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Yale Lecturer Todd Cort wants to discard the electoral college system, because it gives rural voters the voting power to challenge the dominance of the coastal elites. But in my opinion, Todd’s focus on minutiae of the electoral system misses the big picture.
The electoral college is thwarting our ability to battle global warming
Who (you might ask) is David Brearley?
Brearley plays a critical, and entirely accidental, role in climate change because of his position as the chair of the Committee on Postponed Parts within the Constitutional Convention of 1787. While drafting the U.S. Constitution, the convention left several “sticky questions” to Brearley’s Committee, such as the manner by which U.S. presidents would be elected. Brearley and the Committee were stuck between two difficult choices: election by the U.S. Congress or election by the voting public. The committee opted for a middle ground solution – an electoral college that would vote on behalf of the citizens, but which would be populated based on the number of congressional seats assigned to each State in the Union.
It is this solution, brilliant at the time, that leads us to Brearley’s legacy on climate change. Because over the course of the last 200 plus years, the electoral college, which provides for stronger voting power per person in more rural and less populated states, has elected four U.S. presidents who clearly lost the popular vote (1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016). Two of those elections have occurred during the period in which we have known about the causes and impacts of carbon dioxide emissions and climate change and in both cases, the impacts of those elections have very likely had profound impacts on our actions to address the challenge.
…
The Obama administration did not solve climate change, but it did make significant strides both domestically and in international agreements. Obama signed the Paris Climate Accord of 2015 and his EPA finalized the Clean Power Plan in the United States. Perhaps more significantly, President Obama opened the doors of politics to embrace what is a known fact in the scientific community, thereby allowing climate change to be mainstreamed for a wider swath of the country.
Which brings us to November, 2016. Once again, the electoral college system has elected a U.S. president in opposition to the popular vote in the form of Donald Trump. Hindsight in four years will tell us of the legacy of the Trump administration on climate change, but, despite a recent pledge to keep an “open mind” on the subject, the statements and commitments from the administration to date provide strong reasons for anticipating which way he’ll go.
Did the electoral college system deliver an unfair victory to Trump? The following is President-elect Donald Trump’s response to this suggestion;
If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2016
Both candidates knew the rules. Nobody would have given Trump any quarter if he won the popular vote, but lost the electoral college. Trump campaigned to win, under the rules of the system as it stood. Hillary made plenty of mistakes – she reportedly derided her husband Bill Clinton, when he warned her she needed to spend more time chasing rural voters, rural voters who ultimately swung their support behind Donald Trump.
The reality is that the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind including the electorial college have no control.
Indeed. They simply don’t get that the Eco-Naz!s have yet to prove a thing about CO2, much less man’s minuscule contribution thereto, driving the Earth’s temperature.
The Electoral College (EC) was well thought out by the Constitution’s authors. It’s there for the same reason that each state has two Senators: without it, the smaller states would be completely disenfranchised. With no EC, candidates wouldn’t wage a national campaign. They would concentrate only on the states with large populations, and ignore the rest.
The EC forces candidates to address the concerns of states like Rhode Island, Nebraska, Montana, New Hampshire, and Wyoming; in a popular election, their votes wouldn’t count at all.
How is that democratic?
Eliminating the EC would also concentrate more power in Washington DC, at the expense of nearly half the country’s citizens — who would still pay the same taxes, but without any say in presidential elections. Yet that is exactly what the Democrats are demanding, now that their flawed candidate has been decisively rejected. They certainly didn’t complain about the EC after the last two elections, did they? No, they bragged endlessly about their EC score.
If the Democrats want to eliminate the Electoral College, the Constitution provides a straightforward method for changing the law — and the Constitution has already been amended a couple dozen times, so if the country agrees it will be a Done Deal.
The method was designed to be difficult. But it is also very simple: three-quarters of the states must agree to eliminate the EC. But you don’t hear any of the losers in this election proposing the required Amendment. Instead, they want to disenfranchise half the states with questionable and devious end runs around the Constitution’s clear and explicit language.
One final thought: remember when President G.W. Bush was in President Obama’s current situation? Media heavyweights asked him to comment on the incoming Obama presidency. (They wanted Bush to criticize the incoming President, creating a controversy that would sell plenty of newspaper and television advertising for them.) The media folks knew there were lots of juicy things Bush could say, which would cause the newly elected President plenty of grief.
But President Bush’s only response was: “He deserves my silence.”
