The Rasmussen polling organization has always tilted right, which is the reason no responsible commenter quotes it uncritically. But they’ve gone over the edge, urging Vice President Pence to intervene illegally in the election when he announces the results to Congress on January 6.
They quote Josef Stalin in support of their proposal because we know he always had the little guy’s welfare at heart.
Open Thread!
West of the Rockies
Curious. Today the NY Post leans away from Trump and Rasmussen goes all in.
Brachiator
Because mere belief is not proof?
I do not understand supposedly rational people who push this nonsense about voter fraud. It is on the same level as the belief that the Earth is flat.
Achrachno
So it wasn’t just something about their data models or frequent sampling error. They’re really tilting things R.
Frank Wilhoit
I have always said that Republicans spent 1945 to 1991 looking at the Soviet Union and saying, we gotta get us some o’ that.
Dorothy A. Winsor
These people are crazy
SiubhanDuinne
From this day forward, any candidate or media outlet that employs or cites Rasmussen as a reliable polling organisation is dead to me. Dead.
Roger Moore
@Frank Wilhoit:
The Republicans during the Cold War are like today’s Christianists worried about Islamists. They don’t object to anything the Islamists say about morality; they’re just upset they pronounce the deity’s name in the wrong language.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Brachiator: more importantly, the 12th amendment states that the Senate president will open and count *all* certificates. The link in the final tweet even quotes it:
“[T]he President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.”
It doesn’t say “may open some, but not all”, or “may open the certificates he chooses.”
The Republican’s pretense to revere the Constitution is being exposed as a lie ever more frequently. “No, the President doesn’t have to see that laws are faithfully executed, no, the President of the Senate doesn’t have to open all certificates, no, the census doesn’t have to count all people….”
satby
sedition, plain and simple.
Dupe1970
President Pelosi it is.
Roger Moore
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Conservative constitutional scholarship is about like conservative Christian apologetics. They aren’t interested in understanding the meaning of the author; they’re interested in justifying their policy preferences.
Gin & Tonic
@Frank Wilhoit: From the Committee on the Present Danger to this. If you had told me this in, say, 1985, I’d have suspected you of drug use.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, they can kiss any credibility (which was shaky already) for their polling goodbye.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore: This.
Villago Delenda Est
@West of the Rockies: Still a joke talking about Donald’s “legacy.” It’s made up of FAIL.
Tony Jay
He should. Absolutely. Mike Pence should definately choose to go down in history as the mug who went to jail for trying to illegally invalidate the votes of millions of American citizens just to give Donald Trump a moment’s fleeting happiness.
Chances are he won’t though.
Villago Delenda Est
@satby: (Supreme Chancellor Palpatine voice) “So, it’s treason, then.”
cain
These people.. did their twitter account get hacked or something? I can hardly believe that this is what is happening with this polling company.
It seems to me that they might as well bury this firm with that seditious comment.
Mallard Filmore
If this ploy begins to look like it will work, it will become known when the Arizona electors are counted. The Democrats can then, at least one Representative and at least one Senator, hand in a written objection on that or any other state. The two chambers will then split up to decide whether to accept or reject the electors. The Democrats in the House will send this issue to a committee and sit on it until Pelosi becomes President.
Search Youtube for: “Van Jones is WRONG: the Laws Governing the 2020 US Presidential Election”
or, as a naked link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6sVow9l8H4
cain
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Republicans have never given a shit about either the constitution or Jesus. They are all things to be co-opted in their right to fleece people and give power to themselves and their cronies.
Ksmiami
@Tony Jay: tbh if they even try, I’m not gonna be sorry when they get violently attacked
karen marie
cain
@Mallard Filmore:
Even if they engaged in that – they basically have destroyed democracy. The constitutional crises at that point is going to lead to a destabilization that I’m fairly sure their paymasters is not interesting in having.
ETA: Putin on the other hand will relish the great U.S. shooting themselves in the foot.
Major Major Major Major
And of course now they’re pretending they’ve triggered the libs with their Stalin “quote”; we’re piling onto that because we can’t contest the content of their “argument”.
