#electoral college vote

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:

The US supreme court has ruled that former presidents are entitled to some degree of immunity from criminal prosecution, dramatically reducing the likelihood that the federal criminal case against Donald Trump on charges he plotted to stop the transfer of power will proceed before the 2024 election. The court’s conservative majority – which Trump helped create – found 6-3 that presidents were protected from prosecution for official actions that extended to the “outer perimeter” of his office, but could face charges for unofficial conduct.

Trump is accused of overseeing a sprawling effort to subvert the 2020 election, including two counts of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election results, conspiring to defraud the government, and conspiring to disenfranchise voters. Among the accusations: Trump spread false claims of election fraud, plotted to recruit fake slates of electors, pressured US justice department officials to open sham investigations into election fraud, and pressured his vice-president, Mike Pence, to obstruct Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s win. To determine whether Trump’s alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election results came under the protected auspices of his official duties, the supreme court remanded the case back to the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who will have to review the indictment line by line.

The court left the bulk of the analysis up to Chutkan. But Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, found that Trump’s threat to fire the then-acting attorney general for refusing to open investigations were protected, because the justice department is part of the executive branch. Roberts similarly found that Trump’s effort to pressure Pence was probably protected, as the president discussing responsibilities with the vice president was an instance of official conduct. “Trump is at least presumptively immune from prosecution for such conduct,” the opinion said. The final decision on the Pence question rested with Chutkan, wrote Roberts. The burden was on prosecutors to “rebut the presumption of immunity” and whether charging Trump would “pose any dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch”.

And on the matter of Trump’s remarks on January 6, Roberts wrote that they too were probably protected, since presidential addresses were an integral function of the office. But the opinion also allowed that in Trump’s case, it may be more appropriate to categorize his speech as that of a candidate for office. The ruling in Trump’s election subversion case was one of the last handed down by the supreme court this term. In waiting until the end, the conservative majority played into Trump’s benefit and legal strategy of trying to delay any trial as much as possible. The effect of the ruling to block a prompt trial, after the court moved quickly to keep Trump on the ballot in March, has already ignited fierce criticism by liberals and others who believe Trump’s case should be resolved before voters cast their ballots in the forthcoming election.

Trump’s legal strategy for all of his federal criminal cases – he also faces charges in Florida for illegally retaining classified documents – has been to delay them until after the election, in the hope that he will be re-elected and can appoint as attorney general a loyalist who would drop the charges. As the calendar now stands, a trial in Trump’s election subversion case cannot start until 20 September at the earliest, since Trump’s lawyers have 88 days left on the clock to prepare a defense after the case was automatically frozen when they launched the immunity appeal.

Sad day in America, as tyranny will be rewarded if Donald Trump wins again: The radical right-wing 6-3 majority on SCOTUS rules in Trump v. United States in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts that Trump has total immunity for acts done in an official capacity but no immunity for private acts.

The case has been remanded back to the DC Circuit Court to determine whether Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 elections count as "official duties."

[victusinveritas]

[sinister-yet-satisfying]

Join something.

Doesn’t matter what it is. Doesn’t need to be political, but it can be.

Just join something. Join a book club. Join a knitting group. Join a kickball league, or a gardening club, or a climate action group. Just join something.

Fascists want you isolated, disconnected and despondent. Your main goal in life for the next 4 years (and possibly beyond) is to do the opposite of what fascists want you to do.

They are better prepared than they were last time but so are we. We know who they are and what they want to do. We can prepare ourselves and our communities for it, but only if we actually have communities.

If you do want to get engaged in politics, do it at the local level.

If you live in a blue area, you need to fight to keep it that way. Talk to your local representatives and make sure they are doing everything in their power to enact protections against Project 2025.

If you live in a red area, fight to change that. Work on city council campaigns, and state congressional campaigns. Keep an eye on local legislation and bring attention to all the universally unpopular policies republicans are going to push through.

Fascism only wins if we do nothing. Fascism wins if we throw up our hands and throw in the towel. Fascism win if we make it easy for them to win.

Don’t make it easy.

[queermarzipan]

YOU GUYS WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT THE FUCK YOU GUYS. YOU'RE ACTUALLY FUCKING CLOSE TO GETTING FAIR ELECTIONS. I'M NOT EXAGGERATING YOU'RE FUCKING CLOSE

YOU'RE AT 209/270 GUYS!!! 61 TO GO!!!! ISTG PLEASE SHARE THIS I'M

[femmesandhoney]

too many people forgetting hillary clinton won the popular vote in 2016, the issue was never really her as an "unwinnable" candidate bc she was a woman, the electoral college itself is just a scam and hell.