No matter what folks may think of GWB, that was a classy answer. Compare it to the digs, jabs, and constant undermining of the new President by this outgoing President.
President Obama should remember that by next month he will be a ‘has-been’. He can tell anyone who will listen, “When I was President…” Instead, he’s using his last days to try and rock the boat, by endlessly criticizing the victor in this election. How is that good for our country?
Mr. Obama will soon be just a citizen like the rest of us. But in the mean time, his constant undermining of the country’s clear choice for President exposes this lame duck as the lowlife he’s always been…
…IMHO, of course. YMMV.
all of the above…
Thanks DB, especially for the bit about Bush.
“With no EC, candidates wouldn’t wage a national campaign. They would concentrate only on the states with large populations, and ignore the rest.”
Except that candidates DON’T wage national campaigns now. They ignore reliable blue states like CA, WA, OR and NY, and ignore reliable red states like TX, OK, KY and KS. They spend most of their time in the states that are close to 50/50 between the parties, such as FL, VA, OH and MI.
Which is the intent. Such states tend to be a better representation of the average citizen’s belief system. They’re not only close to a 50/50 party representation, they’re (supposedly) close to 50/50 in terms of their beliefs, too, i.e., there are fewer extremes such as in CA or OK.
Mark T,
Correctomundo, compadre. There is no perfect representative voting system in this country due to the fact that it began as thirteen United States. (Although now it might more accurately be called ‘The 57 States Subservient To The Federal Government’).
The President-elect waged his winning campaign strictly according to the Constitution. As he said, if the popular vote determined the winner, he would have run a very different campaign.
We wouldn’t even be hearing these EC complaints if the Democrats’ candidate had won, so this year’s carping is just sour grapes by the losers — who were very happy to brag about their EC scores of 365 – 173 in 2008 (Obama/McCain), and 332 – 206 in 2012 (Obama/Romney). They’re acting like spoiled children now because they lost, fair and square.
dbstealey, nope, this is not a spoiled brat rant. This is simply a discussion about whether the electoral college is a sensible and fair system. That’s all.
He wasn’t calling you a spoiled brat, Chris, he said the whiners on the left were spoiled children.
“But President Bush’s only response was: “He deserves my silence.”
We can be sure Obama won’t be silent. He will be leading the demonstrations. He is going to go from being the worst president evah!, to the worst ex-president evah!
dbstealey December 20, 2016 at 9:56 pm
The Electoral College (EC) was well thought out by the Constitution’s authors.
No it wasn’t, it was completely wrecked by the advent of party politics and consequently had to be replaced in time for the 1804 election.
Phil. is just nitpicking as usual. He says the EC wasn’t well thought out. That’s his opinion; here’s mine:
The Framers were very well educated. So was the average citizen. Back then they didn’t have television, or the internet, or People magazine, or Disneyworld, or social media sites, or similar time sinks. So they discussed things, including plenty of history. Even poor dirt farmers and muleskinners were familiar with Western historical figures like Homer, Abraham, Themistocles, and they were as familiar the convoluted lineages of Greek and Roman gods as they were with contemporary kings and Enlightenment authors. (To see how our .edu system has degenerated, just ask any “_______ Studies” PhD why Actium was important.)
For at least sixty years prior to ratification of the Constitution people met in their homes and in coffee houses to discuss what form an ideal government would take. They debated representative republican government, versus direct democracy. In Federalist #68 Hamilton discussed the EC, and (IIRC) Madison wrote about republican government in Federalist #10. Representative electors had been discussed for decades before the Constitution was ratified. But not all ideas or proposals were incorporated into the original Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Yes, they made misteaks along the way, like the CC, but those were rectified. Remember that they were inventing something brand new; a form of government never seen before. The 12th Amendment put the EC into the Constitution after it became obvious that electing a President and VP from different parties didn’t work well. But representative electors was certainly not a new concept.
Next, @chris: the losers in this election just can’t MovOn. What are they crying about? Answer: democracy. Trump won fair and square; a majority of state electors was simply the goal. He used the existing rules, and as he said, if it was a popular election he would have campaigned differently. The Dems lost because they had such a flawed candidate. But they still can’t face that fact, so their weeks-long sour grapes tantrum continues with no end in sight.
For Mrs. Clinton’s part, her entire campaign strategy seemed to be based on: “Vote for me, because it’s time this country had a woman President.” She certainly had no outstanding accomplishments, did she?
