DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Connecticut To Give Its Electoral College Votes To National Popular Vote Victor

The "Russian election" stuff is tired and actually harmful at this point.

There's a lot of evidence showing that the Trump campaign relied on Russian connections for money and intel, and that's a very real concern given how far in debt Trump is and how likely (and in many cases proven) that massive debt is tied to Russian oligarchs.

Bu Trump won because Hillary ran an incompetent campaign, not because of Russia.

The ""Russian election" stuff is more or less sour grapes about Hillary blowing the election, and detracts from the very real issue of an easily swayed pushover owing big money to foreign powers.

Only you would have a hissy fit and expect links to something that you know there are no links to! The russian bots and lying FB memes dumped on the less educated, uneducated, and uninformed hooples tipped the scale in Trump's favor, there is no doubting that fact. Use google and find all the links you want to that Arch.




This should get you started.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

What do you think had a bigger impact on the 2016 election?

A) Russian-funded spam on social media

or

B) Hillary Clinton neglecting to step into the state of Wisconsin or any major American union all?

I think social media, especially FB was used to target and manipulate middle right america and empower the alt-right. I still get blatant lies showing up in my newsfeed daily. They just don't want Hillary to go away.

Maybe that is because your are in liberal Blue country...I just replaced a BC for $10 in Indiana....I replaced my SS card for FREE...I renewed my drivers license (5 years) for $24.00...and not one thing was a burden other then taking about 10 minutes of my time for each thing...the definition/standard of a burden these days is so stupidly low...it is a sign of the times. We are nearing a point that getting out of bed burden and breathing on your own is unacceptable.

You are somewhat correct in the world of the EC...but this thread started out with the premise that states would award their state EC votes based on a nation wide popular vote....so illegal votes in CA or IL or other documented sanctuary cities that are BLUE and vote Demonrat have the potential to sway nation wide popular vote totals and disrupt the will of the people in each state....please tell me you understand this...cuz it aint rocket science.

In NY u can go to the DMV and for $8 get a NYS ID that works just like your DL ...

And that $8 gets you an ID that expires in 8 years ....

Thats a dollar a year for U leftie’s ....

They can't do Math word problems yet!

I don't believe anyone has accused you of being a CPA.

Actually, after enrolling in 5 YouTube courses, Vambo can do a lot of independent work now.

Puff Puff Pass...

For sure. Judging by your posts you must have the best weed

Since I don't drink or smoke weed he certainly missed the mark. As per usual.

Has a con stated why it should be easier to buy a gun than it is to vote? Of course not, because the party was built on the strategy of voter suppression. That's why they make this big hullabaloo about a crime that's committed by 3 people a year, using FBI stats and make no noise about absentee ballots. If Cons wanted to crack down on voter fraud, then they would take a serious look at absentee ballots. A ballot, where you don't need to submit your ID or anything like that. Of course if they looked into absentee fraud, I'm sure the Cons would find their fingerprints all on it.

Well, if Vambo made points he wouldn't be Vambo.

Fixed it for you!

Sorry for reviving old thread, my twins are still in the NICU so it's been even busier than usual!

I do have a certified replacement, that was what the $200 was for. The actual replacement cost was pretty cheap, something like $30 (I was born in Virginia). The bigger cost was the turnaround requirements because I wanted to overnight mail my info to virginia and have it mailed back to me in connecticut. It was either that or wait up to 3 weeks while my car sat on the lot that I paid for. I opted to pay extra and pick up the car 3 days later.

I live in Ohio, so not sure what the liberal blue country means. My story happened in 2005 so I'm sure things change better or worse. The problem isn't identifying what's a burden, the problem is that the 24th amendment specifies you cannot pay any poll tax. That means the cost burden has to be $0.00.

Correct, you can't charge a tax to vote. You can require people to have a valid I.D.


You can't be arrested for having no valid I.D., but you can for not having one for trying to purchase age restricted items or conduct in age restricted activity.. Voting is a age restricted activity. You can also require a photo I.d. to take part in a age restricted activity.


States need to require proof of age before one can vote. They can also require proof of residence. You can't vote outside you voting precinct. You can, but you have to provide proof and vote absentee.



States hold the power of elections....those who don't empower their authority are weak ass states who shouldn't even be a state.


