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 (See new blog)
CBS news -- Why the US uses the Electoral College in presidential elections video
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, it 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 but, 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."
CURRENT ELECTORAL COLLEGE ALLOCATIONS
The allocations below are based on the 2010 Census. They are effective for the 2012, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections.
Total Electoral Votes: 538; Majority Needed to Elect: 270
Alabama - 9 votes Kentucky - 8 votes North Dakota - 3 votes
Alaska - 3 votes Louisiana - 8 votes Ohio - 18 votes
Arizona - 11 votes Maine - 4 votes Oklahoma - 7 votes
Arkansas - 6 votes Maryland - 10 votes Oregon - 7 votes
California - 55 votes Massachusetts - 11 votes Pennsylvania - 20 votes
Colorado - 9 votes Michigan - 16 votes Rhode Island - 4 votes
Connecticut - 7 votes Minnesota - 10 votes South Carolina - 9 votes
Delaware - 3 votes Mississippi - 6 votes South Dakota - 3 votes
District of Columbia - 3 votes Missouri - 10 votes Tennessee - 11 votes
Florida - 29 votes Montana - 3 votes Texas - 38 votes
Georgia - 16 votes Nebraska - 5 votes Utah - 6 votes
Hawaii - 4 votes Nevada - 6 votes Vermont - 3 votes
Idaho - 4 votes New Hampshire - 4 votes Virginia - 13 votes
Illinois - 20 votes New Jersey - 14 votes Washington - 12 votes
Indiana - 11 votes New Mexico - 5 votes West Virginia - 5 votes
Iowa - 6 votes New York - 29 votes Wisconsin - 10 votes
Kansas - 6 votes North Carolina - 15 votes Wyoming - 3 votes
Electoral College/Supreme Court -- 2020
• Electoral College: On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case in April that could determine whether laws banning "faithless electors" in the Electoral College are unconstitutional.
These laws prevent electors pledged to a candidate from voting for a different candidate. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Colorado's ban on faithless electors last year, but Washington's Supreme Court upheld its state's faithless elector ban. The losers in both lawsuits appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, meaning that to resolve this split, the justices must overturn at least one of these rulings.
The 10th Circuit's decision may be the one that's more vulnerable on appeal. As election law expert Derek Muller has previously noted, the 10th Circuit failed to take notice of a similar case out of Minnesota that the 8th Circuit rejected in 2018, deeming the issue moot. Muller further observed that the Supreme Court could overturn the 10th Circuit's ruling on procedural grounds, much as the Minnesota challenge was.
However, if the Colorado ruling were to be upheld by the Supreme Court and therefore set a national precedent, it would unbind every elector from any state law prohibiting faithless electors. Such an outcome could alter the result of a close Electoral College vote, adding uncertainty as to whether a candidate who appeared to have won a narrow victory would in fact prevail in the Electoral College. While faithless electors have been infrequent in modern history, removing any limits could embolden electors to defect and consequently risk chaos if electors were to randomly overturn expected election results.
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.
Answering Myths
Changing the way we elect the President is an important topic that deserves careful scrutiny. This page summarizes the concerns that have been raised during the course of the debate on the National Popular Vote bill, and shows how they are myths. The 131 Myths are grouped into categories that can be browsed.