13 thoughts on “Sweeping The Chessboard”

1. Speaking of Democrats changing the rules, Warren is pushing the idea of a Constitutional Amendment so that “every vote counts.” Every vote already counts. Is she going to abolish the Senate while she’s at it? Don’t the schools even teach kids about the large state/small state compromise that allowed the Constitution to get ratified?

   The headline, as always, should be “Democrats propose changing election laws so that only Democrats get elected.”

   Last night I was debating a Democrat on their national vote compact, recently passed by Colorado, which promises all of Colorado’s electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote.

   He said:

   No need for a Constitutional amendment. Article II gives the states the power to pick their electors however they want, which means that if states that control 281 EVs decide to assign electors to the popular vote winner, that’s it.

   My reply was:

   States aren’t free to decide that as it disenfranchises their citizens. The state’s citizens can still of course vote, but their votes are thrown in the trash while the electors wait breathlessly to see how Hawaiians voted.

   Colorado’s 2016 electors filed a lawsuit challenging the requirement that they vote according to Colorado’s popular vote – the vote of the people in that state, saying it violated their conscience. The federal judge threw out the lawsuit.

   It likely that the compact will be found to violate the voting rights act, and it is an interstate compact that doesn’t have the approval of Congress. It would face challenges because the intent of the electoral college was to shield states’ electors from outside interference because nobody would, early on, know who to bribe or threaten. The Founders specifically said that. The compact not only applies outside interference, it forces its electors to vote entirely based on outside interference.

   It would virtually guarantee that the President picked by such a method would not be easily seated, as the electoral college system was designed so that a President had to win a majority of states according to the formula that summed each states’ senators and representatives.

   It was specifically designed not to give the citizens of each state an equal say, relative to other states, in the same way that the Senate isn’t a wholly representative body.

   Only if the electoral college is tied does the popular vote decide the election. The Constitution spells that out, too, and the compact renders that clause void because it jumps right to giving the election to whoever one the popular vote, not who won the vote according to the formula the ratifiers agreed to as a compromise to balance small and large states.

   The Supreme Court frowns on interpretations that render the wording of clauses void.

   The first time a state in the compact throws its electors against the popular vote of its citizens, the state will have riots, uprisings, and probably bloodshed, since the majority, not the minority, of the people in that state will feel they’ve been screwed by a corrupt political system and stripped of the one of the most fundamental rights they have, the right for their state’s votes to count according to the way their state voted, not according to how many fraudulent votes people in Chicago or LA could cook up.

   The person really behind the plan is probably Putin, who is doing everything he can to undermine Americans’ faith in a democratic form of government and in the American election system. I’m sure he’s pleased with how it’s going.

   But I have an idea that would counter the Democrat’s plan, although it’s equally unconstitutional regarding the Framer’s intent. The Constitution indicates there must be a popular vote held within each state, or it wouldn’t refer to using the popular vote if the electoral college is tied. But nowhere does it say how they’ll record or report their popular vote.

   I suggest the red-states counter-threat should be that they will count their popular vote to see who won the state, and then have their AG certify all of the state’s ballots as having been for the state’s winner.

   It’s not disenfranchising anyone in the state because their votes are still being counted to see who won. And it’s no different than not dividing up state wide offices by vote percentages, as those offices are already winner-take-all.

   Looking at the 2016 election, such as system would have given a popular vote of 57.5% Trump, 43.6% Clinton, which is the same as the 304 to 227 margin (57% to 43%) in the electoral college, thus preserving the intent of the original compromise between states.

   And the blue states will have to adopt the system themselves and abandon their popular vote compact, because if they don’t then they’d be allowing popular votes to get counted for the other side with no reciprocity, and 2016 would’ve turned out as Trump 74% to Clinton 25%, and the EC would be 435 to 0. Some unfaithful GOP electors would probably vote for Queen Elizabeth II, Bono, and Ted Cruz just so the Democrat comes in fifth. In contrast, the red states don’t have a popular vote compact so a Democrat could win the election, but never achieve a blow out victory in the electoral college.

   It’s not a serious proposal, but it is a counter threat to show why the existing system shouldn’t be tampered with, because two can play that game. If winning is everything, and rules don’t matter, then what will people do if Wyoming’s AG certifies 200 million votes, on the theory that nobody in Wyoming should have less than 100 votes because voting is good, or that there’s actually a hundred million Wyoming voters that the census missed because grizzly bears.

   Treating each state’s popular vote as a poll that’s a sampling of the number of the state’s residents, as recorded in the prior census, is a brilliant solution. It limits the benefits of election fraud, and assures that one state full of unethical fanatics padding voter rolls to unheard of levels still can’t punch above its weight nationally.

   I remember a day when politicians thought the key to getting elected was to present better ideas than their opponent so they’d win on election day. I think Democrats abandoned that and are busy on plan F or G, and still clueless about the ramifications of anything they’ve tried so far, such as their faithless elector strategy, their 25th Amendment strategy, their rigged investigations, their ongoing witch hunts, their ballot harvesting, or now just breaking the electoral college system.