All of us have probably held a whore a few times, but it wasn't the life long mission.


States with weak election laws need to get a grip.



If you can't prove who you are and where you live, no person should you be allowed to vote.

I mean come on, unless you are saying illegals and dead people should be allowed to vote.

Be serious here.

Reminder: There is no two way authentication when you vote absentee. You don't have to show ID then.

Not exactly true. I always vote absentee. I give the Town Clerk my license to get my ballot.

I vote absentee from overseas through Ohio...no ID, just a declaration...

Does your precinct not have online sign up for absentee ballots? Cool to know though.

Interesting.

Makes sense I guess. They probably just ask me for one because i'm there, in person, with no address to send it to

Those requirements are all fine as long as they do not provide a burden on the voter that could discourage them from voting. Unfortunately that's not always the case, especially if it costs a great deal of money to prove you are who you say you are. It's why Voter ID Laws like Texas first implemented (which require a state ID and only a state ID) face more opposition than say, Virginia's voter ID law, which lets you use state ID, bank statements, utility bills, etc.

I am fine with voter ID and do not think that just because some problem is minuscule that it's not worth mitigating. I think voting is the most important thing we can do in this country. But implementing roadblocks is disenfranchisement and no one should be willing to put up with it.



I assume this is in regards to the National Popular Vote change CT enacted. That's certainly one way to look at it, although it doesn't seem well researched to me. I do not throw the word racist around a whole lot, but I do believe the electoral college was founded on racist ideals. The 3/5ths compromise expressly existed to give southern states additional population without that population being able to vote, resulting in additional EC voters as well as house members. The south was the economic engine of the fledging United States, and they had a great deal of pull in the Continental Congress.

James Madison preferred a popular vote but conceded the Electoral College would gain the favor of southern slaveholders: source





Ballpeen, I know you've been on here a while, but your post seemed to not make much sense to me at this point so I don't think I have a good response. I definitely am not OK with non voters voting, and hopefully my post makes that clear.

Their state could vote 100% for one candidate, but give all of their electors to the other candidate, if they won the national vote?

That's ludicrous.

Their voters almost might as well not vote.

So you feel that electing the president by popular vote is ludicrous... ok

So why do GOP voters in, say, California vote under the current EC system... now that is ludicrous...

No matter where you vote, that vote is counted on a national level, as in popular vote... determines the winner... the EC then just follows that awarding the winner the EC votes.. which would not violate the constitution as it currently stands...

The reason that the founders set up the Electoral College is to limit the power of large states.

If we had a popular vote election, Presidential candidates would never visit smaller states. Why bother? They would not matter at all. They would just visit large population centers, and promise them to moon.

If Connecticut does this, why would a Presidential candidate care about visiting them at all? They are allowing their vote to be taken from them, and given to whoever the rest of country votes for. (even if that candidate only wins by 1 vote, and no matter who their state voters vote for)

Let's say that their state votes, by a 75% - 25% margin, for candidate A. However, Candidate B wins the national popular vote. How is this not horribly disenfranchising their own voters?

I wonder how they'll feel about voting for Trump in the next election, despite how they actually vote as a state, if he manages to win the popular vote?

I will add that some states split their electors, some by formula, and some by percentage of the vote for each candidate within their state. I have no problem with that, but to hand over all of your electors to all other 49 states is idiotic, and disenfranchising, to me.

The Troubling Reason the Electoral College Exists

As Americans await the quadrennial running of the presidential obstacle course now known as the Electoral College, it’s worth remembering why we have this odd political contraption in the first place. After all, state governors in all 50 states are elected by popular vote; why not do the same for the governor of all states, a.k.a. the president? The quirks of the Electoral College system were exposed this week when Donald Trump secured the presidency with an Electoral College majority, even as Hillary Clinton took a narrow lead in the popular vote.

Some claim that the founding fathers chose the Electoral College over direct election in order to balance the interests of high-population and low-population states. But the deepest political divisions in America have always run not between big and small states, but between the north and the south, and between the coasts and the interior.

One Founding-era argument for the Electoral College stemmed from the fact that ordinary Americans across a vast continent would lack sufficient information to choose directly and intelligently among leading presidential candidates.

