BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – IT is being reported that millions of people have signed a petition to the United States Electoral College urging members of that institution to ignore their states’ votes and cast their ballots for Hilary Clinton.
According to Yahoo News, the petition was launched on Change.org by Elijah Berg who wrote: “Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic.”
Berg, who resides in North Carolina, argued that the Electoral College could award the White House to either candidate and should use its own “most undemocratic” institution to ensure a “democratic result”.
Berg continued: “Twenty-four states bind electors. If electors vote against their party, they usually pay a fine. And people get mad. But they can vote however they want and there is no legal means to stop them in most states.”
Reportedly, another petition on Faithlessnow.com has called for more than 160 Republican electors to set aside their votes in states that do not have laws binding them to do so. Those states are Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia, to which the petition had assembled a list of the relevant electors.
Yahoo News pointed out that Clinton is the first presidential candidate since 2000 to win the popular vote while losing the White House. “In that year, Al Gore lost the Electoral College to George W. Bush. While Americans were still waiting to see whether Gore or Bush had won Florida’s 25 electoral votes, Clinton, the first lady at the time, called for the college to be disbanded so that no one would ever have to doubt again whether his or her vote counted,” the media house explained.
“We are a very different country than we were 200 years ago,” she [Clinton] said then. “I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people, and to me that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president.”
Ironically, President-elect Donald Trump had also called for the Electoral College to be abandoned. On the eve of the 2012 election between President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, he had called the Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy”.
Following that election, Trump, in a tweet he has since reportedly deleted, said: “The phoney [sic] electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one! [sic]”
According to Yahoo News, Trump tweeted that at a time when he thought Romney would have won the popular vote, which ultimately was not the case.
The Electoral College
What is the Electoral College?
In the Yahoo News article, headlined “Millions sign petition urging Electoral College to elect Hillary Clinton”, the writer states that American citizens did not in fact elect a president on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 8; they chose electors, and that on Monday, December 19, the 538 electors of the Electoral College would cast their ballots for a candidate and ultimately decide the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
In his explanation of the Electoral College, the writer noted that the authors of the Constitution established that system for two reasons.
“First, the founding fathers intended the Electoral College to serve as a buffer between the electorate and the presidency. They feared that a tyrant or someone incompetent would be able to manipulate the population and that better-informed, judicious electors could prevent this from happening. In other words, the Electoral College is supposed to act as a check on the citizenry, should it be hoodwinked by a demagogue.”
The writer pointed to a view articulated by founding father Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers: “A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder.”
The author of the article noted that the Electoral College was created as a result of compromises with smaller states, to ensure that they would not be overlooked.
Each state, he explained, has the same number of electoral votes as it has congressional representatives, and that voters in smaller states thus have more influence than those in larger states, because every state, no matter how small, has two US senators.
He however highlighted that some historians point to slavery as another driving factor in the formation of the Electoral College.
“Southerners were worried that direct democracy - one person, one vote (in actuality, one white, male landowner, one vote) - would give Northern states greater sway in political affairs. But if the South had been allowed to include its slave population in determining the numbers of representatives and electors, it would have greater political power. This resulted in the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, in which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person.
He noted that one writer, Joyce Carol Oates, and others have argued that this system would always benefit rural, more conservative voices at the expense of urban, more liberal ones.
He also stated that the Change.org petition is part of a growing trend of petitions prompted by Trump’s election. Many are directed explicitly at the President-elect and urge him to rethink his policy positions or behaviour on the campaign trail.
The writer further stated that a voter in Virginia is calling for Trump to meet with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to learn about the reality of climate change, while a Californian mother of two children with chronic illnesses is urging Trump to protect the commitment enshrined in the Obamacare legislation that forbids discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. And another woman in California is asking for Trump to condemn hate crimes that his supporters commit in his name.
He however declared that those petitions for Trump to re-examine specific policies or actions have not yet resonated with the public as strongly as the petition to the Electoral College calling upon its members to stop him from entering the Oval Office.
In a major upset on Tuesday (Nov. 8), political neophyte Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States of America over former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.
While Clinton had reportedly won the Popular Vote with 60,781,982 or (47.9%), even though all the ballots have yet to be counted, Trump had won the Electoral Vote with 60,834,398 or (47.2%).
In an election campaign that had seen the emergence of gutter politics and the use of scatological language in a cuss-down mode, Trump was labelled a bigot.
According to former Minister of National Security Dwyer Astaphan, neither Clinton nor Trump is an angel and neither of the two is without a past.
He however stressed that Trump’s conduct throughout the election season was nothing short of ghastly. “His crudeness, disrespect, misogyny, bigotry, racism and ignorance of the nuances of global politics were blatantly and embarrassingly obvious.”
Astaphan opined that Trump had struck a nerve among people who were fed up with the so-called ‘Establishment’, fooling them into believing that he, a man who was able to get away with a nearly $1B tax bill, was not part of that same establishment.
“He fooled poor White people into thinking that he was their champion. Now this is a man who outsourced much of his work to foreign shores, robbing poor Americans of jobs, a man who hired underpaid foreign workers and a man who stiffed small contractors who came across his path over the years.”
It is now left for the world to wait and see if members of the United States Electoral College would recognise the petitions and fulfil millions of Americans desire or cast their ballots on December 19 for Donald Trump to live in the White House for the next four years or more.
