-By Warner Todd Huston
Today, December 19, is the day the electors meet to cast their Electoral College votes to actually certify who will become the next president of the United States and if the anti-American left has its way enough of these electors will defy their duty and vote for anyone other than the actual winner, Donald J. Trump. Even if this last second effort doesn’t beat Trump, the whole campaign is thoroughly anti-American and can’t end well.
Thanks to our horrid system of (mis)education, many Americans are just waking up to news of the Electoral College (EC). Many are surprised over the way we’ve chosen our president since the beginning. They are shocked that we’ve never elected our president via the “popular vote” because we are not a democracy. We are a representative republic and the EC is one of the ways we manifest that “representative” part of our system.
What is the EC?
The Electoral College is currently made up of 538 electors. 270 or more of their votes are required to elect a President. Each state’s allotment of electors is determined by the number of members in its Congressional delegation which equals one for each member in their delegation to the House of Representatives along with one for each Senator.
Most states now have a “winner-take-all” system that awards all electors to the candidate who won the state’s popular vote. But Maine and Nebraska currently utilize a variation of “proportional representation.”
How Does The EC Vote?
The electors meet together in their respective states on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in the December after the presidential election. Contrary to what many imagine, the electors do not meet in one great hall somewhere in Washington D.C., but in their separate states. This is one of the reasons that it is harder than the liberals would think to sway their votes. The electors would have to be swayed in persuasion campaigns in spanning all 50 states (or at least the several where a major change would make a difference), not during a meeting at one central convention. That decentralization was a key aspect of why the founders felt the EC would be beyond influences.
Prager University has a great video explaining the EC:
A Short History of the EC’s Origination
The EC was set up by Article II of the U.S. Constitution but after the elections of 1789 and 1800 problems arose. Changes were then proposed by the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified in 1804.
While the EC itself wasn’t changed with the amendment, the Twelfth did change how the candidates run for the top two offices in the nation. After the two very problematic and contentious elections proved that our original system was not working, it was decided that the presidential and vice presidential candidates would run together on a ticket instead of the previous system whereby the VP was automatically bestowed upon the first runner up for the presidency.
After the rather easy first two elections of George Washington, the founders very quickly learned that the emerging party system made their original idea a major problem. They discovered that if the second runner up was a person of an opposing party he would not work well with his new president and boss and the whole executive office would start out on a contentious note. The first election to be carried out under the Twelfth Amendment was the election of 1804, Thomas Jefferson’s second term.
But that glitch aside, the original EC was still a valid idea as it was meant as a way to make sure that presidential candidates don’t focus only on a handful of the most populous states. Instead it forces candidates to pay equal attention to the smaller states in an effort to make sure candidates treat the whole of the country as worthy of notice during their campaigns. This gave the small states a voice in the elections.
Some may argue that the EC still gives the big states the main voice, but the fact is those big states change over time and there are several paths to gain the needed 270 EC votes. So, the EC does force candidates to devise campaigns to do more than just stump in the three or four biggest states while ignoring the rest of the country.
What if the EC Was Eliminated?
Let’s put it this way, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in California with 8,753,788 votes. Trump won only 4,483,810 in the Golden State. That means Hillary won 4,269,978 more votes than Trump did there. Tump lost the popular vote nationwide by just under three million votes. So, in essence California gave Hillary the popular vote win. Without California?
Well, if you deduct Hillary’s California win from Her final vote total then Trump beat her by nearly six million votes. In other words, Hillary was elected president of California and Trump was elected president of the rest of the nation. Without the EC California would have canceled the vote of the whole country and disenfranchised everyone not living in California.
So, Can the EC Change Votes?
Now, this whole nonsense being floated by liberals that the electors of the EC can meet and discuss the election and then decide whether or not to change their votes is all a load of crap. The electors are supposed to simply meet and file their votes as directed by their state rules, not sit around and discuss the election, deliberate over the situation, and make new decisions that alter the November 8 outcome. There simply are no decisions meant to be made during a meeting of the EC. They are just supposed to deliver their vote. Period. End of story.
After all, the people of the states have elected these electors to cast their vote to represent the wishes of the people, they didn’t vote for them to go re-hash the entire campaign for president. If the electors start changing votes they are essentially disenfranchising their state’s own voters, illegally taking votes away from the people. Any change of EC votes is nothing short of vote fraud and if Hillary doesn’t denounce this she is a party to vote fraud.
But it appears that the disenfranchisement of voters, the destruction of our over 200-year-old election system, and the total disrespect for the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power is nothing that bothers anti-American liberals all that much.
In the last few weeks leftists have banded together to force EC electors, many of whom are just normal Americans, to change their votes. And far from a mere information campaign and arguing their point logically, the left has launched a vicious attack on electors by releasing their home phone numbers, their addresses, work emails, and work phone numbers and have even began targeting these electors’ friends and neighbors.
Electors have been receiving harassing phone calls and a massive number of death threats unless they bow to the left’s mob mentality and change their votes to end up casting a vote against Trump.
And so far every attempt the left has tried to force the issue has failed. Last week a mere two electors tried to get a court to allow them to ignore a state law that they had to cast their vote for the winner chosen by the majority of voters in their state. The court denied their request. And now a group dull-witted “celebrities” created a video aimed at electors to force them to surrender themselves to the left.
This isn’t to say that all electors have always voted in accordance with their regulated duties. There have been times when electors have broken their faith with the rules and revolted. But none of these incidents ever seriously threatened the out come of an election. And there isn’t much likelihood that the EC will meet today and enough “faithless electors” will be on hand to change the outcome we all learned about early on November 9.
But what has been happening with the anti-American left may portend troubles in the future. After all, the left has just spent a full month working to undermine not just the nascent Trump administration, but also causing a whole party to lose faith in the system we’ve used with little complaint for over 200 years.
This is not a good thing, to be sure. If this hatred and distrust of our system becomes fully inculcated into the Democrat Party, this will be only the first time we see a loosing Democrat Party working to undermine our electoral system.
If this continues, it can’t end well.
Lastly I need to point out this historical fact: the last time a large number of electors were faithless is when Virginia’s entire delegation reused to vote in 1836. And guess what these Democrats were protesting? You guessed it, the topic was slavery. They were mad that Martin Van Buren’s vice presidential candidate, Richard Mentor Johnson, had an open sexual relationship with a black woman. 23 Virginia Democrats refused to do their duty because they hated that a white person was in love with a black person.
Yes, Democrats are always looking to destroy the system ver something disgusting, aren’t they?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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