Holding On No Matter What

After the 2016 presidential election it became apparent that Russian Intelligence had attempted (and probably succeeded) in influencing our election. There was no serious suggestions that the Russians had changed any votes or suborned any election workers or officials, but that the influence took the form of disinformation, "fake news" (in its original meaning, not the "news that I don't like" meaning that Trump gave it) that served to sway people's opinions. The long running investigation into Russian interference did not uncover any evidence that Trump had not been legally elected, but that he enthusiastically accepted the Russian aid and actively sought to obstruct the subsequent investigation. 

The cries of "not my president" in some instances reflected a belief that the lection had been stolen, especially since Clinton received over 3 million more votes than did Trump. In most cases "not my president" indicated the understanding that Trump did not see himself as the president of all the people. Starting with his hate-filled campaign, with a brief pause for about 20 minutes the day after the lection, and continuing throughout 4 years of rage tweeting and irrational invective, Trump made it clear that he represented only those who gave him unwavering loyalty and adulation. 

Now, after four years of unrelenting hammering away at any trust in anything or anyone other than Trump, after furious undermining of all of our institutions with a cult-like following that made up close to half of the electorate, is it at all surprising that Trump turned his attention on the whole election system? We are now at the point, even though it looks like we will finally be able to have a transition to the new presidency, where a significant percentage of Americans believe that Trump "rightfully" won the election, that it was "rigged" against him, by an amazingly efficient cabal of Democrats. 

One of the most insidious acts of undermining trust has been Trump's attacks on the media, which he continuously characterized as fake news and regularly tarred as the enemy of the people. Why was this action so destabilizing? Because in a democracy a free press is a necessary information counterbalance to the government. How many examples are there about the government hiding or lying about actions that make them look bad? No one, no party, is immune to prevarication. So how do we hold the government accountable, hold their feet to the fire? By the existence of an independent set of entities who have the resources to root out the truth. How do we guarantee that any media outlet is presenting us with the truth? We don't. But the fact that there is still competition among major media outlets, and that their continued existence and solvency is based on their reputation for accuracy, helps to keep their reporting accurate. What most people have a hard time understanding though, is the difference between news and commentary. 

You would be hard pressed to find many inaccuracies in any of the mainstream media's reporting. Many people would disagree with this, mostly people who don't like what is being reported. Take the New York Times series on Trump's finances. Trump has said it's "fake news", and his supporters follow suit, but there's one simple, easy way to debunk the Times' reporting on Trump's taxes, and that's for Trump to authorize the release of his tax returns. So much of the accusations of "fake news" and media bias rests on someone saying "nuh-unh" without providing any countering facts. A grey area is the use of anonymous sources. Like it or not, some credible sources of information may not want to make their identities known, for various reasons. And an anonymous source generally isn't anonymous to the reporter who is receiving the information. A news story isn't published based on a call from a public pay phone or a burner cell phone without knowing where the information is coming from. A lot of discussion at a media outlet precedes using anonymously provided information, and the newspaper or television network has determined that the source is credible and trustworthy and is staking their reputation on the reputation of their source for veracity. 

Commentary, opinion, punditry...none of that is news, it's what a person or an organization thinks about the news. If the president sends troops into yet another country, that's news. If a talking head holds forth on why it's a good thing or a bad thing, or even speculates on the possible consequences, that's opinion. If a newspaper publishes an analysis of why people support a particular candidate, that's opinion.  A large amount of what people point to when they talk about "the news", or "the media" is the opinion side. The dry facts are too boring for most people, so they gravitate to the color commentators on their favorite platform and deride the prognosticators that they disagree with. 

So now we have arrived at a place where the way elections have been decided throughout modern times, i.e. by counting the votes and everyone agreeing that the candidate with the most votes in each state received that state's electoral votes (partial exception in Nebraska and Maine) and the candidate with the most electoral votes became president, has been upended. Administrative steps like canvassing boards and state certification of results and even the actual casting of votes by the electors has long been considered a mere formality. States reported their vote totals and most of the time each state showed enough of a margin for one candidate or another that the media felt confident in reporting who won. This year, due to the large number of mailed-in ballots, some states were still counting for a few days after Election Day. But once the counting was complete, or at least until one candidate was mathematically assured of victory, everyone just accepted the result. Even the election in 2000, with it's recount in Florida, only happened because Bush's lead was less than 2000 votes and a recount narrowed that to around 500 votes. The other 49 states plus the District of Columbia saw no such upheaval. 2020 is completely different.

