Democracy—It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Control of words is control of a whole lot more—thought, communication, and often action as well.

 

"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"

~ Samuel Adams

 

There are plenty of examples of the tyrants among us controlling us with words. One technique is to change the meaning of words while allowing the masses of us to keep the old definition in our heads, because that is to the tyrants’ advantage. A recent example is the word vaccine. [Don’t worry; that’s not today’s topic, just this paragraph’s example.] Originally, it was a preparation, a medical intervention, that would create immunity by exposing the body to a milder form of the pathogen. It was intended to be a “safe” way of experiencing the disease with the intent that the person receiving the intervention would develop antibodies without having to suffer the actual disease, and this would also prevent contracting the disease in the future—typically for many years. What was imposed upon us in late 2020 did not prevent contracting the disease. It’s hard to say those who got it suffered a milder version than they would have—because it’s not possible to compare current life to a hypothetical alternate life. Additionally, it turned out that it was neither safe, effective, nor in actuality a vaccine. But they used the word vaccine so that you would respond as if it were the traditional definition.

OK, that’s an example of the change-the-definition-without-telling-anyone technique. Now, the word being controlled by the tyrants that I’d like to look at today is democracy.

It comes from Greek. Demos means municipality, or the populous. The -cracy part of the word means government. So, it’s government by the people.

The online dictionary translates the Greek for democracy as republic. In other words, the idea of a democracy is a state or entity ruled by the people, either directly or through elected representatives, according to my 1982 dictionary.

from Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, (c) 1982

 During most of my life, I personally thought of the words republic and democracy as essentially interchangeable, although the Republican and Democrat Parties were always clearly different. But historians, particularly conservative ones, are more vocal today in pointing out the differences between the two types of government. A democracy, meaning direct vote of the people and the majority rules, is quite different from a republic, in which the people vote for representatives, who theoretically do the necessary deep dive into issues to determine how to vote on behalf of their constituents.

The thing that sets a republic apart is the rule of law. Particularly in the United States, neither representatives nor people directly can vote for government to do something that has not been granted as a power to the government. The law is a limit.

In a pure democracy, whatever the majority decides is what government does. There are various metaphors to explain the folly of this. One is that democracy is when you have two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for lunch.

image found here

Here’s a quote from my files: 

“Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefit from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship, and then a monarchy.”—Alexander Fraser Tytler

 So, there’s a difference between a republic—particularly a constitutional republic—and a democracy.

However, here is what has been happening to the word democracy.

1.      The public has the idea that democracy is interchangeable with republic; it just means the power comes from the people, who express their views by voting, mainly, and also by contacting their representatives.

2.      The ruling elites—who happen to be associated with the Democrat Party, mostly, but not fully limited to them—use the term to mean our system of government, or our country as we know it.

3.      The ruling elites separate our system of government from the Constitution and the rule of law, and have it mean the way things are done by us. But they do not yet explicitly change the definition for the people.

4.      The ruling elites start using the term our democracy to mean our regime. They are counting on the public retaining the definition as our system of government, but they do not mean that.

It would be concerning enough if this is where they stopped. But the way we—and everybody else in the world, practically speaking—have a people voice their will to government is through voting. This has always been to the advantage of the democracy advocates. Think of them as the wolves, rather than the sheep in the metaphor. If they can control the message that gets to the voters, then they control the outcome. That is why controlling the message has been so important to them—through censorship and the other many ways we’ve seen, particularly in the last half decade.

But the ruling elites have been facing difficulty in totally controlling the message they want the voters to hear—because of pesky alternative platforms and means of communicating with one another. They censor more vigorously. And they deride all those alternative voices as “extremists” and “conspiracy theorists.” But still, they can’t control the message well enough to determine the outcome of an election. Voters who have found their way to alternative opinions are not controllable in the way “sheeple” are.

And let’s just add here that the ruling elites have tried controlling the outcome of elections by disregarding the actual will of the people—through fraud in varied forms and myriad locations. That’s a topic for another day.

