electoral college Archives · Zepp's Commentaries

December 15, 2020December 15, 2020

The Dawn of Hope — No Hope for Don

December 14^th 2020

The Electoral College held its vote today under some of the strangest conditions in American history. In some states threatening mobs gathered outside, hoping to intimidate the electors. In Georgia, some goofs presented themselves to the public as “alternative electors” and voted for Trump. In various spots, there were vigils held by people demanding that Trump be given justice by the courts, something he has already had over 50 times over the past six weeks. He lost every one of them, including to a large number of Trump-appointed judges, plus all three of Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court.

Of course, Trump WILL be given justice by the courts after he leaves office. But that’s different. If it’s bad for Trump, then it can’t possibly be justice.

The thing, dealing with the dead enders who still believe Trump has been given a second term, is that behind all the bluster and anger and moral rectitude is a level of servility that can’t be described. How DARE the voters defy the Lord? No, they didn’t defy the LORD! Evil forces twisted their will! Trump actually won by 600 million votes, because he is the Lord our God. But Satan is everywhere, in the voting machines, in the Republican states, yeah and verily in the hearts of all the judges and all the state governments that solemnly proclaimed Joe Biden to be a winner.

Surely there is a mistake. God can’t lose an election!

It’s one thing to see Republicans who believe they have a right to rule. They are rich, or at least well-connected, and throughout human history the rich have always assumed they had a right to rule. It’s why human history, by and large, is pretty fucked up. Wealth doesn’t buy wisdom or forbearance or a sense of justice. It just buys hangers-on willing to maintain the illusion of such things as they gouge the people.

Trump supporters, by and large, are in the bottom 90% of American income. They are, by definition, a small percentage of that 90%, but they are noisy and arrogant and sometimes violent in defense of a man whose openly stated talent is the ability to cheat and steal. Yes, Trump supporters, that includes you. Trump’s personal history is littered with the corpses of his supporters. That won’t change.

Trump supporters either prop their belief in that wastrel on either absurdities (“Trump will take care of us!”) or flat out ridiculosities (“Trump has earned the respect of the world!”)

They’ve been drawing in the wagons over the past few weeks as more and more of their illusions are shown to be delusions. Liberals didn’t control the vote. If they did, Mitch McConnell would be long gone, and they would have had huge majorities in the House and Senate. They didn’t even control Georgia, where both Senate races went to runoffs next month which will determine who controls the Senate. There was no fraud, and even Trump’s own lawyers admitted there was no evidence of fraud. China didn’t rig the election. Nor did Hugo Chavez or the Canadian government.

A lot of Republicans had already spun off from the party over the past 12 years as madness enveloped the party. Charles Koch is said to have regretted forming the Tea Party, the font from which much of the madness in today’s GOP flows. The joke making the rounds is that “A moderate Democrat is a Republican who realized just how bat-shit crazy his party had become.”

This brings us to a fabulous creature known as the Oozlum Bird. The Oozlum bird, when startled, will take off and fly around in ever-decreasing circles until it manages to fly up its own backside, disappearing completely. The behavior of the Oozlum bird has been famously used to describe the ever diminishing realities of paranoids and cultists as their views of the world are put under pressure by the steady application of facts.

The Oozlum Bird, from “Carry On Up the Jungle”

Trump has basically already flown up his own ass and vanished at this point. And a lot of the party, including the state A-Gs and pitiful congressionals who voted to support Paxton’s ludicrous effort to have Texas nullify the votes of four other states are finally conceding that yes, Biden did win the election, although quite a few are snarling that as soon as some evidence that
Biden stole it does materialize, they’ll be right back in court.

Meanwhile, they’ve declared war on the GOP and Fox News, which tactically makes as much sense as trying to force the oxygen out of the room you are in.

The right wing trash including the outlaw bikers and the Nazis who have been threatening public officials and roaming the streets of Washington DC and Portland looking for Jews, um, Antifa to beat up are starting to notice they don’t have the support of the people, and without that, they are nothing.

It’s all over but the shouting, and that will go on for quite some time, but for all intents and purposes, the Oozlum bird known as the Trump movement has vanished with an effervescent, if somewhat smelly, pop.