In 2017, President Trump, stung by receiving three million fewer votes than Secretary Clinton, despite winning in the Electoral College, cast about for ways to make his victory "legitimate". He baselessly claimed that millions of undocumented immigrants had cast votes. He created a commission to investigate election fraud. The commission folded within a year without finding any systemic election fraud. Even as the pandemic caused many states to look for ways to make absentee, mail-in or early voting easier, and Republicans looked for ways to stymie those efforts, no actual open doors for fraud were identified. Sure, Trump and his enablers repeatedly claimed that mail-in voting would be more fraud-prone that in-person, Election Day voting, but no evidence to support this was every presented. Republicans took every opportunity to make casting, collecting and counting mail-in ballots more difficult, realizing that it was Democratic voters who were taking precautions against Covid infection more seriously and therefore more likely to vote by mail. 

In the months leading up to the 2020 election Trump worked overtime to undermine confidence in the system. He often said that the only way that he could lose was if the election was rigged against him. He asserted that vote counting should stop on Election Night and a winner declared, knowing full well that in some states the mail-in ballots would be counted after the day-of ballots, meaning that an Election Night lead for him in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin or Georgia could very likely melt away as mail-in votes came in. This is exactly what happened. He was ahead in all of those states on Election Night, but fell behind in all of them as all of the votes came in. He prematurely claimed victory on Election Night. He called for voting to stop in the states where he was ahead but losing ground. He called for voting to continue in states where he was behind but had a chance of winning. Three weeks later he hasn't conceded, although he has allowed the transition to begin.

Around three dozen lawsuits have been filed by the Trump campaign in various jurisdictions (but always in areas or states that he lost). Except one, which was allowed to proceed on procedural grounds, all of them have been dismissed for lack of evidence. In some suits, a relative handful of ballots are being challenged, in some, like in Pennsylvania, they are attempting to have all seven million mail-in ballots thrown out because they claim the Pennsylvania mail-in system is unconstitutional! Interestingly, while Trump screams FRAUD, and that there is an organized cabal perpetrating a theft of a whole election, the lawsuits are not suggesting fraud, but mostly technical issues and supposed irregularities. But his supporters believe the tweets and are convinced that Trump won (sometimes they say "in a landslide") and that Biden stole the election. They believe that "the media" has declared Biden the winner in an election that has yet to be decided. 

Trump enablers among Republicans elected officials are acting like this refusal to accept the results of an election is normal, that fighting tooth and nail to invalidate as many votes as it takes to reverse the results is normal, that expecting an election to be decided in the courts is normal, that state officials who are for all intents and purposes rubber stamps are now acting as if they have investigatory authority. None of this is normal. None of this is acceptable. One of the hallmarks of our system of government has been a peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another, even when the outgoing and incoming where bitterly opposed. There is little chance if any that Trump will barricade himself in the White House and refuse to leave in January, but he has done lasting damage to the institution of the presidency by his actions. Millions of people will never believe that President Biden was legitimately elected. That does not bode well for the future. 

Sore Loser

With few exceptions the results of our presidential elections have been pretty straightforward in modern times. Around 40 states lean so far one way or the other that it usually isn't necessary to wait until all the votes are counted to see who the winner is. Even in the so-called swing states, it generally doesn't require that every single vote be counted before we know who the winner is. If candidate "A" is 20,000 votes ahead and there are 10,000 votes left to count, then mathematically there is no way candidate "B" can win. Media outlets receive voting information from the states and report this information. Most of them will "call" an election based on their analysis of the numbers. They don't always agree, but the "calls" by the media are not official and no one thinks that they are. The media is reporting information that they have received from official sources. In most cases, especially this year. In addition to reporting the apparent winner, they report how many votes were cast for each candidate any how many ballots (if any) are left to tabulate. No one is making anything up. "The media" isn't deciding who the winner is. They are reporting who the winner is. This year is no different in that respect than any other election. 