[tomorrowusa]

The Phantom Menace.

There should be pushback to anybody telling you that wasting a vote on Jill Stein is a good idea.

If people who foolishly voted for Jill Stein in three states in 2016 had instead voted for Hillary Clinton, Trump would never have been president and Roe v. Wade would still be the law of the land.

Jill Stein is a creature of Putin. She was a nobody in 2015 who somehow sat at Putin's table at anniversary celebrations for RT.

One thing worse than being a dupe is being the dupe of a dupe.

And voting for Jill Stein makes you a loser as well as a dupe. The last time a non-Democrat or non-Republican won the presidency was in 1848. Don't expect that streak to end this year.

The odds of winning the Jackpot prize in the Powerball lottery are 1 : 292,201,338. Those are excellent odds compared to the likelihood of a Jill Stein victory in 2024.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace gave us Jar Jar Binks. Vladimir Putin gave us Jill Jill Stinks and ultimately Dozy Donny.

The ONLY way to defeat Donald Trump is to vote for Kamala Harris. Voting for Jill Stein or not voting at all would be tantamount to support for Trump.

[akiizayoi4869]

Raise your hand if you think that the electoral college needs to go

[jaybee2000]

I have had a premonition of 316 electoral college votes for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

May it be.

O Steve Kornacki turn the map blue.

Reblog to charge. VOTE to cast.

[atlas7seo]

Sometimes I feel like people failed US History and this recent election and talks about tariffs really do prove that. I mean did literally everyone collectively forget about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and those major repercussions? Btw that act happened in 1930. There's a reason President Hoover's name was used to refer to Shanty Towns in the Great Depression. Or the fact that almost all tariff acts within the last 80 or so years have either been expanding negotiation for world trade or deliberately decreasing tariffs. And the one time in 2002 where steel had tariffs placed on it, it was repealed in under a year because the cost greatly outweighed any benefits.

Does anyone remember the last time Trump tried to make tariffs in 2018? How many people credit it to be one of the largest tax increases in US history!?

Are people really that stupid? Like it's literally a REQUIRED part of our general education. Why do you think it is!? So people can actually make smart decisions.

[buggbuzz]

also, the electoral college needs to be dismantled. that shit is the reason why gerrymandering works and swing states exist. we need to use the fucking popular vote to determine what the american people actually want. all this points system bullshit does is waste votes and silence voters.

[thedoormann]

people who don't vote can suck my fat fucking cock for real

[sinister-yet-satisfying]

[beauty-funny-trippy]

[aibidil]

In honor of Debate Day (I'm cringing already, and I have to watch with my kid for a school assignment): I keep seeing political posts on here that demonstrate a misunderstanding of the American electoral system, and I want to explain a few points. Because I have a PhD in Political Science and apparently I can't help myself.

E.g. "You people keep saying to vote for the (blameworthy) democrat and then force them to the left, but then you never force them to the left!" <- in a way, this statement is true enough, but not for the reasons that it seems to imply.

The US Constitution doesn't establish a two-party system. However, it does establish the Electoral College, which is a major way in which the US electoral system diverges from a popular vote. The manner in which each state chooses and constrains its electors (the people who make up the Electoral College) is left to the states, but 48 of the 50 states use a voting system called "First Past the Post," or first-preference plurality. FPTP is a system in which voters choose one candidate and the candidate with the largest number of votes (a plurality) "takes it all," even if they do not secure a majority of the votes. So if there are three candidates—say, Gore, Bush, and Nader—and Bush gets the plurality of electors, Bush wins. Even if more voters voted for Gore than Bush. Even if Nader voters indicated in exit polls that their second choice was much more likely to be Gore than Bush. US Congressional seats, likewise, are elected in single-member districts with FPTP winner-takes-all. So in a FPTP system, the makeup of the electoral body is not proportional to the votes cast by voters, and in the Electoral College, it may lead to results in which a candidate with a plurality of overall votes doesn't win the election.

Single-member FPTP systems therefore discourage voting for smaller parties and encourage, as the rational outcome of the electoral system, strategic voting for one of two big parties. This is in direct contrast to electoral systems that run on some variation of proportional representation (ranked preference voting, multi-member districts, etc), where the percentages of votes for each party are reflected in the final makeup of the elected body.

