The Electoral College is Vitally Important

The Democrat Socialist Party wants to eliminate the Electoral College.  Others are pushing a compact among the states to have each state ignore the votes of its own citizens and award their electoral college votes to the Presidential candidate who won the plurality of votes in the nationwide election.  This interstate compact does not eliminate the Electoral College, but it does eliminate its purpose.

Both of these ideas would have awful consequences.  Among them are:

• Already extensive voter fraud will explode.  Contrary to the oft repeated claims of academics, who are in the pocket of the Democrat Socialist Party, that voter fraud is insignificant, actual election managers have known for decades that every Democrat Socialist Party Presidential Candidate has 150,000 fraudulent votes in Philadelphia.  New York City, Boston, Providence, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago will all deliver large numbers of fraudulent votes to the Democrat Socialist Party also.  Voter fraud can only operate on a massive scale where one political party has long held power over an area with a large population for a long period of time.  A nationwide plurality contest will make it much harder to triage the many cases of voter fraud for investigation.  With the Electoral College, one can focus voter fraud investigations on those areas where the vote will actually change the outcome of the state-wide election and the way its Electoral College votes are cast.

• The Democrat Socialist Party presidential candidate will spend even less time in rural areas of the country and in towns and small cities than they already do.  It is a great advantage to have the richest lode of one's voters crowded together in a few large cities.  Limited time and money can be far more effectively focused on these high density ant-nests of humanity than is possible for a candidate who seeks the votes of Americans living in lower population density areas of the nation.  Post-election maps will show even more of the nation in red even as a few dots of blue carry the Presidential election.  Future Presidents will be less and less able to claim that they are the President of all the People.  It will become ever easier for them to disregard those who live in fly-over country and to designate them the Deplorables.

• Legitimate government is government that protects the exercise of every citizen's individual rights.  Unfettered democracy is actually pressed to trample the rights of many citizen's in order to purchase the votes of a plurality of citizens.  In many cases, the interests of people living in cities and high density areas are different than those who live in lower density areas.  The city-dweller may be very happy to have all the products he needs that require natural resources as inputs to come from China, Africa, and South America.  He may be more ready to buy into environmental scare tactics than some who live in a mining area.  The city-dweller might be susceptible to using the government to drive down food prices at the expense of farmers and those who process and transport food materials.  The city-dweller likely has no interest in the fate of fishermen.  He is likely to want federal tax deductions for heavy state and local taxes at the expense of more rural people with less expensive governments.  The city-dweller will push for expensive subsidies for public transportation at the expense of people from lower density population areas.  City-dwellers and the Democrat Socialist Party are already very often seeking to force employers to pay high minimum wages such as the commonly demanded $15/hour wage.  Even in cities a minimum wage requirement does great harm to those who are little educated, have low work skills, or are little motivated to work.  But minimum wage requirements on the national level are even more devastating in rural areas where businesses have fewer potential customers and where the cost of living is commonly much lower.  Our Republic, under which the Electoral College is a key leg, was designed to discourage a portion of the disregard that an unfettered democracy has for individuals and minorities of the electorate.

• That party most eager to have a federal government which provides goodies to its voters while showing a great willingness to harm those who do not vote or who vote for another party will benefit most from keeping the Electoral College from doing the task it was set up to do by the Framers of the Constitution.  The Framers knew the dangers of democracy.  They knew that governments are biased in favor of increasing their power over the People.  They put many checks and balances into our system of federal governance in order to provide for our welfare by minimizing the dangers to individuals and minorities that democracies are inclined toward and by making it harder for governments to increase their power and control over the lives of the People.  When the state legislatures were no longer allowed to designate the electors to the Electoral College, the federal system was undermined.  The power of the states was diminished.  This made it easier for a party to ignore many states as it sought power at the federal government level.  

• A constitutional amendment is required to eliminate the Electoral College.  Such amendments are hard to pass.  An amendment ultimately requires the approval of three-quarters of the state legislatures.  This is pretty much an impossible task for the Democrat Socialist Party to achieve, since so many of the states are clearly to be ignored by them once they have eliminated the Electoral College.  The idea that everyone's vote should count in a Presidential election has a lot of naive appeal to many Americans, so the compact between the states that each state will cast its electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote across America has some appeal.  It requires the approval of many fewer state legislatures than does an amendment to the Constitution.  Many of the states to be ignored by the future government can also be ignored in the process of putting this compact into play.  I do wonder if once the People of a state have voted for candidate A, but candidate B wins the national popular vote, how stable the compact of legislatures will be when the People of that state find their own legislature betraying their state-wide vote.  For instance, imagine that Trump had won the popular vote.  Can you imagine the uproar in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and California when their electoral votes were cast for Trump?