But they cannot count on a people who would not vote them out of their positions of power—no matter how often they cry out that any disturbance to their power means “the end of our democracy.”

So the next step is to discount voting as the means to maintaining “our democracy.”

Coincidentally (and there are likely no coincidences in these things) two major publications had opinion pieces on the same day, August 21, saying that voting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; maybe we ought to find another way. [In case you’re blocked by paywalls, both pieces are summarized here.] 

The New York Times piece, by Adam Grant, was originally titled, “Elections Are Bad for Democracy.”  After much online scorn, it was changed to “The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way.” But the first title is really what was intended, especially if democracy means our regime. He suggests that choosing random leaders would give us better results than choosing from among the multiple bad choices of those who run for office. So let’s come up with a better way. He suggests maybe a lottery.

There are times, I admit, when I’ve thought selecting out of the phonebook (assuming there still is such a thing somewhere) would yield better leaders than we get through elections. But the solution isn’t less voting; it’s more informed voting. We need less censorship and more open debate.

There’s a clue in the wording of the end of the piece:

"As we prepare for America to turn 250 years old, it may be time to rethink and renew our approach to choosing officials. The lifeblood of a democracy is the active participation of the people. There is nothing more democratic than offering each and every citizen an equal opportunity to lead."

Our way of doing things is archaic, he implies. But offering every citizen an equal opportunity to lead is democracy; not everyone having an equal vote. Hmm.

illustration found with The Atlantic piece

The other piece, “Americans Vote Too Much,” by Jerusalem Demsas, for The Atlantic, tells us that all those pesky local jurisdiction elections are low turnout anyway. People just can’t be bothered. In fact, our form of government expects too much of us. It’s a full-time job to stay informed, and most people do the sensible thing and tune out.

I do agree that there are too many separate elections. Sometimes the ruling elites (even the local ones) insist on off years and odd dates—so that they can control the outcome more easily, because fewer people are paying attention. But I think putting the elections on normal voting days makes sense. We already have a long ballot here in Harris County—the biggest in the country, I think. But we do tune in and try to get information, fill out our sample ballot and all, before we go to vote. Many people just don’t notice when there’s some special early May election at some odd place.

Demsas ends his piece with this:

"Giving power to the people is sometimes conflated with giving people more access to government decision making through, say, community meetings or ballot measures. But if only a small, unrepresentative group of people are willing to be full-time democrats, then that extra ballot measure, election, or public meeting isn’t more democracy; it’s less."

Ok, so his assertion is that more is less, and less is more. “Giving power to the people” isn’t something government has the right to do; the people inherently have the power, which they delegate in limited ways to government. In that phrase, who is giving the power? Democracy—or the ruling elite, as we would do well to define it? I don’t see that as a better option.

I don’t have a solution. I try to do my part, educating myself, and then sharing what I’ve learned so others will be better informed after reading my research. I guess that makes me part of “a small, unrepresentative group of people willing to be full-time democrats/republicans.”

When Demsas argues that more participation by people willing to be vigilant “isn’t more democracy; it’s less,” what does he mean there by democracy? It’s not really the will of the people. He may want you to think that, but what I think he means is the ruling elite. I think there’s a subtext saying, “You plebians ought to get out of the way of the ruling elite. It’s too much for you. Let us make all your decisions for you.”

It's not your grandmother’s democracy anymore.

Watch the words. That’s the tyrants’ means of attack.

Three More Updates on the Neverending Election Saga

We’re going to cover three pieces of news, all related to that election that happened three months ago, and yet are newly relevant:

·         There was a cabal that successfully affected the election.

·         The proof of voter fraud, both of the traditional corrupt type and the newer corrupt digital type, is now available.

·         Courts are finally beginning to consider the evidence in voter fraud lawsuits, and a 2/3 majority are ruled in favor of Trump or Republicans.