So now we have a President-elect who beat the entire slate of sixteen Republicans in the primaries, spending less than 10% of what they did to win the nomination. Then with a similarly tight budget, he won the general election over someone with every imaginable advantage: plenty of money, and the media, unions, and the .edu crowd in her corner, and better name recognition, etc.
Speaking for myself, I’m very happy to have a “can-do” outsider who owes nothing to any person or any special interest. A guy who can take on the entire ossified political establishment in both parties, against all odds, and win the election is the best candidate for the job.
As usual, YMMV.
As a non-American it seems to me that Obama is demeaning both himself and his office by the way he is currently behaving.
He answers to the ‘one world government’ cabal….
Right, the one world cabal that is so secret that no one has any evidence of its existence.
POTUS Trump by himself will have a hard time countering that.
Congress + POTUS Trump …. easy peasy.
You forgot to add the SCOTUS–that’s the final clincher.
The Supremes couldn’t overturn a constitutional amendment legally adopted to make the ME/NE congressional district-based system universal.
Yale Lecturer Todd Cort and President-Elect Donald Trump have something in common, they both hate the electoral college! Since Trump won, and the electoral college confirmed his Presidency, he admits the system is now”brilliant”. What Hillary did and what Todd Cort is suggesting is to dismiss urban voters by abolishing the electoral college. If Hillary would have won by the same margin Trump did, Todd Cort would be all in favor of the electoral college and would have been praising it in his lecture! This is a political war, and in war, the truth is usually the first causality. Many scientists who promote man-made warming are making pretty good money. With Trump in office, they are going to loose some cash flow to their cause perhaps a lot! But why should taxpayers pay for research that hasn’t been truthful? We had Climategate where they were trying to hide a ten-year decline while emissions were going up, no doubt it wasn’t the first attempt nor their last attempt when the data is not agreeing with their conclusions.
This year in the World Series, the two teams each scored 27 runs. So that’s a tie.
In the 1960’s World Series, the Yankees scored 55 runs while the Pirates scored only 27.
So that’s a win for the Yankees.
This concept is not an original for me, but I’ve looked up the 1960 score.
Anyone claiming that Hillary won will likely agree with the World Series results above.
This just shows they do not understand the game (Baseball) nor the rules of US presidential elections. Thus, they ought not be allowed to vote.
What a great example John.
This is the question to ask the Hillary won the popular vote people. What determines the winner of a baseball game? Most runs scored. The team with more hits doesn’t win even though that would indicate they played better. The rules are most runs scored. The rule in Presidential elections is most electoral votes received. Nuff said.
BTW, one of the better fall outs of the electoral college is that it produces a clear winner. No need to have endless recounts in every district in every State to try to find a few extra votes here and there that might change things.
Hillary Clinton, at 48.2% of the popular vote, DID NOT WIN THE POULAR VOTE. She simply won a greater %age than Trump.
Mr H,
I understand the point you make but please, please find a way to keep that woman’s name at a greater distance from the 2016 World Series Champion Chicago Cubs.
Hey John,
Try the same analogy with soccer … let me know when you figure it out … I still don’t quite understand it.
It is my understanding that at one time a soccer match that was tied in goals scored was decided by which team had more corner kicks. That is no longer true so the number of corner kicks is just a statistic for those who like sports statistics. Number of fouls and time of possession are other useless statistics that have no bearing on who is the winner.
Thankfully Climate Change alarmism is doomed for reasons beyond Mr Trump.
Called “nature.”
What thwarts the ability to “combat climate change” is that there is no scientific evidence for AGW.
Phillip just pointed to the elephant in the room.
And it’s a HUGE sucker!
And that the East isn’t fighting.
Elections themselves are to blame. They are a significant hindrance to government in general. A world without them would be so much sweeeter.
At the same time during the 20th century governments gone amok killed way more people, than all other disasters combined. So we may be better off with pesky impediments in place after all. In fact, that’s what Constitution is about.
Dear JH. I’m sure Europe can be blamed for all sorts of things but the global warming scam is internationalist in character and I think you have just as many advocates for it as Europe and the rest of the world. It especially seems to be driven by some organisations like Greenpeace who have contrived to sell themselves as charities and taking all sorts of tax advantages while waging a war against human progress and against poor people needing improved nuitrition to avoid blindness by denying them genetically improved crops. Their behaviour shames all humanity and is suppported by general ignorance worldwide.
By the way:
2016 is the first year Wisconsin had voter ID.
Wisconsin had a low voter turnout in 2016.