• The entire plurality that Hillary Clinton won over Donald Trump was based on the vote in California, where Republicans are largely disenfranchised by a state election system that places Democrat Socialists running against Democrat Socialists for virtually every state-wide office in the general election and few if any Republicans are on the ballot.  This Democrat Socialist voting system is a strong voter suppression factor.  The interstate compact to award each state's electoral votes to the popular vote winner will encourage more states solidly controlled by a party to adopt this form of voter suppression.  All evidence to this point is that Democrats are more willing to suppress the vote of Republicans than Republicans are eager to suppress the Democrat vote. 

Most of the support for weakening the Electoral College is in the Democrat Socialist Party.  That is the same party that wants to have children, felons, and non-citizens vote, a $15 minimum wage, welfare for those who choose not to work, Medicare for all, no power except intermittent wind and solar, ever more federal land, regulations against any environmental harm that can be imagined by Chicken Little, catastrophic man-made global warming based on faulty physics and lacking any catastrophe, open borders with a welfare state, and which discourages people from having children.  There is no lunacy too loony for the Democrat Socialist Party which is well-represented by the donkey or ass and in some states also by the white segregationist rooster.

Hilary Clinton's loss of the last election brought on a new sense of urgency to undermine the Electoral College with her claim of a majority of the votes.  Actually, she only had a plurality.  What is more, the sum of the votes to the smaller government parties such as the Republican, Libertarian, and Constitution parties was greater than that for the likes of the Democrats, Green, Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Socialist Workers parties.

Rather than more unfettered democracy, we need more institutions and laws that protect individuals and minorities of all kinds -- not just racial, gender, or sexuality -- from the brutal use of force and the harms that a plurality of voters and their chosen power-hungry politicians are all too often eager to inflict upon them.

The Integrity of the Vote

It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in the U.S. except in a few localities of Maryland.  It is illegal for the dead to vote, thankfully everywhere in the U.S.  It is illegal to vote in more than one state in an election.  It is illegal for a person to vote while impersonating another person.  It is illegal to vote as a fictitious person.  In 38 states it is illegal to vote while serving time in prison as a felon, while in other states it is illegal for a period of time after the completion of serving time or until the felon has petitioned the state for the return of the right to vote.  Yet, each of these types of illegal votes are known to happen.  What we do not adequately know is how many of these illegal votes occur.

We do know that there is a great potential for illegal votes.  We also know that some politicians and their campaign associates eagerly court illegal votes.

During the 2016 election campaign, Obama was asked on a Spanish-speaking radio station broadcast if non-citizens were in danger if they cast a vote in the election.  He told them they, including undocumented aliens, were citizens and no one would come after them if they voted because they were citizens.  So as far as this Democrat is concerned, the naturalization laws established by Congress in accordance with the power invested in the Congress by our Constitution shall be ignored in the interest of the fact that more than 80% of the votes of non-citizens in 2008 were votes for the Democratic Party.

John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, wrote an e-mail advising non-citizen immigrants to get a driver's license and then state at a polling site that they were a U.S. citizen.  That greater than 80% portion of the vote is just too hard for a dedicated socialist Democrat to resist.  A Rasmussen poll in 2015 found that 53% of Democrats support allowing even illegal aliens to vote.

The Democrats have long opposed voter ID and they have long favored mail-in ballots whose validity is especially difficult to ascertain.  In most states one can register to vote simply by stating that you are a citizen, so many non-citizens are registered to vote.  One of the ways we know this is because jurors are called based on the voter registration roles and many of those called get out of jury duty by claiming that they are not citizens.  We also know from an Old Dominion University study of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study of voters in the 2008 and 2010 elections that 14% of non-citizens said they were registered to vote.

