Can The Capitol Insurrection Get Rid of The Electoral College

Should it? Yes.
Will it? No.

 

So
The Question is.. . Can Traitors bully and manipulate the electorial process

I guess so

Rocket River

 

Because it's important to maintain the illusion of democracy, a shared lie that keeps society from crumbling into chaos (or rather into something that doesn't protect the power of those who currently have it).

 

Can The Capitol Insurrection! Get Rid of The Electoral College!

 

The issue here isn't overturning the electoral college. The issue here is WHO determines the final say in which electoral votes go to which candidate per state.

The state legislators do. So a partisan state legislature like in a state like Georgia can claim that there are too many voting errors and not listen to the actual votes from the state and rather make their own decision regardless of the vote tally on which candidate gets the electorial points for said state.


This is how democracy falls. From a causal perspective a GOP fascist can say that they followed the electoral process and the winner of the electoral college won the election therefore democracy did not end. The common American who didn't pay attention to this stuff will buy it. But the reality is that the partisan state legislatures decided rather than the actual voters on who gets which electoral points.

 

Russia still has elections.

The Electoral College was instituted as a compromise to southern states to count black people in terms of population without actually granting blacks the right to vote. So yes, it should be abolished. Will it be abolished? Not a chance in our lifetime.

However, the issue isn't the electoral college. Any way you slice it, the question always comes up about our founding principle that "all men are created equal". How you define "all men" is where the country diverges. At the time, "all men" didn't actually include all men (or women). Until we, as a country, come to terms with what that actually means (and btw, we universally condemn slavery), we will always be stuck in this us vs. them mentality.

Jan 6 was about us vs them. The civil war was about us vs them. The forging of our constitution has us vs them baked right in (3/5 compromise and the electoral college).

Until 47% of our population openly comes to terms that our society is out of balance, we will continue to have this anchor around our necks that slows us down. To answer this question is literally why nobody actually reveres America as "the shining city upon a hill".

 

It should but it won't.

Its far past time to abolish the electoral college

 

Republicans won't even support minimalist voting rights laws. How do we get a Constitutional Amendment through? Not to mention needing 75% of the states to sign on.

 

The window for ending the electoral college was the 1970s and it required Carter to lose in 1976. Carter was actually pretty close to losing the electoral college while winning the popular vote. If that happens, the post-Watergate Democratic supermajority in the house and senate could have easily pushed through an amendment in Congress and Democrats controlled enough legislatures to pull it off.

Also on an unrelated note, there's an alternate history where the Democrats and the US are far better off with Carter losing in 76. If Ford wins, you get a moderate Republican ticket running the country and Reagan likely can't run in 1980 because Ford wins the primary for re-election. Meanwhile, the inflation of the late 70s still happens so a Democrat ends up winning in 1980. So in this universe, a Democratic president not only wins in 1980 instead of Reagan but that same Democrat also gets to appoint a bunch of Supreme Court justices so instead of the post-Reagan conservative court, we end up with a liberal court.

 

Agree - I think you could say that about a lot of elections. If Obama had lost in 2012 or 2016, Trump would never have existed and the nation would be way better of as well.

 

The problem of Jan 6 is not the byzantine electoral college system. The problem is the willingness of bad actors to subvert elections. If we didn't have slates of electors submitted by the states, we would have some other system for counting up and authenticating votes. And Trump would have changed his tactics so he could subvert that tally instead of the electoral college tally. The bureaucratic details don't matter; the impunity with which Trump could act is the problem.

(The one thing we could say though about being rid of the electoral college, Trump would have had a much bigger fraud hill to climb to overcome his popular vote deficit. He'd have still tried, but his chance at success would have been more remote.)

 

Interesting theory about Carter. However, there was zero chance that Obama was gonna lose either of those elections as he won in landslides.

Trump winning in 2016 is like a volcano. The magma under the surface was always there and Trump was simply tapped into that and took advantage. The root cause (the magma) is that this country still has not reconciled our racial problems. What happened in the Trump years were inevitable (and will happen again).

Like I said earlier, the Declaration of Independence said "all men are created equal". The problem is how do we define "all men"? The authors didn't actually mean all men and therein lies the problem that still manifests itself today. The Cornerstone speech by the Confederate VP outlined in crystal clarity that the white man is the superior race. Trump called anybody crossing the southern border a rapists and murderer. Notice he said nothing of our northern border. He also reinforced the notion that only urban/democratic centers have voter corruption, which all happen to have significant minority voters ...such as Atlanta and Detroit. Why is it so easy for conservatives to believe there is corruption in black voting districts?

Ending the Electoral College does not address the fundamental problem of racial imbalance (although it would be a nice gesture).

Conservatives are wide scale hypocrites on nearly every issue. For example, conservatives supported abortion in the early 70s in part because big government shouldn't be in control of your body. But now, for that issue, it's okay for government to tell you what to do.

There is literally only one issue that conservatives have been consistent on since this country was founded. You guessed it, their belief that white people are more entitled than people of color. Can you name another conservative value that has been so consistent?

 

Of course, but the 80s are arguably the most consequential decade in terms of the political trajectory of the country (simply due to the realignment of the courts).

 

This is where the EC is relevant to both 2016 and 2020 (and 2000). Because of its winner-take-all setup, switching a small number of votes in Georgia or Arizona flips a huge amount of EC votes, whereas it no real impact in a popular vote structure.

 

The electoral college is flawed in that it in principle is designed to give land... not people... voting power. When the framers constructed the EC back in the day I understand why they did it with so much concentration of power in just a couple NE cities, and an pioneer expansion happening out west that you wanted to ensure those people blazing a trail weren't at risk of forming their own countries in the future.

But we live in a different time now, and the system is very out dated. STILL... I think with the way that the world is changing, it's only a matter of time (especially with global warming) that our population moves more and more to those states with resources such as Minnesota, Michigan, Idaho, etc. I think it's very likely that we see state power hubs look very different in coming years because of where people live. I don't necessarily think the Electoral College is going to benefit or hurt the major political parties in the long run because of this.

In the short term... yeah, it gives waaaaayyyyyy too much power to Texas, and Florida who have very poor undemocratic leadership unworthy of holding the mantle of having so much EC power in the coming elections of the next 20 years. If we can weather that storm though, I think in the long-run 20 to 50 years, it'll work out well enough to have a pretty balanced election setup.

 

Nope, the EC has nothing to do with land. Zero. It's a flat-out racist institution.

It was instituted to count 3/5ths of a black person (aka slaves) as a resident towards the census thereby enabling southern (aka slave holding) states to have additional congressional representatives. Of course, those same slaves are not allowed to vote for their representation. This effect of counting black people in the census yet minimizing their votes continued it's tradition during the Jim Crowe era. And today we continue to see it in full effect with gerry mandering and voting restriction laws.

The origin story for the EC is a very important fact about America that has been, well, whitewashed.

I agree with everything else you said but this point is super important. We need to call a spade a spade.

 

Holy ALT History Batman!

Very interesting.

We probably then don't get Clinton because of Democratic overreach and who knows who the Republicans nominate.

Would like to see a what if in that scenario.