President Elect: Donald J. Trump

[Brandon Rhea]

Country Name, Country Name. Platitude, Platitude.

#SolidPoliticalPlatform

 

[Kaane]

The Electoral College and why it matters.

I think the electoral college is the best way to determine our president and here is why.

Real talk for one second. If Trump had lost, would you really be defending the Electoral College this hard? It seems like you're trying to rationalize his victory so it doesn't seem so contrived, especially when Trump himself was fervently (at least, I think so?) against this sort of corruption.

If anything, btw, rural votes matter much less in a state by state winner takes all contest. Cities singlehandedly win entire states. Your vote is silenced when the urban centers step in. If you're a rural dude living in PA or anywhere else in the Blue Wall (except in this circumstance where the Dem candidate was so terrible no one wanted her to even exist), then you're fucked.

These population centers grant the state more electoral votes. Meaning if you're living in Idaho, then your 4 electoral votes mean nothing in comparison to NY's 29, PA's 20, or CA's 55.

Let's not forget too, that CA has a ton of people in it who vote Republican, the North and non-coastal areas are Red. But yet the electoral college system means alllllll of their votes mean absolutely nothing. Zero, zilch, nada. The 3 million who voted for Trump just don't get counted, it's like they don't exist. And on smaller scales, the same thing happens in all the other states with large cities and a cluster of elites. The rural population gets discounted. Their votes mean nothing.

And even if you what you said about the EC being good for rural peeps is true and the EC was gotten rid of, let me drop some knowledge on you. The Senate is your savior. The Senate is what keeps rural states and populations on equal ground regardless of anything else. Every state gets 2 votes, no matter what. And when they're actually doing their job, they have always been advocates for the rural areas they represent. They keep the smaller states and smaller populations in the game. And ultimately? They have WAY more power than the House. It's part of our checks and balances system.

Yet the EC is one check we could do without. And I can, myself, say firmly, that if Clinton won the electoral vote and lost the popular vote, I would still want the EC gone, since it would have silenced a group just as passionate, just as deserving, and just as desperate for change as the people who backed her. There's no reason for it, absolutely none.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

when Trump himself was fervently (at least, I think so?) against this sort of corruption.

Trump when, for reasons passing understanding, he mistakenly thought Romney won the popular vote but lost the election in 2012:

"The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy. We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided! Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us. This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy! Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble...like never before. Our nation is a once great nation divided!"​

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dona...tweetstorm-resurfaces-popular-electoral/story

 

[Kaane]

Regardless of my angered convictions concerning them both...the irony is rich.

 

[Jake]

https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656

 

[Roen]

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/musl...ck-admits-made/story?id=43442471&cid=abcn_tco

 

[Mr.BossMan]

Real talk for one second. If Trump had lost, would you really be defending the Electoral College this hard? It seems like you're trying to rationalize his victory so it doesn't seem so contrived, especially when Trump himself was fervently (at least, I think so?) against this sort of corruption.

If anything, btw, rural votes matter much less in a state by state winner takes all contest. Cities singlehandedly win entire states. Your vote is silenced when the urban centers step in. If you're a rural dude living in PA or anywhere else in the Blue Wall (except in this circumstance where the Dem candidate was so terrible no one wanted her to even exist), then you're ******.

These population centers grant the state more electoral votes. Meaning if you're living in Idaho, then your 4 electoral votes mean nothing in comparison to NY's 29, PA's 20, or CA's 55.

Let's not forget too, that CA has a ton of people in it who vote Republican, the North and non-coastal areas are Red. But yet the electoral college system means alllllll of their votes mean absolutely nothing. Zero, zilch, nada. The 3 million who voted for Trump just don't get counted, it's like they don't exist. And on smaller scales, the same thing happens in all the other states with large cities and a cluster of elites. The rural population gets discounted. Their votes mean nothing.

And even if you what you said about the EC being good for rural peeps is true and the EC was gotten rid of, let me drop some knowledge on you. The Senate is your savior. The Senate is what keeps rural states and populations on equal ground regardless of anything else. Every state gets 2 votes, no matter what. And when they're actually doing their job, they have always been advocates for the rural areas they represent. They keep the smaller states and smaller populations in the game. And ultimately? They have WAY more power than the House. It's part of our checks and balances system.