October 30, 2020October 30, 2020

It’s Here – Election time

It’s Here

Election time

10/30/20

There’s going to be an election next Tuesday.

People who read me are more woke and aware than the common rabble, so chances are many of you already knew that. Anyone who didn’t know that, drop everything and start doing a lot of reading over the weekend. Prepare for some nasty shocks. Yes, Donald Trump is the incumbent. Believe it or not, it goes downhill from there.

So, what should we expect from this election?

The signals from the polls are significantly stronger this time then they were in 2016. The polls are narrowing in the final days, but a) over half the population have already voted and b) it’s still over 8 points.

There’s been a lot of propaganda about how the polls are meaningless, and of course, polls taken more than a couple of weeks before an election generally are meaningless. And there are a lot of crap polls out there. Rasmussen is little more than a GOP cheering squad, and Zogby doesn’t even qualify as a bad joke. We all remember one poll that nobody had ever heard of before (or since) that showed McCain leading Obama a few weeks before the election by 20 points.

But the legitimate polls are accurate. Those showed Clinton winning the popular vote by 2-4 points, and she won by 2.5 points. Well within the range of error. The polls are narrowing in the final days, but a) over half the population have already voted and b) the Biden lead over Trump still over 8 points.
I’m expecting that come Wednesday morning, Trump may actually be leading in the electoral college count. The reason for that is that early voting has been mostly Democratic, and come election day, as many as 100 million people may have voted. That would be nearly as many who voted in total in 2016.

Now, if we wake up Wednesday morning and Trump is leading in all fifty states, then it’s safe to assume that Putin and/or the people conducting the cyberattack on hospitals this week have taken over counting the votes, in which case the question you have to ask yourself is not “Who won?” but rather, “Will I still be alive three months from now?” If Putin does scramble the election results, it won’t be because he has our best interests at heart. No, Donald, not even your best interests. He isn’t your buddy. He would find an America in chaos and severe civil strife most amusing as he started swallowing eastern European republics like they were popcorn.

But if you wake up that morning, and the electoral maps on the TV are similar to those of 2016 and show a Trump win, don’t panic.

There is a tidal wave of blue votes yet to be counted. Remember all those banana-republic type eight-hour lines to vote we’ve been seeing for the past month? That’s the early voters—85 million of them as of yesterday. Most of them are Democrats, and there’s a fair number of Republicans who are furious at the party for fucking up the mail service, messing with their ability to vote, and jamming their nasty little fascist theocrat down our throats that they decided to make a protest vote.

But all the early votes get counted—by hand—starting when the polls close. Those will take days, and even weeks to tabulate.

And that’s OK. It used to be that it was normal to have to wait a month or two to find out who won the presidential election, and it was the reason why the actual transfer of power took place four months after voting day. As recently as 1960, it wasn’t clear from the voting who the president was by New Years’. It may have taken a few weeks to determine who won the election in 2000, were it not for a decision by the Supreme Court that was so illegal they make the unique stipulation that Bush vs. Gore never be used as a precedent. (Kavanaugh the Klueless proceeded to try to do that just last week, of course.)

It may take a few weeks to know definitively who won. The Republicans will do everything to stop the counting, including trying to get their toy justices to rule that Trump is God because GOP. Those six clowns will have to decide whether they want to please Donald and lose their credibility and authority forever, or take a stand and prepare for a miserable couple of months compared to risking their lives betraying their country.

Oh–and even if you live in a state where the Presidential race is all but settled, such as California or Kansas, vote anyway. The downticket races are a lot more fluid, and this year especially, more important. Its a Census year, and your vote now determines the influence your vote will have over the next ten years.

There’s a lot of speculation about post election violence, but I don’t really see that happening while it’s still being decided who won. After that, well, we’ll just have to see. Hopefully the results will be clear enough, and have enough legitimacy, that the losing side will feel a patriotic duty to accept those results.

When the dust settles, probably around the 15th, Biden should have 350 of the 270 EVs needed to win. And the US will have taken its first big step back toward being a free and democratic republic.

Then we have the next nightmare to endure: a panicked, furious, frightened Trump. Let’s just hope he doesn’t decide the world must pay for failing to adore him.

