given an unambiguous victory in electoral votes to candidates who receive only a fraction of the popular vote.

In addition, people who have looked into the math have found that in most elections, the electoral college increases the power of every citizen's vote. Each vote becomes more likely to make a difference in the final total, and in deciding the winner.

Polls

Some good comments about the strengths and weaknesses of polls.

1. Manipulation
2. Ranking The Pollsters
3. Prediction Market Update
4. Predictive Markets
5. Prediction Machines