Sometimes a state's votes are very close. Not only do we have to wait for all ballots to be counted, but in some cases there will be a recount to verify the count. This is not unusual. It happens sometimes. Very seldom does a recount change the winner, and the swing is hardly ever more than a few hundred votes. This year is no different in that respect than any other election. 

There are often isolated problems. Voting machine software crashes, ballots get lost, people try to vote more than once, ballots are misprinted, registered voters are purged from voter lists. It's not a huge system, it's a huge collection of systems. Not only does every state have its own election laws, but often individual counties and municipalities have their own systems. There's going to be problems. This year is no different in that respect than any other election. 

What's different this year is that we are in the midst of a pandemic where many people felt uncomfortable about voting in person, so existing mail-in and absentee voting overwhelmed the systems in many areas. The party in power worked overtime to prevent localities from making it easier to vote remotely, including slowing down the mail and blocking local changes to when mail-in ballots could be counted. Voting in person was frustrated in many jurisdictions as polling places were eliminated and additional hoops to jump through were instituted. 

What's different this year is that the President of the United States has been spending months convincing his supporters without evidence that the system was unreliable, that it was rigged against him and that any result that differed from him winning in a landslide was illegitimate. 

No surprise that once enough votes were counted to make it indisputable that the president did not win re-election, it was disputed. 

It was widely predicted that in some states the day-of votes would trend toward Trump, since his supporters were more likely to vote in person and that the mail-in ballots would trend toward Biden, since Democrats were more likely to be concerned about distancing on Election Day and therefore would vote early or by mail in greater numbers. And since in most cases early votes and mail-in ballots would not be counted until after the day-of votes were tabulated, that is exactly what happened. States that had Trump slightly ahead on Election Day evening, like Pennsylvania, little by little gave way to a Biden lead as all the votes were counted. One of Trump's propaganda points was that we should know the winner on the evening of Election Day, and of course since he knew how things would go in the swing states, attempted to get voting stopped in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin where he was initially ahead. In the states where he was slightly behind, like Arizona and Nevada, he pushed for all the ballots to be counted. 

Once Biden drew ahead in these key states, his legal team went to work filing lawsuits to get wide swaths of votes invalidated while taking to Twitter to make unsubstantiated claims (i.e. lies) about alleged election irregularities. In most cases what he was telling his supporters on Twitter was different than what his lawyers were claiming in court. Virtually every case was thrown out of court. The few cases that weren't dismissed involve vanishingly small numbers of ballots that will not change the result. 

Republicans in general are parroting Trump's line, claiming to only be concerned about election integrity, even though they were never concerned about it before and there is no evidence of a coordinated, or even significant effort to rig the election. What Trump and the Republicans are doing is an attempt, not to protect the integrity of the election, but to overturn it.   
 

Election Fraud

No one is surprised. Trump was asked several times in 2016 whether he would accept the results of the election. His answers included "We'll see" and "If I win". In 2016 it was a moot point because he did win. Russian interference did not extend to actually changing any votes, just spreading disinformation to our easily fooled electorate. The popular vote in our system of selecting a president is irrelevant, as much as we wish it wasn't. He could complain all he wanted about the imaginary 3 million undocumented immigrants whom he said voted for Clinton - it didn't matter.

In 2020 it matters.

Trump has been asked repeatedly if he would respect the results of the election, if there would be an orderly transition if he lost, and he repeatedly declined to unequivocally answer, proclaiming that he would win, or that he would only accept a legitimate result and suggesting that the only legitimate result was a win for him. 

For once, he told the truth. 

