Daily Topics - Wednesday March 25th, 2015
By shawnt56
Join Thom in our chatroom during the program!
Be sure to check out our videos: CARBON, LAST HOURS & GREEN WORLD RISING - narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio
In for Thom today...please welcome progressive talkers Danielle & Shane-O
Hour One: What good are rights if you can't access them? / PLUS, did SCOTUS just hand a victory to Alabama voters? Michael Li, Brennan Center for Justice
Hour Two: SCOTUS blasts America's abusive corrections system - Maya Schenwar,
Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better / Truthout
Hour Three: Executing the insane is against the law...so why do we keep doing it? Stephanie Mencimer, Mother Jones Magazine
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
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The reasons to continue having an electoral college are:
1) To predetermine each state's weight in the Presidential election, because with elections being administered at the state level, fraud can be orchestrated to give a state more than its fair share of influence. And with differences in state election laws and demographics, states do not have the same percentage of citizens participating, or qualifying to participate. In a sense, those that vote represent those that can't or won't vote. (The original demographic reason was slaves, but there's enough difference in age distribution to maintain this argument.)
2) To have a process for forcing a majority in the Presidential election when there isn't one in the popular vote. Every nation has some way of doing this, in order to avoid civil unrest over a minority candidate getting all the power. Many nations have a runoff election, but just try getting a decent number of Americans to show up twice when we can't even get most of them to show up once.
Given that, the details of the electoral college don't have to be the way they are:
1) States don't have to follow the unit rule, wherein all the electoral votes go to one candidate.
2) States don't have to get 2 extra votes, thereby overvaluing underpopulated states.
3) If we wanted to head off the idea of the congressional-district method (currently used by Nebraska and Maine, but being proposed in some Republican-controlled blue states), which lends itself toward gerrymandering a national election (a strange concept), we could apportion a number of electoral votes that is unconnected to the size of the House of Representatives. I would suggest, just off-hand, that the number be the minimum necessary for each state to have at least 2, which was 850 the last I checked. By "pixelating" population at higher resolution, it should prevent any objection on the grounds that two states with the same number of electoral votes have widely different amounts of power per voter.