Betty Cracker
@Mallard Filmore: My guess is the search for “Van Jones is wrong” would return a metric fuck-ton of links… :)
mad citizen
@Mallard Filmore: President Pelosi sounds fine to me for a little bit. It’s this Rasmussen crap that makes me glad I have left my Biden/Harris stickers across the back of my vehicle. Not taking them off until Biden is in the white house and Harris in her VP residence.
Matt McIrvin
Everyone knows how the people voted, and everyone knows how the Electoral College voted. Including the armed forces. If Mike Pence does some kind of incomprehensible procedural trick to try to make that magically not valid (especially if it doesn’t make any sense under the plain text of the law), does that bind them like Robocop under the sway of Directive 4?
I kind of doubt it, at this point.
Cameron
@Villago Delenda Est: Legacy? I wouldn’t consider a landscape of smoking ruins a legacy.
debbie
Not too long ago, there was talk of kicking Jefferson out of the Founding Fathers club. ?
randy khan
@LongHairedWeirdo:
If you read the article that’s the basis for the tweets, it’s really amazing how much effort is made to turn “shall . . . open” into “has the discretion . . . to decide which certificates to open.”
Also, apparently the Jefferson thing is hooey.
Elizabelle
@cain: I wonder about a hack, too.
I mean, Rassmussen are hacks, through most of election season.
But they could get hacked themselves. To see.
debbie
@SiubhanDuinne:
I can’t imagine Ramussen will be anything more than a joke after this is over.
AnotherBruce
Why in the fuck do we have this garbage? How many times do we have to count? God this is the stupidest electoral system in the world.
hueyplong
@randy khan: Of course the Jefferson thing is hooey. He won the election straight up and didn’t (nor did he need to) disregard some of the electoral votes in 1801.
A load of shit easily seen through by pretty much anyone except Rasmussen’s target audience
Which is, you know, sort of the point.
different-church-lady
Is Razz not extremely wrong about Jefferson?
cain
@debbie: er how would that work?
Elizabelle
@mad citizen: Why take them off? I still have my Obama-Biden sticker on. Next to the new Biden-Harris sticker. Both look spiffy.
You occasionally see cars with “W” stickers.
I never, ever see any John McCain stickers.
randy khan
I’m trying to figure out which states they mean. First, is it 6 or 7? Second, how do you get the EV count in the tweets? If you subtract Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that takes Biden down to 233. So far as I know, the only state where there even was some suggestion of a “dispute” is Nevada, which has 6 EVs, not 11 (and Biden won Nevada by 3%), and so Trump would win by 5 EVs, not 10. Have I missed a state that the crazies think was stolen?
coin operated
@Mallard Filmore:
I liked the other option presented in this video. Pelosi hoists these fools on their own petard by calling every last Republican Representative “fraudulently elected” and refuses to swear them in until after the electoral votes are counted. The ensuing meltdown would be epic.
Peale
@LongHairedWeirdo: It’s very clear that the founders really meant for George Washington to be President for Life and then pass the torch to his approved successor were he to somehow die (at the time, it was up in the air whether he was subject to human mortality). Once you won the presidency, you could just keep it. All the the other subsequent administrations have just been foolishly not-abusing this power. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why, say, Cleveland just didn’t tell his VP not to open the certifications of any of the states that he’d lose.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
If it was that easy then Breckinridge would have to done this to Lincoln in 1860 election results.
Tony Jay
I particularly like the press-ganging of Jefferson to ‘support’ their argument.
“Well Jefferson totally did the same thing back in the Founder period and we haven’t heard a peep about that from you history-book reading, Hamiltion humming-along with, ivory-tower Liberal frauds, have we? You wouldn’t want to look like hypocrites now, would you? Game. Set. Match.”
Which of course sets the table for the back-up shock revelation that nothing matters anyway because democracy died in 1800 or thereabouts so anything goes, and Rasmussen are just brave enough to acknowledge it.
Ah, what would the shape of this world be like without morons covering everything with their sediment?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@randy khan: California, according the wingnuts Trump really won California.
