My contempt for the electoral college system dates back to that hanging chad matter in Florida that clarified to me the futility of the popular vote, and the rigging's of the two party hustle, even to the degree of their coordinated acquiescence rituals that help keep the rigging's intact.
Without the process of raising the white flag and shifting to support the very person you denigrated days before, the people (US) start to see the unethical aspects of our democracy, the parts that typically get quarantined with acquiescence so that each party's strength is not compromised from exposing ugly truth's every two years in this desperate struggle for power. If the parties have a quarantine, there was first a disease that made it necessary. Very close elections were the first disease to our version of representative democracy. Rogue candidates like Donald Trump are the newest.
In regards to simple politics, acquiescence is actually smart. Acquiescence wards off close vote recounts and brokered conventions, things that force more truth's to be exposed. The2 (my new name for the two-party hustlers) never wanted any of us exposed to the real truth that half of all of our votes (provisional ballots), due to things like late arriving mail or people who vote in the incorrect precint, never get counted anyway. Without quick concessions during close presidential elections, each state with a close outcome would have to be FULLY recounted, including all excluded ballots.
In the end, Al Gore probably acquiesced to Bush with very little fight because The2 really needed him to do it or risk exposing too many of our electoral flaws to concerned voters. For inquisitive people like me, it was already too late.
So What Are Electors and Delegates Good For?
While many aspects of the delegate and elector system were written in a day gone by and are antiquated for a modern world, delegates are actually still very important to manage votes that get cast towards candidates that don't survive until the convention. Without a delegate system, those votes are cast towards absolete candidates and essentially wasted at the convention.
Electors, on the other hand, are useful for balancing the power between California and Wyoming (for example), state's that would have a wider power disparity under a strict popular voting system. A system where EVERY state's electors are bound and proportionately distributed towards WHOEVER receives votes, regardless of party could be a useful, more democratic change. As it stands, electors can ignore the voters, and on 157 occasions, that is exactly what happened.
(votesmart.org)
As WE remain hopeful for an economic evolution sparked by a political revolution, The2 should be viewed as one, and must be challenged accordingly. For lack of better example, challenged like Donald has done after laws upholding campaign finance increases
(Citizens United v. FEC) were upheld, threatening to enslave US all to rich donors. Trumps free, full throttled control over the airwaves has rendered SuperPAC's as super dubious now, maybe even something we don't really need in politics if small donors keep feeling the Bern, and media outlets keeps getting ratings revenue by sticking a microphone in the face of The Donald.
Before Donald and Bernie, political press often waited outside of exquisite homes and fund raising venues to interview Romney, Hillary or any traditional candidate as they hob nobbed with rich and powerful donors just to fund the process. As for the press following Sanders? Not even once has this happened with Sanders, who is thriving on small donations to dominate and redefine the fund raising game, but has yet to do a closed door, big money fund raising event.
 |
George Clooney not only agree's that the big money fund
raising events do produce obscene amounts of money that
needs to be removed from politics, he thinks Hillary can
help win congress and the White House to fix it. |
Aside from the extreme infusion of money, not much about The2 party power maintenance program has actually changed in decades or longer. The key change is mass media and social media that allow the inquisitive to instantly discover details that The2 could readily hide before.
Details such the rules are always adjusted as needed during the convention; or how unbound delegates and faithless electors can, and have disregarded the popular vote during the primary season and the general election.
Are there any
laws to prevent delegate faithlessness? Only in 24 states, but NO ONE has ever been held accountable for acting in bad faith as an elector or delegate. and there is NO WAY to change the election results from their faithless act, even with criminal prosecution. In the world's greatest democracy, only two states in the entire union- Maine and Nebraska- democratically distribute the electors proportionate to the actual voting results, and even they suffer a significant flaw.
Proportionate distribution, while very altruistic, exposes the real problem with American politics and the reason why delegates and electors have value.
Voter apathy. Distributing the votes fairly demands a fair representation of the populace, which NOBODY has figured out how to achieve since ONLY Bernie Sanders is calling for MASS voter turnout as a national necessity- possibly the only hope to save America. He and I agree.
Is this recent lesson about The2 enough to ignite our lazy electorate? God willing. But for now, the democrats are willingly playing the old hush hush game better than republicans who are currently cursed by Trump's tantrum, which has made our rigged system the headline issue for the GOP.
