Now some people are seriously saying the Electoral College may simply refuse to put Trump in office:
A few questions: Did Hillary’s concession speech mean she would not accept an Electoral College endorsement if it happened? If not Trump or Hillary than who? Given a Republican majority in both houses, would they refuse to certify the vote?
My 2-¢: If rogue electors nullified Trump’s victory and put Hillary Clinton in the White House, open rebellion might not be just trash talk.
This election begins to sound as though it occurred in a banana republic.
If the EC revolts, then we accept the result. Clinton won the popular vote, I’m not going to bitch. The EC would be working as designed, to exercise independent judgment.
The likelihood of that actually happening is slim though. Especially if Trump can behave himself as well as he’s been doing until they vote.
So let me ask you a question.
If Hillary had won the EC and Trump had won the popular vote, would you still be OK with the EC going rogue?
Justify your answer and show your work.
That’s harder to answer, but if the electors that REPUBLICANS chose to represent them think Trump is unfit, then who am I to gainsay them? And I feel the same about Democratic electors. Or they could all get together and decide on someone who actually is fit.
We might see 1 or 2 faithless electors, but no more than that.
Are any of the people saying this electors for Trump?
There’s a Facebook petition circulating to ask electors not to vote for Trump. I have a pretty low opinion of the value of Facebook petitions, but it’s pretty popular, FWIW.
I’ve always been in favor of the Electoral College, but I’m starting to rethink that. People say it would entail a convoluted constitutional amendment process that no one’s going to want to go through, but hey, when they wanted to repeal Prohibition, they cut right to the chase. It could be done.
The sour grapes is strong with this one.
Not in a million years, even though it’s an attractive fantasy sans the repercussions. If it were to happen, our political system would be broken forever.
In a sane world you would be able to reform the EC without a constitutional amendment. For instance, by getting rid of the electors and making the scores automatic. It’s absurd that a fraction of electors could say “my conscience won’t allow me to cast my vote for the guy who won in our current system.” I mean, who the fuck are they?
If the EC never existed, nobody would be clamoring for it. Were it ever proposed, it would gain zero traction. It was originally about control, and it now serves the cause of inequality. Making some citizens voting power less than others is a civil rights violation. It needs to be ended.
The EC is just affirmative action for rural America. Is it the AA or the rural you dislike? I have my suspicions.
First off, the transitional period would be a mess. Donald Trump is already settling into the presidency, and if Clinton was voted in instead on Dec. 19, she would only have one month to prepare for the presidency (which considering the protocols, briefings and various other codes, would take time considering how old they are), and even then, the congress would decide otherwise to prevent any electors going rogue. It would be a complete fuckup.
The revolt is unlikely. More or less this is just a story the media posted to make people feel better after the election…or in my view, keep the country far from united so that they can profit over chaos.
To be honest, direct votes don’t do much good either- then the inner cities have a say in the government, and if you live in a rural area, you’re out of luck.
OMG, I’m suspect.
If it did the opposite, I’d be equally opposed.
I come from rural and I have no bias (and that’s the whole point, removing bias), except towards enthusiastic Trump supporters. They have those in the big, bad city too, ya know.
And for the millionth time, rural America is already over-represented via the Senate. There is no need to double down on the AA.
Getting 1-3 electors to defect is one thing. For Hillary to win, 19 Trump electors would have to switch over to her side. That’s impossible.
That being said, maybe someday the EC will move to something of a points system, whereby the slate of electors doesn’t exist in human form, but rather, is simply a slate of points awarded to the winning candidate. So if a candidate wins Texas, he or she gets 38 electoral votes that are really nothing but score points. There would be no real humans who could go rogue and act faithlessly.
Out of luck? Almost everything in our lives is controlled by local government. This is the leader of the country, not the zoning commission. Where you live shouldn’t matter. To make matters worse, in the current political environment, you’re advocating taking from urban minorities and giving to rural whites. It really doesn’t play all that well.
It wouldn’t break the system at all, actually. Rule of law is like that. There are only two real possibilities that will have implications beyond the initial outrage:
I fail to see how the EC electing a candidate is worse than SCOTUS doing so and we got through that.
Supposed it happened. In the future, electors become commodities because the other side now wants in too. You could do very well as an elector. Everything from cold hard cash to patronage. Utterly broken.
If it’s that much of a risk then it would be fixed. However, what you described is precisely why electors nearly always vote for who they are supposed to: they are considered loyal party flunkies.
Which makes their very existence ridiculous.