Peale
@randy khan: They also dispute Minnesota.
different-church-lady
@randy khan: It doesn’t even matter because all they need to do is knock Biden’s count below 270, not give Trump a lead. Pence could refuse ALL of Biden’s vote and that still doesn’t give it to Trump, it just sends it to the House. Rass is just being batshit here.
gratuitous
Let’s take a run at this nonsense from the other direction: If what you (“you” being Rasmussen, Louie Gohmert, Lin Wood, Rudy Giuliani, or the rest of the whackaloons pushing these fantasies) say is true, what is the point of going through the whole election thing? If voting doesn’t mean anything because your theory of the election says your preferred candidate wins regardless of vote totals, what’s the point of holding an election?
Millard Filmore
@mad citizen:
So, you’re going to wait a month while the ferrets clean out Russia’s listening devices?
Miss Bianca
I just wish stupid like this was actually self-punishing.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t think that the GOP leadership, or anyone else, thinks that Trump is worth precipitating a constitutional crisis and putting democracy on the line.
Jeffro
@West of the Rockies:
It is a time of choosing…
hueyplong
It appears the Trumpers are now at the One Weird Trick click-bait stage of the election.
Not sure what follows other than Pence being some sort of Sovereign who can name Trump the once and future king because reasons.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
And now the wingnuts are all Stalin fans. Perfect. They’ve did it. The stupid bastards finally went so far to the Right they ended up on the left.
Jeffro
Me neither!
I have seen ones with the ‘McCain’ part razored off, leaving only the ‘Palin’ part behind. But never the reverse.
I’ve also seen college kids wearing “Reagan/Bush ’84” t-shirts.
We are not talking huge numbers of ‘loser chic’ like this, though! Maybe a half-dozen of each across a decade. No way to make a living ;)
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@mad citizen: I still have 3 Biden Harris signs in front of my house. They will remain there until January 20, 2021. I don’t trust these repubs. At. All.
Roger Moore
@randy khan:
Of course it’s hooey. The 1800 election was the one where Jefferson and Burr tied in the electoral college and they wound up with 35 ballots in the House that couldn’t elect either one. Jefferson may have read off the ballots in the joint session, but his final election was in the House, not in the Senate.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@hueyplong: This the “Fourth Branch of Government” Dick Cheney was referring to about the Vice Presidency? I am just thinking if the VP had the power to decided elections Republicans would have thought twice about making Teddy Roosevelt VP back in the day. Or Curtis would have negated the 1933 election results to stop FDR.
Jeffro
I truly hope both the Biden and Harris families take at least a week to ensure that both residences are scoured for germs/viruses as well as listening devices. Make a show of it. At least get the word out: “We’re waiting until we can safely move in…as Americans know, the previous maladministration was horrendous in terms of their Covid protocols and certainly didn’t care about security procedures either, at least not when it came to Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia…”
ThresherK
Rasmussen always had “closing speed”, so after months of distorting things for Republicans it could point to the last fortnight of work before an election and say “we called that right”. God knows what kind of methodology warping they used to get those results.
I haven’t bothered in 2020 to check on this; did they do this year?
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: The idea is that knocking it to the House is the same thing as giving it to Trump, because it’s one vote per state and Trump will have more states than Biden. But in fact Pence can’t just make it so nobody won a majority by refusing to count some of the votes.
Matt McIrvin
@ThresherK: Since most polls actually undercounted Republican votes, just spotting the Republicans several points wouldn’t actually make you seem less accurate in this election (much less accurate, at least).
narya
Finally watched the most recent Sam Bee episode, and one of the people interviewed kept talking about the FOUR Nobel Peace prizes that MangoMenace supposedly received, and why isn’t anyone talking about THAT, huh?? It’s just . . . where to even start? I insulate myself from this, and am fortunate in being able to do so (!), but I don’t even know where to begin with that kind of delusion. That isn’t even from Faux news. I suppose their brand of delusion sows the seeds for the even more outright batshit crazy stuff.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Matt McIrvin: The article Rassemun linked to claims that Pence can just negate any state he doesn’t like until Trump get more EC votes and like magic Trump wins.
germy
Roger Moore
@gratuitous:
The goal of having the election is to give the people a chance to pick the right candidate. It’s only when they fail to do so that wiser heads need to intervene and keep the people from being so foolish.
germy
This looks like something from the American Beef Council:
Eat more meat!