Yet the EC is one check we could do without. And I can, myself, say firmly, that if Clinton won the electoral vote and lost the popular vote, I would still want the EC gone, since it would have silenced a group just as passionate, just as deserving, and just as desperate for change as the people who backed her. There's no reason for it, absolutely none.

Tell me if this video works.

Link: https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=V6s7jB6-GoU

 

[Miz]

Tell me if this video works.

Link: https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=V6s7jB6-GoU

I think the link is broken.

 

[Mr.BossMan]

I think the link is broken.

Thanks for telling me. Much appreciated.



Okay so what imma about to post is gonna be kinda long. I tried to give y'all the video by posting it....however I'm not technologically inclined. So I couldn't post the video. Notice I simply copy and pasted the dialogue from the video and you'll just have to read it old school style.

This is Tera Ross from Prager University:

"I want to talk you about the Electoral College and why it matters.

Alright, I know this doesn't sound the like most sensational topic of the day, but, stay with me because, I promise you, it's one of the most important.

To explain why requires a very brief civics review.

The President and Vice President of the United States are not chosen by a nationwide, popular vote of the American people; rather, they are chosen by 538 electors. This process is spelled out in the United States Constitution.

Why didn't the Founders just make it easy, and let the Presidential candidate with the most votes claim victory? Why did they create, and why do we continue to need, this Electoral College?

The answer is critical to understanding not only the Electoral College, but also America.

The Founders had no intention of creating a pure majority-rule democracy. They knew from careful study of history what most have forgotten today, or never learned: pure democracies do not work.

They implode.

Democracy has been colorfully described as two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. In a pure democracy, bare majorities can easily tyrannize the rest of a country. The Founders wanted to avoid this at all costs.

This is why we have three branches of government -- Executive, Legislative and Judicial. It's why each state has two Senators no matter what its population, but also different numbers of Representatives based entirely on population. It's why it takes a supermajority in Congress and three-quarters of the states to change the Constitution.

And, it's why we have the Electoral College.

Here's how the Electoral College works.

The Presidential election happens in two phases. The first phase is purely democratic. We hold 51 popular elections every presidential election year: one in each state and one in D.C.

On Election Day in 2012, you may have thought you were voting for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, but you were really voting for a slate of presidential electors. In Rhode Island, for example, if you voted for Barack Obama, you voted for the state's four Democratic electors; if you voted for Mitt Romney you were really voting for the state's four Republican electors.

Part Two of the election is held in December. And it is this December election among the states' 538 electors, not the November election, which officially determines the identity of the next President. At least 270 votes are needed to win.

Why is this so important?

Because the system encourages coalition-building and national campaigning. In order to win, a candidate must have the support of many different types of voters, from various parts of the country.

Winning only the South or the Midwest is not good enough. You cannot win 270 electoral votes if only one part of the country is supporting you.

But if winning were only about getting the most votes, a candidate might concentrate all of his efforts in the biggest cities or the biggest states. Why would that candidate care about what people in West Virginia or Iowa or Montana think?

But, you might ask, isn't the election really only about the so-called swing states?

Actually, no. If nothing else, safe and swing states are constantly changing.

California voted safely Republican as recently as 1988. Texas used to vote Democrat. Neither New Hampshire nor Virginia used to be swing states.

Most people think that George W. Bush won the 2000 election because of Florida. Well, sort of. But he really won the election because he managed to flip one state which the Democrats thought was safe: West Virginia. Its 4 electoral votes turned out to be decisive.

No political party can ignore any state for too long without suffering the consequences. Every state, and therefore every voter in every state, is important.

The Electoral College also makes it harder to steal elections. Votes must be stolen in the right state in order to change the outcome of the Electoral College. With so many swing states, this is hard to predict and hard to do.

But without the Electoral College, any vote stolen in any precinct in the country could affect the national outcome -- even if that vote was easily stolen in the bluest California precinct or the reddest Texas one.

The Electoral College is an ingenious method of selecting a President for a great, diverse republic such as our own -- it protects against the tyranny of the majority, encourages coalition building and discourages voter fraud. Our Founders were proud of it! We can be too."

 

[Green Ranger]

I'm sorry, but that's a terrible argument on so many levels.

