suga mama

The electoral college does not vote until December 19th. We have 40 days.

What does this mean?

Right now, the presidential election results are only a PROJECTION of the election outcome. They are PRELIMINARY RESULTS. A candidate still needs to earn 270 electoral votes to win. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, which means that more than 50% of the voters wanted her for president. The electoral college shouldn’t guarantee an override of the public’s opinion– and it doesn’t have to.

There are 21 states that do NOT restrict which candidate the electors vote for. Out of these 21, Hillary lost the following:

As you can see, these states are worth 166 electoral votes. As it currently stands, Hillary Clinton is projected to receive 232 votes. Trump is projected to win 306. This means that 37 votes need to be taken away from Trump to bring him down to 269. Hillary Clinton needs 38 votes ADDED to win 270. These electoral voters can also abstain, which means that they can refuse to vote for either candidate. If 37 of the voters within these states abstain then no candidate will have reached the required 270. In this case, the vote would be taken to the House.

Trump won Pennsylvania, a state that typically votes blue, by less than 100,000 votes. While it is highly unlikely to get all 20 electoral voters to cross party lines and vote democrat, it also isn’t impossible to convince a few of them to be “faithless electors.” We only need to convince 38 out of the 166. That is 23%. There are SIXTEEN states we need to focus our attention on.

A move like this would be unprecedented. However, as we all saw on November 8th, odds don’t guarantee reality. Trump had a less than 20% chance of winning, yet given the circumstances, enough people came together and made it happen. We can make this happen. 

Ask yourself this: What do we have left to lose? We can stay complacent and accept that this country will be run by a racist, sexist, islamophobic, homophobic, ablest bigot, or we can at least try. 

How?

SPREAD THE WORD. Trend #NotMyPresident to let people know that we do not accept being led by a man who does not care about our wellbeing. Email your professors, email the dean of your colleges. The last thing a university wants is negative press. Millenials can take a stand, but that doesn’t mean we have to be the only ones. Church-led events helped bring a lot of disillusioned voters to the polls. Spread the word in any way possible, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or even in person. Stage a peaceful protest. Hand out flyers. Let the people around you know that you don’t accept this man as your leader when he won’t even accept you as a citizen with your designated rights.

These 166 people need to face the consequences of electing this man. 

Is this possible?

Yes, I wouldn’t have made the post without doing my research. Read the following paragraphs, taken from archives.gov:

Are there restrictions on who the Electors can vote for?

There is no Constitutional provision or Federal law that requires Electors to vote according to the results of the popular vote in their states. Some states, however, require Electors to cast their votes according to the popular vote. (The 16 states listed above do NOT restrict their electors to this rule.) These pledges fall into two categories—Electors bound by state law and those bound by pledges to political parties.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution does not require that Electors be completely free to act as they choose and therefore, political parties may extract pledges from electors to vote for the parties’ nominees. Some state laws provide that so-called “faithless Electors” may be subject to fines or may be disqualified for casting an invalid vote and be replaced by a substitute elector. The Supreme Court has not specifically ruled on the question of whether pledges and penalties for failure to vote as pledged may be enforced under the Constitution. No Elector has ever been prosecuted for failing to vote as pledged.

SOURCE: https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/electors.html

Can Hillary still receive votes from the electoral college even though she’s conceded?

Think about it, Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election. All of the electoral voters didn’t immediately vote for President Obama the second he conceded. The election still ended up being 332 votes to 206. Not 538 unanimous votes for Barack Obama.

“For starters, it doesn’t matter if a losing candidate concedes, as far as the Electoral College process goes, according to Amy Bunk, director of legal affairs and policy at the Office of the Federal Register, among other experts.”

SOURCE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/10/20/can-losing-presidential-candidate-actually-challenge-election-results/s42xw8h3pcwFcXx7rsS14I/story.html

Conceding does not take a candidate’s name off of the ballot that the electoral voters see. In the past, “faithless electors” have voted for the projected losing candidate, or even voted third party. 

SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_faithless_electors

When I was a child, from the time I was about four and could understand things, my mom told me and my brother that we should have a secret word. That way, if we were ever in trouble or felt unsafe and we didn’t want the people around us to know we needed her to come get us, we could let her know. So she let us pick the word and my brother and I chose the phrase “peanut butter cups.” (I’m happy to share the phrase now since both my brother and I are adults now). 

I used the phrase twice in my life. Once, I was at a friends house when I eight years old. Her dad got really drunk and was throwing things against the wall. I was really scared and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself on the phone when I called my mom to come get me because I didn’t know if he would get more violent if I asked her to come get me. So I called her and was calm and after a couple minutes I asked “Hey mommy, did you get me those peanut butter cups from the store?” And she said “I’ll be right there.” And she came and got me within minutes. 

Second, I was a teenager spending the night at a friends house. Her brother and dad were drinking and they started talking about things that made me uncomfortable - ie: what they liked to do to women. My friend didn’t seem perturbed and said that was normal for them and that I shouldn’t worry. But I was worried because they were really drunk and I was 15 and the only ‘woman’ around that wasn’t related to them. I went in my friends room, told her I needed to call my mom and say goodnight. Before I hung up with her I asked “Next time we go to the store, can we get some peanut butters cups? I’ve been craving them.” And she came and got me, just like that. 

beauty of simple

And that’s not even the reason the college was made in the first place. It was made for 2 reasons. 1. The founding fathers didn’t trust the citizens. They thought the citizens were too uneducated to make a good choice. And 2. It’s easier to count the votes of a small group of people all in one place rather than millions across the country when there’s no cars or internet.

Without the electoral college, every single vote would count exactly the same.  No vote anywhere in the country would be worth more than any other vote.  Now you may ask, but Raymond, isn’t it like this already?

NO.  IT FUCKING IS NOT.

Take Wyoming for example.  Wyoming has a population of 584,000 people.  They also have 3 electoral college votes. This means that each 194,667 votes is worth one electoral college vote in Wyoming.  Now let’s look at California.  California has a population of 38.8 million people and 55 electoral college votes.  This means that it takes 705,455 votes for each electoral college vote.  

A VOTE IN WYOMING IS WORTH 3.5X MORE THAN A VOTE IN CALIFORNIA.

It literally takes 3.5 times more votes to get 1 electoral vote in California than it does in Wyoming.  How tf is that fair?