Joe Biden set to become the 46th president of the United States

I'm concerned about faithless electors.

It would be no surprise at all if Trump were trying to get as many electors as possible to vote for him regardless of their pledge. You'll note Georgia and Pennsylvania don't have any faithless elector laws. The laws that are in place in some states are toothless anyway.

Do you want a civil war? Because this is how you spark one.

@undeadpool: I totally get that it was set up over 200 hundred years ago, and that changing stuff in a constitution is really hard (*cough* proper First Nations recognition in the Australian constitution *cough*), but at it's basest level, it seems insane from a democratic standpoint that for 48 of the 50 states, whomever gets the majority vote gets ALL of the electoral college votes for that state, not just an amount proportional to their vote percentage. Although unfortunately, that idea would run into problems with your less populated states that only have a handful of electoral college votes to give.

It important to remember that the US isn't a "nation" like England or France. We are a "Nation of States" or a federation of small nations, each with their own full governments. We then elect people to send to the federal government to represent our states. Each state gets to decide how they set up their elections and how portion out their electoral votes.

The electoral college is some hot bullshit, but getting rid of it would take some overwhelming political will and a national movement. Doing so would require the majority of states to give up power to the more populated states and that just doesn't happen without extraordinary circumstances.

Some states have signed an agreement to award their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote, but of course it relies on state legislatures agreeing to the idea. Red states are unlikely to do that, so ultimately it doesn't change anything.

Yeah but my boy Howie Hawkins came in fourth.

In fact, the Greens are going to be refocusing on a return to local politics. We won a mayorship in east LA (Bell Gardens) I believe along with several other local wins.

And yes, orange man bad, it will be great when he's gone. Most of the country doesn't buy into his false election narrative, thankfully (at least, according to a Reuters poll that released today).

They also need to really pursue investigations of Trump and basically make him pay for encouraging violence and basically attempting a coup. If they don't, the risk of someone more competent coming along and actually succeeding is too high. You can't "negotiate" with a slide towards fascism, and I hope this has galvanized the Democratic base in such a way that the Republican party doesn't recover.

@fantasticasm89: Focusing on the local level is the smart play for minor political parties, and important work gets done there as well. The US system just doesn't support anything other than the current two party system at the national level. The Democrats and Republicans both should split in half, but neither side will forfeit the power they have to do so.

@plan6: The federal government has more authority than any state government. We are not a loose federation of states as some of the founders may have initially envisioned. States can't exactly choose to leave.

@ithas2besaidkvo: If you think that's bad you should see how the equivalent office is elected in Australia.

@bladeofcreation:well I didn’t use the word loose, or imply states could leave. I point this out because many of my European friends didn’t understand that each state has its own government and laws. There are hard limits on what the federal government handles. Like elections. The general election is, in fact, 50 separate elections on the same day. Each with its own rules.

I can't believe this is being dragged out in such a stupid way and that it's being treated as normal. I'm not saying Trump will succeed in this idiots coup attempt, he's being basically laughed out of court so far, but it's just beyond ridiculous in so many ways and Pompeo is up there making jokes about it. This country is a joke.

@plan6: That's fair; I guess I assumed that other democracies are set up similarly to the US.

@ithas2besaidkvo: It is insane! It's also behind why the Senate is almost always Republican majority: they have 2 senators representing entire states with less population than a single CITY in many states. The same 2 that states with the population of a European country are represented by.

I understand the argument that "if the electoral college goes, no one will ever give a shit about Nebraska and Wyoming again in national elections" but at this point, most of those state's populations are FINE with minority rule, and their vote would STILL COUNT. With Covid showing just how fragile our national political campaigns are, it's never been more clear that we need an overhaul.

@undeadpool: And honestly, to be fair, no one gives a shit about those states anyway. The EC literally just has people giving a shit about the same 4 or 5 "swing" states every presidential election, so the idea that it is more representative than one person, one vote is misguided, IMO.

@sethmode: This too! It's not like candidates do a ton of campaigning up and down the West Coast (despite the massive population) because they know it's going Blue no matter what.

But they're SO TERRIFIED of losing what little power they perceive themselves to have, that 1-person-1-vote still sounds like "oppression." EVEN THOUGH the conservative people IN THOSE BLUE STATES would actually be better represented (but so would the liberals in deep red states, so it's worth it to OWN THEM, I suppose...)

@undeadpool: Absolutely. I think though, that most of the people that speak in defense of the EC likely don't really understand how bad it is. They just key in on a talking point and know that they hate anyone on the left, so that means it is good, I guess. After all, it wouldn't be a discussion about American politics if it didn't involve a large portion of the population voting against their own best interest.

The system worked a lot better when the Senate and the House fought all the time and had little factions in each that represented different parts of the US. But in 1995, Gingrich set out to destroy all of those little factions and mold the House to function as an extension of the Republican party.

A great article on the subject is below:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/

I would also like to highlight in the article that Newt a dumb man that sounds smart by saying things like "natural law", the mythical concept that there are immutable laws of existence, mostly that boil down to "Men fight, family unit good". And also talks about "Western civilization" which any historian will tell you isn't really a term they use. But it is a cool term used by people who want to talk about "Anglo European superiority" without tripping up people's Huge Racists Alarms.

The only ray of hope in the future is that the instant the Democrats start pushing interests of labor again, like for real, the Republicans be dumfounded. But we might have to wait until some of these old heads leave congress.

@undeadpool: It is crazy, but it's not like I can fully shitcan your system when here in Australia, you still totally get the situation where if you're in a safe seat that's held by a political party you don't want to vote for, your vote is greatly diminished compared to a tightly held seat where politicians will throw a ton more resources into (and infrastructure/services promises if they win). Hell, there was a scandal here last year where the sports minister of the ruling political party was found to have straight up had a binder detailing that their department disproportionally gave grants to sporting clubs in tightly held electorates over safe seats.

Warning to everyone: Get ready for Republicans to really focus hard on how America is not a democracy but actually a Republic in which the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

Republicans are increasingly becoming aware that they're running on borrowed time as an increasing amount of Americans question specific parts of Government. Mainly the electoral college, as well as lifetime supreme court seats. So once Biden gets into office, they're going to start trying to get their constituents used to the idea: that the majority (aka. Brown people, LBTGQ, immigrants) are gonna take your freedumbs, so we need to permanently make sure that republicans wield power to stave us the evils of socialism!!

Unfortunately, Republicans are increasingly being okay of democracy being for only a select few patriots (i.e. white people), so it probably wouldn't be that hard to get people onboard. And while I don't think politicians now have the stomach for an outright coup--give it 10 years. Where even more crazies find their way into seats of political power, and we're that much closer to a president willing to use its military on the people.