So even though there's nothing in the US Constitution saying we have to have a two-party system, in Political Sciencey terms: Duverger's Law states that all FPTP systems will become two-party systems. This is true because it is the logical outcome of rational actors operating in the system.

Okay, but who cares if we have a two-party system? We can still push democrats to the left, right?

Well, kind of? But ultimately, not really. Because think about it: if you have two parties competing for votes among the entire populace, they can only position themselves against the other party. You've got one candidate on the right and one candidate on the left. Committed leftists and committed right-wingers are going to vote for their party (or not vote at all). There's no incentive for a party to make any concessions to those voters. Whose votes are they trying to get? The people in the middle. Those are the only people they should care about, if they want to win. So the voters in the middle can exert influence over the platforms, and that has the effect of pulling both sides toward the very middle.

(One thing that has happened in recent years is that the Republicans have been successful at moving the entire distribution of votes farther to the right. This hasn't changed the fact that the two-party system will always pull both parties toward the center of the vote distribution, but it's definitely fucked us over. If the democrats had any way to enact this sort of shift, I would be all over it, but I don't see how they could. The entire system is fucked even beyond all I've already said by gerrymandering and the fact that leftists are geographically isolated in cities, both of which systematically benefit the right, so it doesn't seem likely that the democrats could be successful at a shift like that without changing some of the laws about gerrymandering, if not also the Electoral College.)

On the other hand, in systems that have more than two parties, you end up with bimodal distributions of votes. Why is that? Because say you have three parties on the left, and voters know that they aren't throwing their vote away if they vote for a smaller party. What will happen? The three parties on the left will be vying for the votes of the leftists. And the same thing will happen on the right. In this way, the voters will pull the party platforms farther from the middle, out to each side. The leftmost and rightmost "fringe" parties will each get a small proportion of the votes, and the more mainstream parties will get more, but those fringes have much more power than they ever could in a two-party FPTP system.

So when people say, "You say, vote for the democrat, then force them to the left, and then you don't force them to the left"—correct. There is no clear way to force a democratic candidate to the left in our two-party FPTP system. How would one even do that? The only thing leftists can threaten is to not vote, when not voting will certainly benefit the candidate on the right. So, sure, you can do that—if you want your behavior to benefit the right as a way to threaten the left. Some people will make that choice, but not many, because it will help the right!

To be clear: this is fucked! I think this is fucked! But we get nowhere by sticking our heads in the sand about how the electoral system actually works.

I'm not pretending that there's only one right way to act. Our system is fucked and has been for a long time. What I do think is key is understanding how the system actually works and making your decisions from there.

For me, I've often said, "Vote for the democrat for harm reduction, because that will absolutely reduce harm compared to the republican candidate. Then, fight the system." But I realize this maybe wasn't specific enough. What I mean when I say that is: I will vote for Kamala with zero qualms. Because I believe that Trump would be worse for literally every demographic in the world that I care about. To me, that's the only thing the vote is about. Do I agree with Kamala on Israel-Palestine? No. Do I think Trump would be worse for Palestinians and for American Jews (probably for Israeli citizens too)? Absolutely. Do I shudder to think what happened last time Trump had control over creating the Supreme Court? YES.

But when I say, "Then, fight the system," I mean specifically: the number one thing that leftists should be doing if we want to make any headway, if we want to shift that distribution of votes back from the rightward journey its taken in recent years, is to fight to overturn the electoral college and gerrymandering. Every tiny step we take in making our electoral system closer to the popular vote favors both principles of democracy and the left. If we can amend the constitution (this is enormously difficult) to get rid of the Electoral College, then we can turn to changing the electoral system to something other than FPTP.

I do not mean "vote for Kamala and then spend 4 years yelling at democrats for not being leftist enough." I agree: that is a terrible strategy, and will do nothing.

We can't keep ignoring, in between elections, that the voting system itself is where our focus should be! We can't keep pointing fingers at each other, even though we're all acting within the constraints of a fucked system, every time an election comes along! Maybe I'm getting old but I am so weary of this! We can't somehow willpower our way out of the system in which our votes are being cast! We have to change it!

[sleepnoises]

in re ballot phraseology btw I'm crazy spoiled by living in california, one of 8?? states that allow all elections to be done by mail. i am never in a booth when i vote. i am in my home and i am googling things