Jeffro
Here’s Jen Rubin with what will hopefully be standard Dem talking points going forward: America Isn’t “Hopelessly Divided”, It Actually Leans Democratic.
OGLiberal
Rasmussen when completely off the rails after Scott Rasmussen left, and they were already very much to the right. Scott Rasmussen used to live in my town on the Jersey Shore. He was pretty involved with the Methodist Camp Meeting Association (which is in no way a reflection of the town as a whole) Believe he “retired” to Florida. Does his own, separate polling which actually isn’t propaganda like what his old shop is pushing. His final poll had Biden winning nationally by 7, or winning by 5 if GOP turnout was high.
Interesting fact about Scott Rasmussen – he and his dad cofounded ESPN way back in the day.
germy
Sorry, Libs. It’s over.
Roger Moore
@hueyplong:
They seem to be oscillating between denial and anger.
featheredsprite
Stalin, huh? And they accuse us of being socialist!
Joy in FL
My Biden Harris sign is still up in my front yard. I may take it down on Jan. 21 or move it to a less conspicuous location where I can savor it.
I’m not taking the Biden Harris sticker off my car. It’s next to my Warren magnet : )
I would still have my Obama bumper sticker, but I sold that car six years ago.
Miss Bianca
@Jeffro: Dang. Jen Rubin is all but declaring herself a Democrat here. Or has she already? A lot of Never-Trumpers seem to be at least flirting with the idea, if not actually taking the plunge already.
Delk
Google says that Stalin didn’t say that quote.
VOR
So Rasmussen tweet #2 says “six disputed states” while #3 says “7 contested states”. What’s the difference between a disputed and a contested state? Or did they just f-up the count, six being more fingers than a single hand. Is this Wingnut arithmatic?
Ian
whats a non-elector?
germy
@Delk:
And isn’t this incorrect as well?
Central Planning
@Major Major Major Major: We can beat them at their own game because their argument is so weak an ant could knock it over.
All Biden has to do is protest a state Dolt45 won with >10 EVs. Pence won’t be able to count those either, so now Biden has more votes. Winning!
SiubhanDuinne
@germy:
The power of music. The only reason you’re thinking “American Beef Council” at all when you see the Trump spot is that both it and the beef commercial from decades ago used Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown” (from the ballet Rodeo). Strictly associational.
germy
Speaking of Republicans…
germy
@SiubhanDuinne:
Look at the last text in the ad.
It’s what for dinner (America)
germy
hueyplong
@germy: Yes, it’s incorrect.
The suit is based on a conflict between electoral law and the Twelfth Amendment that doesn’t actually exist.
It’s sort of why no one else has ever tried this (like, say, Biden in 2017, or Charles Curtis in 1933, or Richard Fucking Nixon in 1961).
dmsilev
@germy: I notice Twitter has gotten a lot more specific and definite with their warning tags. No more “this claim about the election has been disputed” or similar passive-voice formulation.
Roger Moore
@Miss Bianca:
A fair number of the Never Trumpers have formally joined the Democrats, and I’m pretty sure Rubin is one of them. I think she’s one of the people who was a Republican because she preferred them on a couple of important issues and stuck with them on the rest because that’s what a party loyalist does. When the Republicans gave up on the things she cared about by picking Trump, she gave up on all the positions she was only taking as a party loyalist, which means her overall policy positions have lurched to the left.
Brachiator
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
So let me see if I have this right. Right wing nut jobs hate Chinese communists, but love Soviet communists.
What a bunch of morons.
randy khan
@different-church-lady:
The Constitution talks about EVs cast; you don’t actually need 270 if fewer are cast. Leaving aside all of the other ways in which Pence would be causing a Constitutional crisis, refusing to count votes that were certified would raise a huge question about how many votes were cast. (And we don’t want it to go to the House anyway.)
Roger Moore
@Delk:
He didn’t say that exact thing, but he is quoted as saying something very similar:
Given that the quote given above is a translation anyway, it’s understandable that it has been paraphrased into the more general and memorable version.