 

The TIME Story

image from here

That news about the cabal isn’t from some conspiracy theory source; it is from TIME Magazine, documenting what happened, as told by those who did it, because they’re so proud of what they accomplished.

The TIME piece is called “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” by Molly Ball, with reporting by Leslie Dickstein, Mariah Espada and Simmone Shah.  It appeared online February 4^th, and the print version is set to appear February 15^th. As the piece describes it,

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum.

By “save,” they mean prevent Trump from winning. And by “across the political spectrum,” they mean leftist/progressive Democrats along with some anarchists, with a few never-Trumpers added in. They  also say,

[T]he participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.

It runs close to 7,000 words, so a review here can’t cover everything. But we can highlight what they’re so proud of. While I’ve summarized, I’ve taken the info pretty much directly from the story; I’ve highlighted my comments to differentiate them:

Overview of What They Did

·         There was an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.

o   It stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley, and the nation’s statehouses.

·         They got states to change voting systems and laws [to remove rules meant to prevent fraudulent votes].

·         They helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding used to promote the voting changes, particularly mail-in voting.

·         They recruited armies of poll workers.

·         They got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.

·         They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation [i.e., opposing views] and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears [i.e., opposing views, again].

Who Are They?

·         The architect of the cabal is Mike Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO.

o   He brought together a group of liberal strategists in the early 2000s, which led to the creation of the Analyst Institute, a secretive firm that applies scientific methods to political campaigns.

o   He was also involved in the founding of the progressive data company Catalist.

·         Among the participants were the US Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO; and Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. They also partnered with the Movement for Black Lives and the Working Families Party.

·         Other actors included The Fight Back Table, a coalition of “resistance” organizations.

o   Many leaders of the summer’s racial-justice protests were a key part of the liberal alliance.

o   They did scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition.

·         On March 3^rd, Podhorzer drafted a three-page confidential memo titled “Threats to the 2020 Election.” [By threats to the election, or to democracy itself, they always mean a Trump win.] The memo laid out four categories of challenges:

o   Attacks on voters [i.e., voters who commit fraud].

o   Attacks on election administration [i.e., election officials who commit fraud].

o   Attacks on Trump’s political opponents.

o   “Efforts to reverse the results of the election.”

The Activities

·         Podhorzer began coordinating in October 2019. He began hosting weekly 2½-hour Zoom meetings in April 2020, talking about which ads were working, what messaging to use, and legal strategy, aiding communication among various leftist groups who normally didn’t communicate.

·         Taking advantage of COVID-19 as a crisis, in March the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights led 150 organizations to pressure Congress to steer COVID-19 relief to election administration, including postcards encouraging mail-in voting and other alternatives.

o   Private philanthropy joined in this COVID-19 response effort on elections. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million.

o   Amber McReynolds, a former Denver election official who heads the nonpartisan National Vote at Home Institute, which advised 37 secretaries of state plus DC on such things as which vendors to use and where to locate drop boxes.

o   McReynolds also provided press materials used to convince the public on the importance of absentee ballots for shortening lines at polling places and preventing an election crisis [ meaning a Trump win].

·         The Voter Participation Center, instead of doing get-out-the-vote canvassing, focused on getting people to vote by mail and overcoming resistance, particularly by black communities that didn’t trust mail-in voting.

o    In August and September, it sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states, 4.6 million of whom returned them.

·         Democrat lawyers fought pre-election lawsuits contesting law changes and rule changes. [Note: many lawsuits were dismissed for lack of standing, because damage had not yet been suffered by plaintiffs. However, later lawsuits were dismissed for laches—being filed too late for remedy, because problems should have been contested before the election.]

The Media Campaign

·         Laura Quinn, progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, piloted a nameless, secret project that tracked disinformation [i.e., opposing viewpoints] online and tried to figure out how to combat it.

o   Her solution was to pressure platforms to remove content or accounts that spread disinformation [i.e., opposing viewpoints] and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.