2016 was the first year Wisconsin went for a Republican since 1984.
There are 27 states with no requirement for voter ID and
Hillary Clinton won 57% of the popular vote in those.
There are 29 states that do require voter ID and
Donald Trump won 54% of the popular vote in those.
Clinton won 51% of the popular vote.
Trump won 34 of the 50 states and 57% of the electoral votes.
The rules count electoral votes.
See if you can connect the dots.
Need Help?
People who used to vote five or six times can’t do that in Wisconsin anymore. And if voter ID was applied in all 50 states left-wing liberal Democrats would probably have a difficult time winning in any of them.
So how can the people of, say California, ever hope to ix the voter registration problem when the invested ruling class would never allow it?
Once upon a time the mice decided to put a bell on the cat …
The federal government could pass a law that voters in federal elections must have proof of citizenship. That would solve that part of California’s problem. And it might shame the state into adopting the rule for statewide elections too. (Or maybe the state GOP could sue in state court and win.)
Trump’s reply indicates he knew exactly what to do to get both nominated and elected.
Clinton’s choices indicated she did not. This difference will no doubt be studied for years to come. Trump marketed an opportunity to drain the swamp in political Washington. Clinton demanded on penalty of social stigmata, that everyone with a vijayjay had to vote for the candidate with a vijayjay, as Oprah would say it.
Trump appealed to legal Latinos by offering to keep out illegal Latinos. He appealed to African Americans by pointing out they are getting screwed by what academics call, ‘the new Jim Crow’. Clinton demanded their votes because her party was their natural born representative.
The climate change mania was only an issue indirectly, the result of negatives piled in the Democratic corner that offered only increased energy costs, lost jobs, higher taxes and even more onerous regulation. Clinton apparently thinks milk comes from stores.
I am surprised that Clinton is surprised that the so-called White vijayjays didn’t put out for her. It turned out that the women think with another part of their body.
And a PS: Didn’t Kennedy win with less that 50% of the popular vote? By a little bit?
Crispin in Waterloo, You are exactly correct, smart women used their brain during the elections.
Being called a ‘deplorable’ was just the last nail she drove into us so called peasants.
To tell us we are uneducated and basically unable to cast an educated vote, was a huge slap to American women.
She’s so out of touch, she thinks we ‘deplorable women’ sit at home waiting on every beckoning call, like a Stepford wife, yes sir, okay sir, can I rub your feet sir, ect.
EJ
Thanks for speaking up. Another way to put it is to hear the ‘deplorables’ argument as saying ‘the little people’ are so stupid and politically uneducated they do not deserve a vote. This argument is always at the root of a Communist putsch. The argument goes that the proletariat is so politically immature that ‘certain decisions’ must be made for them, especially about leadership. CIA putsches are no different.
Consider how different that attitude is from the elites in 1776 who acted on the basis that all men were equal! Men, of course, is a generic term for people. They took the time needed to learn philosophy and apply it to the issues of the age in which they lived. I am not saying they were perfect, I am pointing out they acted in the interests of the masses by uplifting the masses, not oppressing then ‘in their own interest’.
A great many powerful and enlightened males supported the suffragette movement, as did a large number of powerful White men oppose slavery.
Aspirant politicians who feel that laws only apply to the little people need not bother filing papers. The masses have no need for self-appointed leaders.
Crispin in Waterloo December 21, 2016 at 10:12 am
Consider how different that attitude is from the elites in 1776 who acted on the basis that all men were equal!
Well not quite equal, slaves only counted as 3/5ths of a person and ‘Indians’ who didn’t count at all.
Indulging in Nirvana Fallacy, are we?
Strange that…there doesn’t seem to be too much correlation in this chart. Perhaps Todd Cort needs to review his beliefs.
(H/T to Eric Simpson on another thread)
It is virtually impossible to make an accurate judgement of correlation by visual inspection of plots such as these. All you need to do is to compute the correlation coefficient for the two series. This value is then compared via a method akin to the t test for its probability of occurring by chance. I think that in the case you put forward you may be surprised by the result. If you’d like to provide URLs for the data series I’ll do the calculations for you!
Robin: I relied on the fact that the parasitic oscillations due to inter-stage feedbacks in the Eccles-Jordan mono-stable double-diode flip-flop were amply capable of supporting the discrepancy. No?
But hey, I guess your way would indicate enough of an error to obliterate the divergence – such that the correlation that Todd Cort sees is true. as in TRUE! Heh. No way.
Harry Passfield
Great analysis!