This objection rang true in the 1780s, when life was far more local. But the early emergence of national presidential parties rendered the objection obsolete by linking presidential candidates to slates of local candidates and national platforms, which explained to voters who stood for what.

Although the Philadelphia framers did not anticipate the rise of a system of national presidential parties, the 12th Amendment—proposed in 1803 and ratified a year later— was framed with such a party system in mind, in the aftermath of the election of 1800-01. In that election, two rudimentary presidential parties—Federalists led by John Adams and Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson—took shape and squared off. Jefferson ultimately prevailed, but only after an extended crisis triggered by several glitches in the Framers’ electoral machinery. In particular, Republican electors had no formal way to designate that they wanted Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice president rather than vice versa. Some politicians then tried to exploit the resulting confusion.

Enter the 12th Amendment, which allowed each party to designate one candidate for president and a separate candidate for vice president. The amendment’s modifications of the electoral process transformed the Framers’ framework, enabling future presidential elections to be openly populist and partisan affairs featuring two competing tickets. It is the 12th Amendment’s Electoral College system, not the Philadelphia Framers’, that remains in place today. If the general citizenry’s lack of knowledge had been the real reason for the Electoral College, this problem was largely solved by 1800. So why wasn’t the entire Electoral College contraption scrapped at that point?

Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.

At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.

Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.

If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.

Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.

The 1796 contest between Adams and Jefferson had featured an even sharper division between northern states and southern states. Thus, at the time the Twelfth Amendment tinkered with the Electoral College system rather than tossing it, the system’s pro-slavery bias was hardly a secret. Indeed, in the floor debate over the amendment in late 1803, Massachusetts Congressman Samuel Thatcher complained that “The representation of slaves adds thirteen members to this House in the present Congress, and eighteen Electors of President and Vice President at the next election.” But Thatcher’s complaint went unredressed. Once again, the North caved to the South by refusing to insist on direct national election.

In light of this more complete (if less flattering) account of the electoral college in the late 18th and early 19th century, Americans should ask themselves whether we want to maintain this odd—dare I say peculiar?—institution in the 21st century.

http://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/

The electoral college was in place so the southern states would agree to a vote of the people for president. They were the economic engine of the colonies and held an immense amount of sway. Virginia back then would be California today.

Candidates already don't bother to visit states they consider safe, so I don't agree. With a popular vote you could see candidates visiting large cities in safe EC areas like Texas (Houston and Dallas) and California (LA) more. Right now there's little point in visiting the safe places for a presidential candidate. This would reduce the importance of campaigning in other places , so I view this as mostly zero sum. Candidates already rally in cities in swing States and that's about it...

It's interesting you bring up the 75-25 margin because that's how the EC works in the majority of states. If a state goes 60-40 for candidate A, all EC votes go to that candidate. The minority voters get absolutely zero votes on the national stage. The popular vote compact plays within the game of the EC to force a popular vote outcome.

j/c

Suddenly conservatives are against states rights?

See, my idea is to have an electorial college where it isn't a winner take all system. Let the delegates give their votes proportionally. So in CT where I think we have 8 delegates. If 60% of the vote goes toward the Dem and 40% goes to the republican, then it should be something like, 5 electorial votes to the dem, 3 to the republican.

I don't like the winner take all measure. I makes states like Florida and Ohio too important, and it makes states like mine, only important for fund raising.

Cause the candidates always go to my state, but I never get a chance to hear them. They're right down the road at some fancy house or country club meeting with the people that can donate serious cash.


I think this allows the small states to still have their power, while also making it sensible for the Candidates to visit more states than just Florida, Ohio, etc

Exactly

Exactly right. Why Conn. would want to give up their power as a state of people is mind blowing.

Ok... answer me this... why would a repub vote in California... what is the motivation there?

It would be hard to get rid of the winner take all system , because it would weaken the strength of the two parties we have. The corrupt bargain of 1824 showcases how this came to be.

Historically, Republics have always been used to restrict the power of the people. It was used extensively in Ancient Rome as well as the British colonies to keep power at the top.

In hopes that he might tip his state to his candidate.

Why would a person vote when his vote is absolutely meaningless, not even counting towards his state's electoral college vote?

Have you even read the original article...?

Bottom line... take the EC out of your mind... every vote counts, as they go into the popular vote pool... are you this confused when you vote for your governor?