·         In November 2019, nine progressive leaders met with Mark Zuckerberg in his home, pressuring him to act against election-related “falsehoods.”

o   They weaponized current rules, expanding beyond actual crimes, such as inciting violence, to include the “dangers” of “false” ideas [i.e., opposing viewpoints, again].

o   Among those present was Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who also pressured Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others.

·         They had a media message campaign to convince voters:

o   That mail-in voting wasn’t susceptible to fraud.

o   That failure to finish the count on election night was to be expected.

o   The Voting Rights Lab and IntoAction created state-specific memes and graphics, spread by email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, urging that every vote be counted [they mean every vote, not merely every legal vote]. Together, they were viewed more than 1 billion times.

o   By late October over 70% of Americans did not expect to get election results on election night.

Hair-Trigger Timed Riots

·         Activists prepared to reprise the summer’s demonstrations if Trump claimed to win the election.

o   This included 150 liberal groups: the Women’s March, the Sierra Club, Color of Change, Democrats.com, the Democratic Socialists of America, all joined the “Protect the Results” coalition.

o   The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as early as November 4^th. [I highlighted this, because it shows their control over mob violence, which they intended to launch as needed. Meanwhile, they’re impeaching Trump for violence at the capitol that he did not cause.]

o   The summer’s racial-justice protests had sent a signal to business owners about the potential for economy-disrupting civil disorder, which led to the US Chamber of Commerce’s connection about a week before the election. [Notice the similarity to mafia protectionist racketeers: “It would be sad if something happened to your place; we’ll protect you—in exchange for a little something.”]

·         Podhorzer held an 11:00 PM Zoom call election night. He knew that polls had underestimated Trump’s support but promised that election-day voting would be overcome with mail-in votes.

o   Those on the call carefully prepared timing of planned protests.

o   Protect the Results announced that it would “not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary.”

o   Twitter continued to allow upset progressives to converse about how to stop the Trump “coup” [i.e., win of the count at that early point, or challenge of the irregularities]. They wanted violence.

o   Protect the Results altered protests into a weekend of celebration. “Counter their disinfo with our confidence & get ready to celebrate.”

Post-Election Day

·         Biden victory was declared by the media on November 7^th. After that came:

o   Winning the count.

o   Winning the certification.

o   Winning the Electoral College.

o   Winning the transition.

·         At 10 PM on Election Night, poll watchers arrived at the TCF Center in Detroit. Within 45 minutes progressive reinforcements arrived and were added to email chain for updated instructions.

o   Reinforcements included racial-justice activists from Detroit Will Breathe and Fems for Dems, working alongside local elected officials.

o   The media strategy messaged “the people’s right to decide, demanding their voices be heard and calling attention to the racial implications of disenfranchising Black Detroiters.”

·         When President Trump invited GOP state house leaders to the White House to talk, Protect Democracy’s local contacts researched pressure points to keep the lawmakers’ from being persuaded to act on fraud and irregularities.

o   Activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Michigan lawmaker Shirkey’s journey to DC. Michigan was key to preventing other states from failing to certify questioned election results.

o   A street artist projected the state lawmakers’ images onto the outside of the Trump Hotel building on Pennsylvania Avenue, along with the words “THE WORLD IS WATCHING.”

o   Activists flooded the livestream of the canvassing board meeting, using the Twitter hashtag #AllEyesOnMI.

·         According to the TIME story, all progressive activists were told to scrupulously stand down on January 6^th. That meant any mayhem would be blamed on Trump supporters.

o   Business leaders denounced the Jan. 6^th attack and vilified the lawmakers who refused to certify Biden’s victory.

And Now

·         Podhorzer and his allies are still holding their Zoom strategy sessions, gauging voters’ views and developing new messages. Media and social media censorship continue.

·         Trump is in Florida, about to face his second impeachment trial, deplatformed from his Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The piece ends with this:

Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.

The “will of the people” does not mean what you think it means; it means the will of these people. And this is where we’d better define terms, in order to translate.