Bernie Sanders complains about everything, but never term limits for congress or the need to win over superdelegates just to stay even in primaries and caucuses that he's destroys Hillary on popular vote.
Why no burn from Bern?
Because Sanders, a Senator of MANY years,
who voted in favor of Bill Clinton's crime bill by the way. is well aware of how things work. While he is technically not part of the democrat establishment, a democratic socialist who runs as a democrat is hardly someone the democrats have not depended on to support causes sensitive to democrats. From all assessments, Bernie is only an independent in congress because he is so far left on most things that he is ends up on the right over one key issue. Gun control.
Other than his NRA loyalties and decades in congress, what makes Bernie completely a part of the establishment of The2- from which he is seeking a nomination from one- is his willingness to stay around when the mirky pathway says he might be running on symbolism only. Bernie is not staying in this race because he's too stupid to see that his path is simply blocked thanks to superdelegates, he is staying in this race because he was asked to do so and understands that, for Hillary's sake, he must.
Sanders has already conceded in a recent interview that he wished he had realized sooner how truly relevant his movement was. In other words, he realizes that it's too late already to win the nominaton, otherwise Sander's would have NEVER allowed those words to come out before quittng or writing his autobiography about the experience.
Disregard all of the contentiousness that we've seen between the two remaining candidates for the democrat nomination. Hillary not only needs Sanders to stay, she needs him to stay viable enough for news coverage because, although the delegate game is rigged already, the news coverage game has been exposed, and is under the grips of The Donald and The Bern, not Clinton, Cruz, or Kasich
8 years ago, when Hillary was overwhelmed by The2 herself, she was smart enough to keep her mouth shut and learn what they allowed Obama to do to her so that she could do it herself next time. She could have blown the whistle on flip flopping delegates herself, who she improperly courted and eventually lost some as they switched to Obama in the closing weeks of that primary.
Trump, on the other hand, can smell the hustle happening early, and he's not having it. Nobody has been fired, but Trump is scrambling to hire the kind of people that he needs to win this delegate game, while basically exposing the world to the fact that many really smart Americans have no real understanding of the very system WE all depend upon to fill the office of the U.S. president. What isn't quite clear, is how exactly did the deal maker, Trump, not deal with the demand for delegates.
The2 have been able to write wrong rules because they know that few understand the rules in the first place. With a couple of tweaks to the rules, The2 ruse together two similar puppets and prop them up for US to choose between. May the strongest money machine win.
I call it a ruse because many of the big money donors that finance campaigns give money to both sides, during the same election often. Trump funded this kind of ruse himself before actually running for president. But it will probably come from our Colorado republicans, who disregarded stupid voters and made the entire caucus process nothing but a ritual this time around after assigning their delegates to Mitt Romney last time, a candidate that didn't survive the 2008 presidential season. Soon after, Colorado republicans decided to disregard dumb voters and distribute their delegates as they saw fit.
I'm prettty proud of my state, because once again, as with the direct democracy of weed laws, Colorado could play a pivotal role in shaking up the direction of national politics and policy for years to come. If something finally changes relative to The2 and their hustle, Colorado's extremely undemocratic decision from the republicans of our state could impact a constitutional amendment that mandates our national manner of distributing votes.
But WE must show up to vote and let politicians know we're aware.
Many American's have no clue that right now, it is already too late to register to vote even if they get the gumption to give in to the urge. This is another 2party trick that helps polling to remain consistent with the registered voters and turnout trends and not population or eligible voters. If the electoral hustle proves too complex to dismantle, at the very least, every eligible American should be able to register to vote the moment they decide it is important. It is hard to imagine US reaching massive voter turnout without a massive overhaul in the ease of voting.
One way or another, our system sanctions political rape in too many deeply entrenched ways to dismantle them all. Yet, it is very hard to imagine that we allow The2 to continue to screw US in the same way again. Four years from now, something will change.
God willing.
Trump does finally gets this delegate thing, and realizes that it will be used against him no matter how many states he wins prior to the convention. He, and WE, are learning that it might have been created to stop people exactly like him. Whether Trump anticipated thousands upon thousands of people coming to campaign events (I doubt that he did), he is now the face for those people and the political pioneer for exposing our undemocratic politics. For Trump, he must press on to achieve this righteous cause and justify his followers, all while hopefully offending just enough people to not have to actually preside over this miserably disfunctional nation.