For months Trump has been working steadily to undermine faith in our electoral system. He has, without a scintilla of proof, alleged that the voting system was rigged, that it was rife with fraud, and invented all manner of bizarre scenarios. He and his Republican enablers, meanwhile, have been working overtime to make it harder for people to vote. Republicans in Florida effectively nullified a vote by the majority of Floridians to give felons who had served their sentences the right to vote. Republicans in Texas limited ballot drop boxes to one per county, even in counties with millions of voters, Republicans in Georgia closed many polling places. Republicans throughout the country refused to expand voting by mail for people concerned about voting in person during a pandemic and when the rules were loosened, went to court to prevent it. Republicans attempted to invalidate votes postmarked by election day but received afterward. I'm sure that I'm overlooking some of these moves. 

Despite all of these roadblocks, people found ways to cast their vote. People took advantage of early voting options, waiting in line for hours in order to exercise the franchise. Due to the likelihood that early voting would be done predominantly by people concerned about Covid-19, it was predicted that mail ballot and early ballots would lean Democratic. In many states, including several of the swing states, state law required that day-of ballot be counted first. The entirely predictable (and predicted) result was that several states would show Trump leads until the mail-in and early ballots were counted. This is what happened. Trump and the Republicans tried to get counting stopped while he was still ahead. 

Now Trump and his cultish enablers are claiming that the results are tainted. They are throwing around accusations and allegations that are based on nothing more substantial than a belief that Trump couldn't have lost, so any numbers showing that he lost must be rigged. 

The fact that Biden conducted no massive rallies and very few small ones is not proof that the numbers are wrong

Disbelief that Biden could have received more votes than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 is not proof of fraud

The fact that Trump rallies attract huge crowds does not translate into invalid polling results for Biden

Mainstream media outlets "calling" the election just means that they think the numbers warrant it; it is not proof that the media is manipulating the numbers. 

There is no real evidence other than "there must be fraud" scenarios that Trumpists are looking for any scrap of "proof" for.

The Republican post election talking points try to make it look like questioning every opposition vote and letting the courts decide is normal. It's not. It's a desperation move by a desperate man and his desperate enablers. 
 

The Electoral College Must Die

As I write this I have no idea who will win the presidential election or which party will control the Senate. I don't know which candidate will end up with more actual votes (no one "wins" the popular vote because it's not a contest) but however it turns out, the Electoral College is a bad idea. 

"But the genius of the founders!"

Please.

The Electoral College was compromise piled on top of compromise. 

Keep in mind that the founders were not supporters of democracy. They did not believe that "the people" were capable of making decisions. They did want national policy to be determined by those who were already in power, and this decision-making included who would be the president. The participants at the Constitutional convention debated several different scenarios for selecting a president. One solution was to have the legislature choose the president, this, as well as a suggestion for direct election, was rejected. The former due to separation of powers considerations and the latter because they simply didn't trust "the people". Keep in mind that each state set its own standards for who would be able to vote, and that in general the franchise was limited to white male landowners. The legislatures of each state, often a self-selected collection of oligarchs that were representatives in name only, determined who the electors would be and who they would vote for. 

So the one compromise was to set up a system where the will of the voters, even though they were a small percentage of the actual people, could be circumvented if those people made the "wrong choice".

The second compromise relates to how the legislature was set up. At the time of the writing of the Constitution the ruling class of each of the states viewed each state as a sovereign nation (what "state" used to mean) and were keen to maintain their own power and influence. The governments of the states with smaller populations did not want a legislature with membership based on population, since that would put them at a disadvantage. The leaders of the larger states did not want to give up the advantage that greater population gave them. The compromise was a two-chamber legislature, with one chamber's members elected according to population and the other, the Senate, with two senators from each state. Initially the senators were selected by each state's legislature, not elected. 

This compromise made sense when each state viewed themselves as separate and unique, and only associated with the others in a glorified alliance, and not subdivisions of a federal nation. This is hardly the case anymore. 

A compromise within a compromise was made in order to entice the slave states to enter the union. A huge percentage of the people in the salve states were enslaved people. The Southerners wanted to count them in the census, as this would give them more influence in Congress, the Northerners did not want to count enslaved people at all, since they could not vote. What we ended up with was the infamous 3/5 Compromise, whereby enslaved people, for the purposes of representation in Congress, were counted as 0.6 of a person.