(That is the kind of mumbo-jumbo we hear from the left all the time to try to gloss over .. the obvious.)
The temperature data is a time series with high autocorrelation, and no trend significantly different from zero can be discerned. CO2 is also a time series, but it clearly has a positive trend.
“It is this solution, brilliant at the time…”
In my humble opinion, their solution is still brilliant at this time. I am constantly amazed at how much genius there was compacted into that location at that time in history. Those guys wrote out a system of government that is the most well laid out and provided for the most contingencies and potential pitfalls in history, and did it in just a few short pages.
Ask a bunch of intellectuals and politicians from our time to write down the principles and rules for a new government and you’ll end up with a stack of paper three stories high and it will neither work nor make sense to anyone.
But I digress: The electoral college was and is genius. It prevents a bunch of elitist, self-righteous control freaks from being able to dictate to the rest of the country how we should live our lives, while still giving voice to the will of the people.
No one should be able to be the President of 50 individual states by achieving overwhelming support in three or four of them and little to no support in the rest.
And the leftists still don’t get it. If they want us to bow to their superior wisdom and leadership, they need to convince us of that superior wisdom and leadership. I can’t speak for the rest of the rubes in flyover country, but this particular rube doesn’t respond well to being instructed as to how stupid and racist and xenophobic I am rather than being involved in a civil conversation about the best path forward.
I truly believe that most leftists are just as concerned about our society being successful and prosperous into the future as I am (or at least I hope so), but until they convince me that their path is better through evidence and logical reasoning, I think I’ll keep my own counsel and I won’t be bullied into submission by anyone. That’s just not the way I was raised out in the backward, uncultured hinterlands.
SailorCurt
I would agree with you if the electoral college were elected by the public. In order to perfect the system, the delegates should be chosen by the public, not the party. In fact there would be no need of parties at all if the delegates were chosen that way.
Sailorcurt December 21, 2016 at 4:56 am
“It is this solution, brilliant at the time…”
But I digress: The electoral college was and is genius. It prevents a bunch of elitist, self-righteous control freaks from being able to dictate to the rest of the country how we should live our lives, while still giving voice to the will of the people.
Interestingly the Electoral College system, the ‘brilliant solution’, was designed by the elites of that time to prevent the hoi polloi from effecting the choice of president! As stated in the Constitution it was not intended that the electors should be chosen by popular election: “Each State shall appoint, in such a Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress;” In most states the legislators chose their electors, i.e. the elites decided who would become president.
If the winning candidate didn’t get a majority then the House of Representatives would decide between the five top vote getters. Similarly if there were a tie then the HoR would choose between the two candidates, this resulted in the situation in the 1800 election when Burr and Jefferson tied and the HoR took 36 votes to decide in favor of Jefferson. The 12th amendment was introduced to fix the problem caused by that ‘brilliant solution’ which failed to take into account the propensity of party voting to produce a tie. Also the choice of an EC had nothing to do with ‘small states vs. large states’, it was specifically designed to preserve a balance between slave states and the non-slave states.
After the 12th amendment the choice has only gone to the HoR once, in 1824, and the second place candidate was elected on the first ballot, John Quincey Adams. That was as it was intended, the elites got to choose the president. In that election only half of the states chose their slate of electors by popular vote.
Interesting to contemplate the academically credentialed musing of this CU Boulder educated Lecturer in Sustainability; a product of our unsustainable higher education system arguing in favor of an unsustainable form of government.
Thanks for the Trump tweet. He said it better than I would have said it. Trump campaigned in the existing system, not la la land.
I was reading a typical MSM blog a few weeks ago. Usual stories about how badly the transition is going, how EEEVIL Trump’s picks for cabinet were, and how the Electoral College was an out of date, racist, sexist and everythingelseist mess that needed to be eliminated. Everyone knows that the popular vote is what counts.
However…if you just scrolled down to earlier stories, same blog, you got to stories written BEFORE the election. And guess what (no peeking!). Yes, indeed, there was an article that said that the EC was very, VERY important, because Trump would probably win the popular vote because he was a populist, and his dumb voters are just going to vote for slogans, etc. Luckily the system would save democracy.
As I’ve said, the Democrats have used up all the available hypocrisy in the observable universe in the last month or so.
“As I’ve said, the Democrats have used up all the available hypocrisy in the observable universe in the last month or so.”
Oh no-no-no, Caligula. You will soon find out over the next 4 years that, like stupidity, Democrat hypocrisy is infinite.
