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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Electoral College Is a National Security Threat
Nor did the founding fathers anticipate that so many people could be insane--to vote for Trump!
Washington And The World
The Electoral College Is a National Security Threat
The founding fathers never anticipated the rise of Facebook and fake news.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/20/electoral-college-threat-national-security-215626
By MATTHEW OLSEN and BENJAMIN HAAS
September 20, 2017
In Federalist No. 68, his pseudonymous essay on The Mode of Electing the President, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the Electoral College could shield the United States from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. Because of the transient existence and dispersed makeup of the electors, he argued, hostile countries would find it too expensive and time-consuming to inject sinister bias into the process of choosing a president. At the time, the new American leaders feared meddling from Great Britain, their former colonial master, or perhaps from other powers such as France, and they designed a system to minimize the prospect that Europes aging monarchies could seize control of their young democracy.
Hamilton and his colleagues never could have envisioned a year like 2016, when an enemy stateRussiawas able to manipulate Americas election process with stunning effectiveness. But its clear the national security rationale for the Electoral College is outdated and therefore it should be retired. Simply put, it enables foreign powers to more easily pierce the very shield Hamilton imagined it would be.
In Hamiltons day, as he argued, it would have been nearly impossible for a hostile power to co-opt dozens of briefly chosen electors flung across 13 states with primitive roads. But in the social media age, the Electoral College system provides ripe microtargeting grounds for foreign actors who intend to sabotage presidential elections via information and disinformation campaigns, as well as by hacking our voting infrastructure. One reason is that citizens in certain states simply have more voting power than citizens in other states, such as Texas and California. This makes it easier for malign outside forces to direct their efforts.
But what if the national popular vote determined the president instead of the Electoral College? No voter would be more electorally powerful than another. It would be more difficult for a foreign entity to sway many millions of voters scattered across the country than concentrated groups of tens of thousands of voters in just a few states. And it would be more difficult to tamper with voting systems on a nationwide basis than to hack into a handful of databases in crucial swing districts, which could alter an elections outcome. Yes, a foreign entity could disseminate messages to major cities across the entire country or try to carry out a broad-based cyberattack, but widespread actions of this sort would be not only more resource-intensive, but also more easily noticed, exposed and addressed.................................
saidsimplesimon
(7,888 posts)There is a reason that our Constitution was amended on many occasions, including giving the right to vote for those age 18.
I support, "One Woman, One Man, One Vote". It is time, imo, to retire the Electoral College.
unblock
(52,352 posts)the bigger problem at this point is that we're dealing with a major political party that is perfectly fine cheating.
a change in which votes where determine the winner in and of itself doesn't address the cheating issue.
republicans will simply adapt and start cheating elsewhere.
one of the few advantages of the electoral college is that it puts the emphasis on states that are roughly evenly split between the two parties, notwithstanding that republicans seem to have state-level control of too many of these states (again, cheating).
at least in evenly-split states, it's somewhat harder (obviously still possible) to cheat, because both parties can look closely and have power to complain.
if it's a nationwide popular vote, then the fraud will simply shift to places like wyoming. too few people to matter? ha! what are we going to do when wyoming claims that most people voted there than in california? or they could just goose the republican vote totals by 10% in every red voting precinct in the country. we would need incredible oversight in every tiny voting precinct in the country.
again, i'm in favor of a nationwide popular vote.
but i'm also in favor of aggressively clamping down on the real electoral frauds -- gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc.
FakeNoose
(32,791 posts)This subhead on the Politico thesis is saying that the Electoral College is outdated now, and Facebook changes everything.
Maybe.
Or maybe it was that Facebook allowed themselves to be taken over by the Russian/Rightwinger "fake news" machine while they invoiced for all the advertising and ignored what was happening. Those things did happen last year and Facebook got extremely rich with the constant stream of "fake news." If Facebook hadn't been so greedy and allowed themselves to be aggregiously misused, perhaps the election would have had an entirely different outcome.
If the Electoral College is to be abolished, it means a Constitutional amendment that must be ratified by 3/4 of our states and would probably take up to 10 years to accomplish. But Facebook can and should be fixed immediately. There should be a US law stating that advertising cannot be made to look like a "news" story so that people are fooled into thinking it's editorial content, when it's not. There will be severe penalties or suspension of service for non-compliance. This bill should be written immediately and get passed this year, instead of wasting more time on the ridiculous 5th or 6th attempt to repeal the ACA.
I'm using Facebook as an example but they are far from the only news aggregator who allowed themselves to be used by the Russian/Rightwing "fake news" machine last year. This must stop and they aren't policing themselves, so we have to do it.