With Donald Trump as the new President-elect,
supporters of Hillary Clinton have been looking
for a way to avoid a Trump Presidency.
One Change.org petition suggests convincing
the Electoral College to cast their votes
for Clinton, rather than Trump.
The petition has over three million signatures
as of November 11th.
But...didn’t Americans already vote?
How could Hillary Clinton still win the Presidency?
Well, in order to understand a Clinton-win
scenario, you have to understand the electoral
college.
In a nutshell, the President is not actually
elected on election day by the voters.
In fact, the President is elected by an influential
group called the “electoral college”.
Each state gets a certain number of electors,
indirectly related to the size of their population.
The elector’s only job is to cast their
vote based on their state’s popular vote,
thereby acting as an election representative.
For example, California, the most populous
state, has 55 electors, which are all expected
to go to Hillary Clinton when they officially
vote on December 19th.
If you're wondering why the US uses such an
indirect system of voting, it’s because
it was thought of in the late 1700s, when
getting the whole country’s votes counted
on the same day was nearly impossible.
Instead, each town or city would select a
representative to travel to the nation’s
capital, and let them know how they had voted.
There was also the added benefit, discussed
by the Founding Fathers, that it would prevent
anyone without quote “the requisite qualifications”
of becoming President.
In short, the Founding Fathers didn’t seem
to trust direct democracy, but didn’t want
to make it seem like they were the ones choosing
the Presidency alone.
Now this system has worked so far, in fact,
so well, that there is NO federal law requiring
electors to vote for their state’s preferred
candidate.
21 states have no rules on the issue whatsoever.
An elector can vote for another candidate
or refuse to vote altogether.
Moreover, in the other 29 states, plus Washington
DC, which do require the elector to vote alongside
the population, they still don’t really
have to, because the punishment for doing
so varies from state to state, but is generally
a small fine.
Only a few states actually cancel the vote.
Electors who do this are called ‘faithless’,
and in the history of the United States, there
have been 157 of them.
In nearly half of those cases, electors didn’t
vote for the preferred candidate because the
candidate had died before the vote.
In 3 cases, electors have refused to vote
altogether.
The rest of the time, the vote was changed
based on political or personal reasons.
To date, faithless electors have not influenced
the outcome of an election, but there was
one election where they could have.
In 1836, the election came down to the Democratic
Party versus the Whig Party.
Only, instead of having one candidate versus
another candidate, the Whigs nominated several
different candidates, hoping to split the
vote, thus forcing the House of Representatives
to decide.
But the Democratic candidate, Martin Van Buren
ended up winning the popular vote.
On the day of the Electoral College, all 23
electors from Virginia cast their votes against
Van Buren’s Vice President.
Some say this was based on deep political
disagreements, others suggest that it was
racially motivated as Van Buren’s VP was
in a public relationship with a woman who
was one-eighth African and also his slave.
Either way, the VP candidate fell one electoral
vote short of a majority, and wasn’t automatically
elected alongside Van Buren.
It ultimately fell on the US Senate to call
the election.
Thankfully, they didn’t appoint anyone else
as Van Buren’s VP, and everything went as
planned.
The last faithless elector voted in the 2004
election in Minnesota.
Rather than casting their vote for “John
Kerry”, the unknown elector cast their vote
for Kerry’s VP, John Edwards, and also misspelled
Edward’s name as “Ewards”.,This year,
the chances of actually overturning Trump’s
majority are close to impossible, and would
require 42 faithless electors.
Clinton has already conceded, Trump has begun
his transition into the White House, and ignoring
the will of the voters in such a dramatic
way would subvert the purpose of a democracy.
By some accounts, it could even lead to a
constitutional crisis.
Despite talk of avoiding a Trump Presidency,
the reality is that Donald Trump will be the
next president of the United States.
So, how exactly did Trump win the U.S. election?
Find out in this video.
Clinton's inability to garner enough votes
from these demographics is part of the reason
Clinton narrowly lost in key states such as
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Since 1992, these sates have been Democratic
presidential strongholds, but they have large
populations of rural and working class white
voters who make up a majority of Trump's base.
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