   A republic is supposed to reward good and popular ideas. Democrats wouldn’t be trying so hard to cheat if they hadn’t run out of those.

   1. Democrats never go after the root. They can’t get a constitutional amendment, so they play shenanigans to bypass it. It is the same way they treat guns and every ither issue from healthcare to wages. People don’t make enough money? It’s too complicated to deal with why that is, so just mandate wages. Something costs too much? Just mandate a price.

      Putin could be responsible. He was KGB after all, and this nonsense was seeded by them in the fertile soil of the Democrat party back in the soviet days.

   2. “Only if the electoral college is tied does the popular vote decide the election. The Constitution spells that out, too…”

      I believe that is incorrect. The popular vote is never involved.

      https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/faq.html#no270

      If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects the President from the 3 Presidential candidates who received the most Electoral votes. Each state delegation has one vote. The Senate would elect the Vice President from the 2 Vice Presidential candidates with the most Electoral votes. Each Senator would cast one vote for Vice President. If the House of Representatives fails to elect a President by Inauguration Day, the Vice-President Elect serves as acting President until the deadlock is resolved in the House.

      1. Oops. I’m not sure where my notion came from, but probably some of the screaming from the 2000 election.

         1. The Press/Left/Dems have been gaslighting us for so long, confusion is to be expected.

            here is some little-remembered history, of interest to us today…

            https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/presidential-election-decided-in-the-house

   3. The answer to any question that begins: “Don’t schools teach…”, is no. At least a third of high school graduates are illiterate. They’re the ones that end up in education programs and go on to “teach”.

2. “…..is hatred of the United States of America.”

   Well, that’s one interpretataion, but I think it is more a case of “Not Reading the Constitution like Robert Bork Did”, but rather, as Lincoln did, as described in the American Greatness article you linked to here:
   http://www.transterrestrial.com/2019/03/19/robert-bork/

   I was surprised to see you post a link to the Robert Bork article without a rebuttal from you. And I was a bit disappointed there weren’t any comments about it on your blog. It was a great article – thank you for posting a link to it – and since I agreed with so much of it, I’m a bit shocked if you don’t disagree with all of it.

   1. Surely you have seen the efforts of the Democrats to deligitimize the existence of the USA? Much of what motives their party is a hatred for our country and much of what they want to do requires either skirting the constitutional process or engaging in outright corruption of our civic institutions.

      Certainly not all Democrats feel this way but how could they possibly be blind to what the party is doing? Is it because the DNC media doesn’t cover it?

   2. Bob-1, what you “liberal” State-shtuppers hate isn’t so much the Constitution but individual liberty. Anything, like the Constitution, that imposes any significant impediment to the “liberal” Hive dragging those of us who value liberty the rest of the way down the Road to Serfdom is something the State-shtuppers want to get rid of.

3. It is my understanding that the Democratic Party scheme for bypassing the Electoral College has one more fundamental flaw I don’t see anyone addressing.

   One important factor of the Electoral College process is the winner must win a majority of the Electoral College vote. A majority, not a plurality! The means the President can’t be some factional candidate, who manages to squeeze out a mere plurality of the EC vote.

   But the interstate compact scheme being pushed, does not require a Presidential candidate to win a majority of the popular vote! The scheme awards State EC votes on the basis of the plurality winner of the national popular vote, the candidate only needs to win the most popular votes he doesn’t need to win a majority of the popular vote.

   I doubt that fundamental error is a mere oversight by those pushing the interstate compact. They know exactly what they are doing.

   I did an analysis of the popular vote in Presidential elections since WWII and found some very interesting results. Only in four Presidential elections out of 17, did Democrats win a majority of the popular vote! And two out of those four elections were Obama.

   1. Hillary only got 48.1%. Her husband never got a majority either, and almost certainly would never have won if not for Ross Perot.

      I’m surprised California still allows a Republican to run in the general. You think they’d make people choose between a Democrat and another Democrat, like they do in their Senate races.

      1. In Illinois, the Democrats choose the Republican candidates for national office. My wife, the lovely and talented KfK, discovered this while researching a Republican congressional candidate for a high school report (the candidate in question had not been chosen by the Democrats, and was undergoing extreme persecution as a result).

         Come to think of it, Arizona places no restrictions on who can vote in primaries, allowing Democrats to vote in Republican primaries. That’s how McCain, a jackass in elephantine clothing, got elected again and again.

         Politics suck.

4. I propose a greatly expanded electoral college. One vote for every county, or county equivalent, tied to the popular vote in that county. That’d be around 3500, iirc. Said votes are assigned to the candidate as soon as the appropriate state AG certifies their election. No meat space electors needed.

   I’d also go so far as to require incoming winning congressional candidates to take office as soon as said state AG certifies their election. No more lame ducks. No more lame duck F U legislation. You lost the election you have one task left, clear your office and get out of Dodge.

   No one has to ride across the continent, on horseback, in the snow, to get to DC anymore.

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