But the ratification by the Electoral College confirms that the United States can no longer refer to itself as the world’s greatest democracy.
It’s a republic, rather than a democracy… That’s what the electoral college means.
So what seems to have happened is this: Two candidates campaigned under the rules – that is, the electoral college system. Both knew this when they went into the race and both understood how it works; that is, it is designed to counterbalance the inbuilt advantages of numbers in the densely populated states, using an electoral college system. The system weights these, not popular votes.
The outcome was that Trump won the electoral college vote and the electors, apart from a few, did as expected and voted according to their states’ preference. So, er, the system worked precisely as it was designed to do.
And this is a problem?
With the CIA, FBI, and US Director of National Intelligence all agreeing that Russia intervened in the 2016 US election to help Donald Trump win, never has there been a greater need for oversight of the integrity of the US electoral process.
Uh… If the Democrats hadn’t written the emails in the first place there wouldn’t have been a problem, would there? The issue is not that the Russians – if it was them – exposed the mendacity, it is that the mendacity occurred in the first place. That is why it might have influenced the outcome. As Russia wasn’t – so far as I am aware – actually casting votes, then there really isn’t a problem here. Indeed, it is arguable that the hackers did the US electorate a favour by giving them access to relevant information about one of the candidates that they would not otherwise have been privy to.
I suppose the problem here is that the “wrong” man won. Therefore, it wasn’t democracy and the sky will fall in. Never in so short a space of time have I seen so much whining and complaining from sore losers as I have since the 24th of June. Sometimes the other guy wins. It isn’t the end of democracy, it is democracy working as it is supposed to. Grow up and get over it.
I think you might be mistaken on this one, LR.
Because as far as I can make out democracy means the left win. So if the left do not win it can’t be democracy.
Mea culpa.
Socialism can’t really coexist with democracy because every time the masses are exposed to it they promptly vote for something else. In the UK, the Labour party never served more than one term until Tony Blair presented them as Tory light. In practice this allowed them to screw up the country’s finances on an unprecedented scale. I can recall the lefties wingeing that Margaret Thatcher was only endorsed by a minority of the population back in the eighties. My thought at the time was that people who can’t be arsed to vote are tacitly endorsing whomever they get. The current pathetic whining though, is on an entirely different level. These people do actually know everything that there is to know and, as a consequence of that knowledge, are certain that anyone who disagrees with them must be wrong by definition. Democracy may be the least bad of all political systems Maybe the best thing about it is that it protects us from those who are certain that they are right.
If you exclude California, which Clinton won overwhelmingly (and Trump didn’t campaign in), then Trump won the popular vote in the rest of the US by more than 1.4 million.
The Democrats were extolling the merits of the electoral college when they feared Trump would win the popular vote but they were confident of winning the greater number of electors.
Of course there is always the bleating of the defeated in these cases. It’s never their fault, just that the wrong side won so we should vote again until we get it right.
Or that the system doesn’t work properly. Or there was outside interference. Never that they just simply lost…
Oh, so you’re talking to me again? As opposed to talking about me on your blog. How nice. What happened to “don’t comment on my blog and don’t send me emails”?
Irritation aside, yes, I agree.
Yeah. Mind you, it was a tad harder to talk to you when you banned me from accessing your site. Still it was a valuable exercise in exploring the software concerned.
I’m happy to talk to you as long as we can disagree and you weren’t blocked from my place so you could read what I was saying. It wasn’t behind your back.
Always happy to agree to disagree…
Okay, a couple of points. You were the one who specifically told me that I was not to post any comments on your site, nor to email you. That’s a ban by any other name. I didn’t ban you until you decided to play silly games leaving ever more trite comments in an attempt to get the last word in. I was travelling to Ireland at the time, and grew increasingly weary of repeated notifications on my phone of off-topic and immature comments. So, yes, I decided to ban you. You needed some time out to cool off and I make no apology for it.
Secondly, you weren’t talking to me, you were talking at me, having repeatedly failed to grasp what I had been trying to tell you. Your final comments with Kath Gillon showed both of you in a very bad light, frankly. They said more about the pair of you than they did about me.
I’ve tried.
I give up.
It’s just not worth the effort.
Have a nice life…
Tried what? You behaved like an arsehole then a few days later you walk in and expect me to roll over for a tummy tickle? I didn’t ask you back. I didn’t ask you to make an effort. And while I am prepared to forgive, forgetting will take a while longer. If you wanted to come back, opening with “I’m sorry” will have helped somewhat, because, after your disgraceful behaviour, that was the obvious starting point.