The total number of members of Congress from each state would equal the number of electoral votes they would have. 

How did we get to the point where we have had several recent elections where the candidate who won, received fewer votes? 

The main reason is that early in hour history it became the norm for states to award all of their electoral votes to the candidate who received the most votes. If there were more than two candidates, this could mean that the winning candidate received less than 50%. A losing candidate with 49.9% would receive no electoral votes from that state. Another reason is that many states have become predominantly either rural or urban, and the two major parties appeal predominantly to one or the other. The predominantly rural states tend to be lower in population. Since every state most receive a minimum of 3 electoral votes, the smaller states have proportionally more influence than the larger, more urban states. 

Advocates of the Electoral College will claim that this is exactly what the founders planned for, except that they didn't. For many years the size of the House of Representatives, and hence the Electoral College, increased as states were added and population grew. In 1929 the Permanent Apportionment Act was passed, limiting the size of the House of Representatives to 435. The US population increased from 123 million in 1930 to 309 million as of the 2020 census. Two states were added. The result was that not only were the number of people represented by each Congressman steadily increasing, but the relative clout of the smaller states was increasing as well. 

Due to the above, we have a situation where, in any state where one party is dominant, those who vote for the minority party are effectively disenfranchised. 

Supporters of continuing the Electoral College claim that if we switched to a popular vote system, California and New York (or sometimes a collection of big cities) would call all the shots and that the voters in the small states would be ignored. This is wrong for several reasons, and why I often say that if you're for the Electoral College, you're just bad at math. California and New York, combined, have around 18.9% of the US population as of the last census. That sounds like a lot and it is, but it's not so scary as it seems. In the Electoral College, the two states combined control 15.5% of the total. So there would be an increase, but they are already throwing their weight around, not too mention that the counterweight is Texas and Florida with a combined 12.4% of the Electoral votes (16.5% of the total population). EC cheerleading usually doesn't take into account that not everybody in California and New York votes for Democrats. There are substantial minorities of Republicans in both states (as there are Democrats in Texas and Florida) whose votes would count in a popular vote setup. The thinking that small states would lose their influence assumes that they have any influence now. How often do campaigns visit Vermont, or Wyoming or Alaska? Hardly ever, because they are each safely in the orbit of one political party. The states that get the most attention have two qualities: (1) They are medium-to-large and or (2) They are "swing" states, whose voters are close to equally divided between the two major parties or (3) Both. 

The problem with discussing eliminating the Electoral College is that it is enshrined in the Constitution and it is difficult to change it, especially when one party owes much of their power to it. 

So, how can we address the worst problems of the Electoral College while still keeping its shell?

1. Repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act and increase the size of the House of Representatives. Designate the population of the smallest state (currently Wyoming at around 500,000) as the size of a Congressional district. I recently calculated that this would increase the size of the House from 435 to 565. Smaller to medium states' delegations would remain the same while the larger ones would increase. This would make the House of Representatives more proportional to population and by extension, the Electoral College.

2. Require that electoral votes be awarded by each state proportionally. This would differ slightly from the system that Nebraska and Maine use (they award 2 electoral votes to the statewide winner and 1 vote each to the Congressional district winner). This system would require states that are now swing states, to award the relevant percentages to the second place candidate. For example in Wisconsin, with 10 electoral votes, saw Trump and Biden almost equally divided. They would split the electoral votes 5-5 (or 6-4 if you wanted to give the winner an advantage). Nationwide the electoral votes would closely match the popular vote.

This system would eliminate the disproportionate influence of small, rural states, and enfranchise minority party voters in the "safe" states. Large population centers would probably have as much influence as they do now, but would be balanced by the rural populations in the smaller states. Urban areas in otherwise rural states would also be heard for the first time.

The Electoral College was not engraved in stone and handed down from on high. It was born of a series of compromises by people who didn't trust "the people" and disliked giving them any power. We have changed over the decades to a country that values our leaders being chosen by "the people"...at least that's what we say. 

(Ranked choice voting deserves its own article...coming soon)