What is the potential for immigrants, and especially non-citizen immigrants, to affect the outcome of elections in the U.S.?  It is clearly a function of their numbers, their understanding that it is illegal for them to vote, and the protections against those determined to vote.  Let us examine the number of immigrants first:

Of the immigrants, 47.1% in 2014 were citizens.  So of the 42.4 million immigrants in 2014, 52.9% were non-citizens, making the number of non-citizens about 22.4 million.  About 20 million of them were older than 18 years of age.  Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch has been making the mistaken claim that there are 42.4 million non-citizens in the U.S.  But 14% registration of 20 million non-citizens is 2.8 million illegal registrations.

A 2012 Pew Research Center study found that about 2.75 million people are registered to vote in more than one state.  It also found that 1.8 million dead people were registered to vote.  Adding up the non-citizen registrants, the multi-state registrants, and the dead registrants, the voter registration rolls have a very worrisome 7.35 million registered illegal voters.  Some of these people may themselves use their false registrations to vote -- well excluding the dead ones --, but as worrisome as that is, there is great potential for an organized effort by a nefarious minded organization or party to convert that potential into actual election stealing results.

Mind you, I am not claiming that it is likely that President Trump is correct in saying that there were 3 - 5 million illegal votes in the 2016 election.  I am saying that it is not acceptable knowing what is at stake in elections to have such a large potential for election abuse.  Evil-minded socialists in particular are often inclined to trample on individual rights by using such potential tools to undermine American freedoms.

It is clear that the Democrats are especially keen on encouraging non-citizens to vote and other illegal voting practices.  There are some known cases of Republican politicians also doing so.  None of these nefarious activities should be tolerated in the least.  The integrity of the vote is a very serious matter. It is all the more so because voters unleash and direct the hugely exaggerated powers of our big governments which make a practice of hurting some citizens and other residents in favor of the whims of a plurality of votes collected.  This situation is bad enough when the votes are those of citizens cast in a legal manner.

The Old Dominion University study estimated that 6.4% of U.S. non-citizens themselves voted in the November 2008 election and that 81% of those votes were for Obama.  Such numbers were actually enough that had they not been cast, John McCain would have won the electoral votes of the state of North Carolina instead of Obama.  That did not change the outcome of that election nationally, but there are not infrequent presidential elections that are changed by flipping a state with 15 electoral votes.  It is also very likely that Al Franken became a Senator representing Minnesota because of the illegal votes cast in that election.  ObamaCare was made law as a result of his election.  The Colorado Secretary of State, Scott Gessler, in an investigation of the U.S. Senate election of 2010 found that almost 5,000 illegal aliens cast votes in that election.  In 2005, the U.S. GAO found that as many as 3% of the 30,000 people called to jury duty in one U.S. district court were non-citizens despite being on the voter registration rolls.

Elections have consequences.  It is, unfortunately, rather difficult to detect all of the illegal votes after an election.  One has to find a way to see to it that illegal votes are not cast at all.  And one has to do this despite the concerted efforts of the Democratic Party to maintain the huge potential for election fraud. The Obama administration refused to comply with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which requires the states to keep accurate and up-to-date voter registration rolls, with help from the federal government in identifying those with citizenship and those without it.  The state of Maryland requested the help guaranteed by the NVRA to clean up its voter registration rolls from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service and was denied the information under the claim that that agency had to "safeguard the confidentiality of each legal immigrant."  Few states have made the effort to comply with the NVRA and without help from the federal government, it is very difficult for them to do much.

In general, the Obama administration has opposed voter ID, which is required, contrary to Obama's claims, in most other nations.  It has favored same-day registrations, voting by mail, open borders, amnesty for illegal aliens, and every other measure to increase the immigrant vote.  To clean up this mess, the federal government must be required to help the states comb their voter registration rolls for non-citizens and it must help them identify the registered dead using its information on social security and Medicare.  To be sure, there are cases in which the states can probably help the federal government clean up its social security and Medicare records as well.  It is important that every vote actually cast is checked against provided voter identification, including absentee ballots.  No voter registration should be allowed without proof of citizenship.  And, there should be a concerted effort to inform non-citizens that it is illegal for them to vote.  Each and every case of illegal voting that is found should be prosecuted vigorously and punished severely.  There need to be frequent and careful investigations of elections looking for any voter fraud that has occurred.  Elections are too vitally important not to make a major law enforcement effort to insure their integrity.