Tony Jay
@Ksmiami:
Sorry? Hell, you could make a couple of fortunes just selling tickets online for the scheduled beatings.
West of the Rockies
@Jeffro:
I’m so weary of 70 million stupid, racist people having the power to muck up the country. NPR has a story up today about “toxic individualism during the pandemic” causing ruin in rural areas as health care providers flee anti-maskers.
dmsilev
@narya:
He’s been nominated a few times, because the pool of people eligible to send in nominations is quite large and includes a fair number of wingnut idiots (but I repeat myself).
It’d be absolutely hilarious if Joe Biden actually won the prize, with a citation that boils down to “is not Donald Trump”.
randy khan
@Peale:
Biden won Minnesota by 7.2% – 233,000 votes. That’s insane. (Of course, so is the rest of it, but that’s particularly insane.)
SiubhanDuinne
@germy:
I don’t see the word “dinner” at all. Yes, it says “Trump: He’s What’s for America,” which I guess the filmmakers were riffing off the “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” tag, but I maintain that without the musical cue you’d never have made the connection.
hueyplong
@randy khan: They need Minnesota to put Biden behind Trump’s 232. There really isn’t much more to it than that.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I think that we need to take Stalin very seriously. After all, he was one of the original Founders of this country, from Georgia. Best buddies with Jemmy Madison, mainly because old Joe was just one inch taller than Madison and so didn’t feel inferior.
Peale
@randy khan: Including Minnesota is totally due to the fuck-up of one of the so-called data scientists who released something or other that proved that the election result in Michigan was not possible, but included towns in Minnesota in the data set because there is a place called “Detroit Lakes” in Minnesota. No I am not making this up. Because they are stubborn fools who will never admit a fuck-up, the chairwoman of the Minnesota State GOP decided that that was all the proof she needed to declare Minnesoata’s presidential election null and void. Something suspicious happened in Detroit Lakes! She’d seen the proof of it.
Cermet
The President of the Senate does NOT count the votes – he opens all certified votes. Congress counts the votes. See the following
“… President of the Senate;-The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;-The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President … .
Elizabelle
@West of the Rockies:
The NPR link. Sounds worth a listen.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/28/950861977/toxic-individualism-pandemic-politics-driving-health-care-workers-from-small-tow
Ksmiami
@Tony Jay: we could even upsell for front row…
Uncle Cosmo
All that Raz needed was to tweak the turnout model away from overwhelming GOP participation (which always made the reaces look like impending Thuglican landslides) gradually toward some representation of reality.
(BTW, I thought I read that Raz hisownself sold the company a few years back. Truth or dare?)
Mike in NC
Colin Powell wants seditious Mike Flynn recalled to active duty to be court martialed. I go one step further and have him shot at sunrise on the National Mall. Sell tickets for $10 each and collect a fortune.
jonas
Utter horseshit. The election of 1800 came down to an electoral vote tie between Jefferson and Burr, which was resolved by the House of Representatives (after lots of wrangling) in favor of Jefferson. Jefferson self-dealing electoral votes in the Senate had bloody nothing to do with it.
Matt McIrvin
@Peale: In the days leading up to the election, if you were predicting a Trump win and you wanted to go a little out on a limb to show loyalty, it was very popular to say Trump was going to win Minnesota.
If you wanted to go REALLY out on a limb you’d insist that he was going to win in a gigantic landslide that included California.
Most of these people switched afterward to say that this was the real electoral count.
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: Also, that was under the pre-12th-Amendment vote-counting rules, not to mention before all the legislation passed after 1876 to resolve electoral-count disputes.
RSA
The RWNJ interpretation, based on the article Rasmussen links to, is apparently that because “count” is in the passive voice and Congress must only be present, the President of the Senate controls everything about the process, including the decision about which submissions count as certificates. It’s not very convincing.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mallard Filmore:
The Democrats will then pass a vote that all the electors are good, and it won’t matter shit what happens in the Senate, because both houses have to agree to invalidate a state’s votes. This is likely to happen, because it only takes one nutcase in each chamber to force a vote to happen at all. Although Tuberbrain is going to hard talk from McConnell about what the rest of his Senate career will be like if he jumps on this ‘dispute the election’ bandwagon as promised. McConnell wants nothing to do with this bullshit. He hasn’t wanted to go for or against it. He wants it a long way from him.