Saying 'it works good and here's why', and then following it up with a rudimentary explanation of how it works rather than why it works better than other systems, is shamefully flimsy. In fact it doesn't even try to make comparisons with other democratic systems - the closest it gets to doing so is by doing a comparison with a popular vote, and even then it stuffs it up because it still looks at it through the framework of a state-by-state dissection - in other words, it's using the structure of the EC to argue against a system that wouldn't need to use the EC.

It also refutes the issue of safe states by saying 'yeah but the swing like every generation or so so it's cool and not broken at all' - shitty rebuttal is shitty. Expecting voters to wait their turn until their state is important is frankly bullshit and shouldn't even be used as a joke.

The only even remotely plausible criticism it hits on is that politicians may focus on cities rather than rural areas to garner more votes in a popular vote campaign - but luckily the population divide in the US, and the factor of voting being optional, means that you cant ever discount the rural heartland votes anyway, otherwise you wind up in the position of the Democrats right now. Even under a popular vote system, the Democrats would have had to fight tooth and nail to claw back support for the mid-terms, because the margin in the popular vote was so slim. So I disagree with that notion entirely as well.

But going back to what Kaane said. Millions of voters have no voice right now because their states are safely opposed to them - with some states having voted for the same party for almost entire generations. That alone is reason enough to consider the electoral college system broken.

Also,

'Democracy has been colorfully described as two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. In a pure democracy, bare majorities can easily tyrannize the rest of a country. The Founders wanted to avoid this at all costs. '

If a bare majority tyrannizing the country is the measure of a failed democracy, then what does that make a bare minority tyrannizing the country? By your own source's measure, the system has failed.

 

[Nor'baal]

It's almost like an electoral system designed 250 years ago isn't suitable for the modern age.

 

[Jinan B]

Not that the bare majority dictated anything anyways. The majority didn't vote

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Raydo]

I think there is definitely room to improve the system. I would like to see states get rid of their winner take all systems and hand out elector posistions based on percentage of voters in each state. This peserves the voice of states with smaller population centers and gives a voice to those minority party leaders in states like California ect.

If you want change, you will need to want it for longer than a couple weeks after the election. This country has a pretty nasty habit of getting up in arms about situations that didn't go our way, but cant be bothered to continue to fight for change until something "hashtagable" happens again.

 

[Kaane]

If you want change, you will need to want it for longer than a couple weeks after the election. This country has a pretty nasty habit of getting up in arms about situations that didn't go our way, but cant be bothered to continue to fight for change until something "hashtagable" happens again.

Trump would literally have to go out on fifth avenue and shoot somebody for anything substantial concerning our democracy to happen XD

 

[Brandon Rhea]

The "small states vs big states" argument made sense in 1787 when America had like 12 people and 8 of them lived in Massachusetts, but that's not what the country is like anymore. The fact that Hillary won the popular vote by something like only 200,000 votes shows just how much every vote counts. You can't just rely on New York or California at that point. You have to go everywhere, because in an increasingly divided country, you have to find every vote you can get.

And the notion of "the founders didn't want democracy, therefore this won't work" is also silly. Literally every other election in this country is based on the popular vote. We don't choose electors to choose our representatives or land commissioners, we choose them ourselves. That doesn't make us a direct democracy, that's just taking out a needless middle step.

 

[Clayton]

Trump would literally have to go out on fifth avenue and shoot somebody for anything substantial concerning our democracy to happen XD

If George Zimmerman could get away with it, Trump could too.

 

[Mr.BossMan]

I think there is definitely room to improve the system. I would like to see states get rid of their winner take all systems and hand out elector posistions based on percentage of voters in each state. This peserves the voice of states with smaller population centers and gives a voice to those minority party leaders in states like California ect.

If you want change, you will need to want it for longer than a couple weeks after the election. This country has a pretty nasty habit of getting up in arms about situations that didn't go our way, but cant be bothered to continue to fight for change until something "hashtagable" happens again.

I'd concede to this.

I believe only two states do it though.

Edit: however to get this I'd only accept it if the constitution was amended. Not what the NVP is currently doing which is basically going around the constitution.

 

[Logan]

If Ben Carson becomes secretary of education we're all fucked.

 

[Mr.BossMan]

If Ben Carson becomes secretary of education we're all ******.

How do you figure?

 

[Clayton]

How do you figure?

Besides the fact that he's a Young-Earth Creationist that thinks the Pyramids were built to store grain during a famine in Egypt, even though even the Bible doesn't say that, let alone thousands of artifacts recovered that say otherwise?