Oh, I can’t disagree. Leftist hypocrisy will outlive the heat death of the current universe and like gravity, will survive until the next one.
I can only hope I can get a grant to study it first hand, though. My method will be to sit in a bar drinking great local brewpub product and state my case, then show them their own words to prove them wrong.
I don’t know if I can get Mrs. Jones or my doctor to sign off on my grant application, but considering someone got money to study how to make glaciology more feminist, I think I have a shot.
Infinite and without fail.
Trump is a business person who understands marketing very well, I would imagine, and so he did the marketing he had to do in the electoral system to win. That’s what successful business people do — know the market, create a marketing plan, work the plan, and profit.
If there is any “thwarting” going on, therefore, it’s coming from clueless academics, which is not to say that all academics are clueless, … just the ones who played the game to get their degrees without learning squat.
… reminds me of the PhD student I once knew who could not compose a paper at a fifth-grade level of language comprehension. How is that possible?
I once wrote a two-page executive summary of a 100+ page plus document in about an hour by simply removing all the buzzwords, weasel words and filler…
The EC is thwarting the Climatist juggernaut, throwing a monkey wrench into their ill-conceived, harmful to America, and to mankind, plans. Turns out the founding fathers were pretty smart. Who’d have thought?
This whole excitement over the popular vote is pointless.
If I (were a U.S. citizen and) lived in Kentucky, I could reasonably expect the GOP candidate to win. Whether or not I like that outcome, I might not bother voting. Different party but same idea in NY and CA.
We have no way of knowing what the popular vote would have been under a system that would actually use it.
Michael Palmer
So what?
The notion that the Electoral College system is going to be replaced by a popular vote is nonsense. It would take the cooperation of 38 states to achieve the constitutionally necessary 3/4 vote for a constitutional amendment. There more than 13 less populous states whose voters have a disproportional voice due to thhe Electoral College system. They are well aware of this and are tired of being ignored and dismissed as ‘fly-over’ states by the MSM. They are not about to allow a constitutional change.
“It would take the cooperation of 38 states”
Yes, and lost in all the “Ruskies have hacked everything” is the fact that while the Democrats put all their eggs into the HRC for Prez basket, the Republicans have made progress in state houses and governors.
Aren’t the Dems supposed to be the smart ones?
So they tell us. I’ve never seen any evidence of it.
No one has addressed low voter turn out. For this election it was almost 60%. That means roughly 30% of the people are in political control of the entire country (debatable) and no matter who wins that’s a sad state of affairs. Voter apathy ranks right up there with voter fraud IMHO. Not voting “because it won’t make a difference” is no excuse to not exercise one of our most important rights as citizens.
In deep-blue or deep-red states, it is rational to conclude that your vote will indeed not make a difference. Behaving rationally needs no excuse.
There’s more to vote for on the ballot than just president.
Fair point.
Yet another reason to ignore the popular vote. A lot of people in California, NY, et al., who would have voted for Trump didn’t vote because it would have made no difference. Had the election been decided by popular vote they would have voted because their vote would count even if they were in the minority in their state.
The UK also runs a ‘first past the post’ electoral system, just like this electoral college (but on a ‘parish’ level, rather than at the larger state level). So we too can have a winner with less votes than the loser.
The system has its pros and cons. It favours big parties, at the expense of smaller parties. This gives more stability, than the Italian form of politics, which has a myriad of small parties all getting a few percent of the vote. It also stops the absurdity of Holland’s ‘Save the Puppies’ party getting two seats in parliament, by canvassing all the slightly dotty rich divorcees and widows.
However, it does mean the ruling parties have a strangle-hold on government, and are very difficult to get rid of, if they go astray or feral.
Ralph
Here in Canada our “first past the post” system elected a drama teacher with nice hair and a famous name. He promised to “look into” changing the system that got him elected with 39% (of 68% voting) because, as he said, its 2015. Have to modernize. Keep up with the times. Move forward…
You can imagine what happened…seems that the system that elected him is just fine. Never mind. Nothing to see here..
Claim: Outbreak of Foot-In-Mouth Disease Within Scientific Community
Boy, the greenies are in full panic mode now! I have to admit that I’m entertained by their breakdowns. Reminds me of my 3 year old grandson when he doesn’t get his way.
Well, part of the point of CAGW messaging is to justify ignoring rules in order to advance a totalitarian agenda. It’s not surprising they would attempt to use it to overturn an election.