Baud
Interesting argument. I can’t wait to revisit it when Kamala Harris is in charge of counting the votes in 2024.
Baud
Seriously, though, Nate silver needs to ban Rasmussen from his stats ASAP.
Elizabelle
OK, since the previous open thread seems kind of moribund: Someone else claimed to have been hacked recently. It did not work. His ass got fired. Promptly.
From northern Virginia: A Prince William County sheriff’s deputy, 15-year veteran Aaron Hoffman, had a bunch of crap up on his Parler account. Including threatening language against Chief Justice John Roberts. And he came to the attention of blogger socialistdogmom, who isn’t credited in the major stories, but allegedly did the investigative work on the guy’s account. The Sheriff was alerted.
Hoffman’s now saying — yes, the hack — but: sheriff’s deputy? On Parler? That should be a problem right there. “Conservative” is a euphemism for those types. They are radicals who further radicalize each other. Problem.
Prince William County. Power base of one Corey Stewart, Republican nominee for Senate against Tim Kaine last election. Had noncrazy Republicans disavowing him and averting their gaze. Why does this stuff keep happening to their party?
No surprise, and I am glad Sheriff Glendell Hill, a Republican himself, acted so swiftly.
Elizabelle
Here’s the twitter thread from Molly Conger (aka socialistdogmom), who investigated Deputy Hoffman. Reading it now myself.
ETA: the twitter thread is fun. Deputy is an aspiring Country Western musician (blogger: “his Soundcloud sucks”) under an assumed name, but he posted a photo of himself in police uniform with his nametag visible.
Also the first time I’ve heard the word “copaganda.”
mrmoshpotato
Well then. Never thought I’d see the day when Rasmussen decided to hump Stalin’s corpse.
patrick II
Does projecting vote outcomes make one a constitutional law expert by osmosis? If so, shouldn’t we let Steve Kornacki decide?
Barry
@randy khan: “Have I missed a state that the crazies think was stolen?”
Of course, since they think that any state’s vote was stolen if it’s necessary to discard those votes to win.
mrmoshpotato
@Villago Delenda Est:
Haha. Legacy. Dump cemented his legacy as a Soviet shitpile mobster conman back in 1987 when he trashed the NATO alliance on newspaper ads.
Barry
@Roger Moore: “It’s only when they fail to do so that wiser heads need to intervene and keep the people from being so foolish.”
To be fair, wasn’t that the ultimate argument for the Electoral College – so that wise elites would block a demagogue?
Matt McIrvin
@Baud:
Sorry, but by induction and geometric logic all future presidential elections go to whichever party was in power the one time they figured out the magic win-every-election trick.
mrmoshpotato
@randy khan:
@Barry: Tell these assclowns that Biden won Wakanda, Narnia, Oz and the Democratic Order of Planets.
Jay
@Elizabelle:
copaganda has always been out there.
critical case example this summer.
BIPOC single mother commuting home, encounters a KKKop Kettle of protestors, puts it in reverse.
KKKops shoot into her car with teargas, “non lethal” and lethal rounds with her kid in the carseat.
they KKKops then go to the media with a “hero story” of saving a 2 year old from tear gas at the protests.
Her child went into Child Services Custody.
She went to jail on 14 criminal charges and a $150k bail.
It took a week for Community Activists, ( BLM and Antifa) to get her out of jail, get her a lawyer. Two weeks for her to regain child custody, and as yet, they are still GoFunding to get her car, her only mode of transport, repaired, so she can go back to a menial service job in Covid world.
not the worst case so far.
KKKops announced the “rescue” of an abandoned toddler at a Mall Food Court. Got lot’s of press.
Turned out, the Mom was 6 feet away, interviewing for a job.
When that came out, the KKKops and the DA charged her with “Child Abandonment”.
