Tag Archives: electoral college

Why we should condemn the US Electoral College

By Samuel Jackson | Tue 1st October 2024 - 11:29 am

We are five weeks away from Election Day in the US, and things have certainly been eventful in the presidential race, to put it mildly.

This election may be American democracy’s greatest test. With revenge in mind, and with a guide to converting the federal bureaucracy into a conservative vehicle and removing many checks on presidential power vis-a-vis Project 2025, a second Trump presidency would be dramatically worse than his first and may well signal the end of American democracy. Even in defeat, his refusal to accept the results in a tight race will likely instigate political violence as it did on 6 January 2021, but across multiple states. Since the United States is one of the greatest military and economic powers on Earth, as well as an ally and proudly democratic country, such outcomes would be deleterious to the rest of the free world.

The Electoral College is the key to Donald Trump’s success in 2024. Despite Kamala Harris’s nationwide three-point lead, this may be insufficient to overcome its distortive effects. However, Trump may not even need to win states’ popular votes to win the Electoral College. Learning from 2020, pro-Trump Republican strategists have endeavoured to put in place election officials who will refuse any state-level result other than a Trump win to enable the appointment of Republican electors by Republican-controlled legislatures.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged 2024 presidential election | 20 Comments

Thirty-seven Americans have the power to change the course of history

By Scott Craig | Mon 19th December 2016 - 9:11 am

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Today, the US Electoral College will meet in 51 separate locations to decide who will become the next President of the United States. The decision these individual men and women make will determine the outcome of every significant global event for the next decade, if not the next century.

Earlier this year, on 4th August, the Harvard Republican Club issued a press release stating that, for the first time in their one hundred and twenty-eight year history, they would not be endorsing the Republican nominee for president. The presumptive nominee, they said, was not just unfit to be president but represented, “a threat to the survival of the republic”.

They went on to say that, “His authoritarian tendencies and flirtations with fascism are unparalleled in the history of our democracy.” and that, “He hopes to divide us by race, by class, and by religion, instilling enough fear and anxiety to propel himself to the White House”. This approach, with a little assistance from foreign hackers, has brought him within touching distance of the White House.