HOW TO STEAL AN ELECTION
GERRYMANDERING
A picture is worth a thousand words in the case of gerrymandering. Study this graphic for a few minutes, count the boxes and you will see what a huge impact can be made by drawing boundaries for political gain and to maintain unfair, unrepresentative advantage.
There have been five presidential elections where the Democratic candidate for president has received the majority of the popular vote,
5 times total and 2 times since 2000! Gore beat Bush by 500,000 votes. Clinton beat Trump by approximately 2.9 Million votes.
This is wrong. It makes a mockery of one person, one vote. And it has led to the minority, not majority, representation in the US.
The Trump administration's attempt to collect immigration data for the 2020 census was based on needing the information so more gerrymandering could be done.
One man was responsible for drawing the maps and advising Republicans throughout the country. He recently died. He had advised everyone against keeping any records or writing anything down. However he kept his gerrymandering data on a disk. His daughter, who was estranged from her father, found the disk and turned the disk over to the authorities and law firms that fight gerrymandering. Rough justice.
Look up Thomas Hoeffler and read this article from the New Yorker entitled The Secret Files of the Master of Modern Republican Gerrymandering
ELECTORAL COLLEGE
The electoral college has been skewing the election results in recent years. In two of the last three elections, the Democratic candidate winning the popular vote have lost the presidential election to the Republican candidate. This distortion is creating a mockery of "one person, one vote" and subjecting the American people to minority rule, where the views of the majority are discounted or ignored.
What is the Electoral College? from the NY Times (read full article)
The Electoral College is a group of people that elects the president and the vice president of the United States. (The word “college” in this case simply refers to an organized body of people engaged in a common task.)
HOW IT WORKS
As voters head to the polls, they will not vote for the presidential candidates directly, in a popular vote. Instead, they will vote to elect specific people, known as “electors” to the college. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes based on its population. (See gerrymandering, reapportionment and redistricting below. In gerrymandered states, the member of the electoral college do not necessarily represent the popular vote.)
The "electors" are appointed by the political parties in each state. Even when a Democratic candidate wins the popular vote in a state, tit might happen that the "electors", that the Republican Party has chosen, will cast votes for their Republican candidate in their state capital in December. The "electors" are asked to cast their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December.
Most people don’t pay attention because, technically, it’s the election of the "electors" that matters. And on Election Day, we’re electing the electors who elect the president.
QUESTION PEOPLE HAD IN 2020 DURING THE GORE VS. BUSH ELECTION
These answers were written more than eight years ago in response to readers’ questions:
-
How many times was a president elected who did not win the popular vote? The answer is four, with the most recent occurring in 2000 when Al Gore received over 500,000 popular votes more than George W. Bush. But Bush won the electoral vote, 271 to 266.
-
Why does the U.S. have an Electoral College? The short answer is the framers of the Constitution didn’t trust direct democracy, and provided an extra layer to ensure, as James Madison put it, that “factions” of citizens with a common interest don’t harm the nation as a whole. However, the Electoral College had become a mere formality, until recently.
For more information, please read “Presidents Winning Without Popular Vote” and “The Reason for the Electoral College.”
Update, Dec. 23: There now have been five times in which a president was elected who didn’t win the popular vote. Trump won the electoral vote 304 to 227, but Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes."
NATIONAL INTERSTATE VOTING COMPACT
One solution is the National Interstate Voting Compact which allows states to vote their electoral college votes based on the state's popular vote. This is worth fighting for but it is unlikely to occur in time for the 2020 election.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Explanation.
It has been enacted into law in 16 jurisdictions with 196 electoral votes (CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, HI, IL, MA, MD, NJ, NM, NY, OR, RI, VT, WA). The bill will go into effect when enacted by states with an additional 74 electoral votes. See map. We authored the National Popular Vote bill, and are the non-partisan, non-profit group that employs traveling and local representatives, on a year-round basis, to meet with state legislators, other officials, voters, organizations, and the media in order to get the bill passed.