Roger Moore
@Barry:
My impression is that the Electoral College was created as a solution to practical problems with electing the President, and all the other explanations were grafted on afterward. The underlying problem was that there was no good way to have a national election in a country where the franchise varied wildly from state to state and slaves were only counted as 3/5th a person. So instead of having a national election, they threw the ballots to the states. That automatically evened out issues of differing franchises, including the effect of the 3/5th compromise.
Furthermore, the expectation was that the Electoral College would often not be able to come to a consensus. They expected most states to vote for someone from their state, which is why electors were supposed to vote for two people, at least one of whom was not from their state. That was expected to lead to an inconclusive outcome much of the time, so the House would choose between the top candidates.
The plain fact of it is that the Electoral College was not a carefully thought out system. It was something the Framers threw together because they couldn’t figure out anything better. When the gross flaws with it were revealed in 1800, they came out with the 12th Amendment as a quick fix, but many of the underlying problems with state-to-state disparities in the franchise remained, so they couldn’t replace it with something qualitatively better. Reconstruction would have been a good time to fix the system, but it wasn’t included in the Reconstruction amendments. If nothing else, going to a national popular vote would have reduced the influence of states that denied their black citizens the vote, which would have aided the goals of Reconstruction.
Jay
@mrmoshpotato:
The Democratic Order of Planets has not officially announced relations with Earth, and are keeping everything on the down low.
(I did not have alien contact via the Democratic Order of Planets on my “wingnut bingo” card.)
Elizabelle
@Jay: Needs a link. But: horrible story.
Jay
@Elizabelle:
https://www.inquirer.com/news/a/walter-wallace-protests-philadelphia-police-brutality-suv-20201203.html
jonas
@Matt McIrvin: Is there a “#badhistorytakes” twitter? Because I love the #badlegaltakes. This covers both, it appears.
Mike G
At least it’s honest to see Republicans openly embracing the ideology of a totalitarian dictator to justify their actions.
jonas
@Baud: Well of course then this will be an impeachable offense.
You know, logic and all. (plus IOKIYAR)
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
As it’s on that same level why would you doubt that 70% of conservatives believe it? Conservatism in this country is about following the lead of their “betters.” You don’t have to know anything, just believe what you are told. It’s not just trump who’s an idiot, who doesn’t actually think, thinking is for losers, following is all you need to know.
Ruckus
@Frank Wilhoit:
Yes!
I believe the code is Follow and Ye Shall Arrive.
jc
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I suspect that the vast majority of Republican voters don’t really know who Stalin was, or know only in the most vague sense. People who visit blogs like this are leagues beyond most folks in terms of political/civic awareness.
Ruckus
@ThresherK:
Some call it lying. I call it bullshit.
There is absolutely no reason one couldn’t call it lying bullshit.
smedley the uncertain
@mad citizen: VP residence Blair House.
Another Scott
@smedley the uncertain: Er, Naval Observatory, no?
Cheers,
Scott.
catclub
Which IS one of the justifications for the existence of the electoral college. Faithless electors have only been made ‘faithless’ by explicit state laws. before that… gentlemen’s agreement.
catclub
wow! really?
WaterGirl
@catclub: I’ve been saying that for weeks. I so hope that happens.
WaterGirl
@Mike in NC: Actually, it turns out that it’s Colin Powell’s former chief of staff that said all of that. I wish it had been Colin Powell himself, but I hope it’s a conversation starter.
Because Flynn is a disgrace to the uniform. Hell, he’s a disgrace to the human race, but we don’t get to do anything about it. Maybe the military can.
Bill Arnold
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
FWIW the Rasmussen tweet makes more sense if it’s talking about voting machines controlled by undead Hugo Chávez reanimated by Democrat Party Necromancers.
mvr
@Mike in NC: Actually, that’s Wilkerson, not Powell. (He said a day late).
J R in WV
@smedley the uncertain:
@Another Scott:
Smedley is incorrect, Blair House is one of several adjoining historic townhouses owned by the US Gov’t for use by the executive branch.
The home on the grounds of the US Naval Observatory is currently designated as the official residence of the VP.
Masha
@Roger Moore:
David Wood objects to Islam’s demented morality everyday. He’s been doing so for at least 9 years ??♀️