November 15, 2018

The Constitutional Gerrymander – A proposal to make the Senate more equitable

November 15^th 2018

The latest wrinkle amongst Republicans arguing in favor of the Senate system of allocation (and by extension the Electoral College) is that it actually favors Democrats, since seven of the ten lowest states by population have one Democratic Senator and five of the smallest have two Democratic Senators. It’s a perfectly true statement, but it’s also a fact that is cherry-picked. The Senate doesn’t favor Democrats, as this last election showed: Overall, in the 33 states that had Senate elections this year, Democrats outpolled Republicans by some 12 million votes—and lost two seats. (Although three seats are still undergoing the recount process).

There’s an easier way to demonstrate that the Republican making this argument is gaslighting you: just ask him if this means he supports changing the makeup of the Senate to make it more equitable. After all, if the Senate gives the Democrats an unfair advantage, surely he would want to do something about it. At that point the Republican will either tell you that the Constitution is the sacred word of God and must not be questioned, or he’ll just simply scamper away. Either way he’ll suddenly lose interest in defending the underrepresentation of those poor Republicans.

Of the fourteen* states in the 1790 census, four had 2,071,170 people, roughly 53% of the total population**. That 53% covered 28% of the Senate. (If you limited to white property owners, then the Senate representation of people who could vote was much more equitable, since women and slaves could not vote). But even the 53/28 ratio is more equitable than it is today: 70/30. Thirty percent of the population control 70% of the Senate, and the fascist right have been blasting those 35 states with unending propaganda, persuading them that they must defeat the “city elites” or be completely subsumed by those pesky Americans living in desirable and productive states. OK, they don’t put it quite that way. They usually settle for warning about coastal elites.

And yes, these are billionaires with bloated senses of entitlement warning the rural population against elites. Yes, it’s grotesque.

I have a suggestion to alleviate this state of affairs while still protecting the smaller states. It would require a constitutional amendment, and would not be popular in at least ten states, but it should be worth considering.

Change the allocation of the Senate as follows: the smallest ten states by population will have just one senator. The ten largest by population would have three senators. The rest would stay at two senators.

What would the top to bottom distribution be then? The ten smallest states, with 9,582,945 people, would see their representation halved, from 20% to 10%. However, they only make up 3.1% of the population, so they would still be overrepresented. The ten largest states would make up 30% of the Senate rather than 10%, but with about 49% of the population, would still be underrepresented.

I don’t have a problem with the built-in bias in and of itself. There is a certain amount of wisdom in not allowing the population centers to run rough-shod over the more thinly populated regions. It’s just that the existing bias is way out of hand, and gives a handful of rich bad actors a loophole to manipulate the government of the country on the cheap.

How would this affect the Electoral College? As most of you know, the EC gives each state electoral votes that equal the sum of their House representatives and the two senators. (For example, Wyoming has one representative and two senators, thus three EC votes). Worse, most states have a winner take all tabulation. Win California by one vote, and get all 55 of the electoral votes).

As a part of the same amendment reallocating the Senate, I would get rid of the Electoral College altogether. Its only purpose is to allow unpopular political parties to cheat, and steal presidencies. (Oddly enough, all five instances involve Republicans). It’s detrimental to the validity of national elections, and has done far more harm than good.

The amendment would have a provision automatically reallocating Senator seats based on the ten-year census. For example, I was using the figures from the 2010 census and the 2020 census might show different states occupying the coveted #10 position, or the much-less-coveted #41 position. It’s not real likely in this census, but it will occur as states rise and fall. In which case, reallocation takes place before the following election, and is automatic. States losing a Senator may decide in a special election which one to dump.

As things stand, this particular idea has zero chance of implementation, but then, that’s true of most new ideas. Pass it around, let people mull it over, and see if it germinates.

The United States does need to address the issue of allocation, because it is being used as a tool to thwart public will, and that’s always detrimental.

*Maine was counted apart from Massachusetts but was still a part of the state. Likewise Kentucky and Virginia. So you had 16 states in the census but only 14 in the Senate.

**Skewed by the fact that slaves (some 700,000 or so) only counted as 3/5ths of a person each, and could not vote. Even then, bigotry made America grotesque.