Democracy, at the time Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, in the 1820s, wasn’t referring to a form of government, but to an egalitarianism—no elite ruling over the plebians. Anyone was equal to anyone else, and was just as entitled to rise to the top of his business or other sector of influence.

When these people refer to democracy today, it is clearly not that; they mean forcing the plebians (us deplorables) to submit to the ruling elites in government, media, academia, and business.

We know it isn’t even rule by the majority, which they claim they favor, because they want to ensure than only the elites’ choices are made, regardless of the voting will of the people. But they do put a fair amount of effort into persuading the plebians to go along with the elites’ choices—by preventing any opposing viewpoints from getting through.

What they claim to have done was save America from “an autocratically inclined President,” ironically failing to see the fascistic, totalitarian thought control and corruption they use to do it. Also ironically failing to notice that Trump’s actions throughout his four years were decidedly not autocratic or authoritarian. But it helps their narrative to paint him as Hitler, without letting little things like facts get in the way.

They claim their efforts were “dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.” But their admissions actually show that they were about “winning the vote” at all costs, particularly at the cost of free and fair elections—and at the cost of trust in the election process going forward. Ironically, they blame Trump for the lack of trust they could have solved simply by being trustworthy.

Joshua Philipp, on his January 7^th Crossroads episode, talked about this weird story: 

You have conspiracy here. And what do you call it when groups working together for more than a year in a conspiracy to change the outcome of an election, have been found to have coordinated on it—again, what do you call that? That’s a coup. That’s sedition. It’s what they’re accusing Trump of doing right now.

Something about a cabal, a secret conspiracy, a secret pact, and totalitarian censorship just doesn’t give off the “credible and uncorrupted” vibe they say it does. They are so out of touch that they think their collusion admission is noble.

Rather, it corroborates what Trump voters already knew, but non-cabal-participating Biden voters did not. Maybe you should tell them.

Here are a couple of good legal discussions of this TIME story:

·         “Time Magazine Releases Information About the Secret 2020 Election Shadow Campaign” Robert H. Gruler, Feb. 5, 2021. 

·         “The Times Elections Exposé is STUNNING” Viva Frei Vlawg, Feb. 6, 2021. 

 

Absolute Proof

Already I’m writing too long. I hate when that happens. One of the big news stories of the week was the excellent documentary put out by Mike Lindell, called Absolute Proof. It is a little under two hours.

title screenshot of Absolute Proof

It has been banned from YouTube and Vimeo, but not before getting 10 million views. And it continues to spread better than any previous collection of voter fraud evidence. You should be able to get it directly at MichaelJLindell.com.

The first portion goes over the more-or-less traditional election fraud, which is mainly what the cabal of the TIME story was involved in. There’s plenty of that. The following screenshots show the known fraudulent votes totals of those types in the six battleground states. Notice that each state far exceeds the margin of victory.

Arizona

Arizona voter fraud and irregularities
screenshot from here

Michigan

Michigan voter fraud and irregularities
screenshot from here

Nevada

Nevada voter fraud and irregularities
screenshot from here

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania voter fraud and irregularities
screenshot from here

Wisconsin

Wisconsin voter fraud and irregularities
screenshot from here

Georgia

Georgia voter fraud and irregularities
screenshot from here

Those of us who have been paying attention have seen this evidence. It has also been catalogued by the Navarro Report, the Epoch Times documentary, and various other places we’ve referred to before. In normal times, this evidence would have prevented those six states from certifying until the questions could be cleared up and the actual outcome known, if it is possible to know. But these are not normal times.

Later in the documentary there is additional proof, of the more technical type of voter fraud. The other sources have mentioned this as well. People keep claiming it’s a conspiracy theory, and that, “you haven’t provided a shred of evidence.”

OK. Challenge taken. Lindell brings in the experts to lay it out.

They demonstrate that they have every instance of information exchange catalogued. They can show what IP address (what individual computer) made what contact to an election system, even down to the precinct level, what changes were made, whether they were attempted only or whether they succeeded in making the change.

And they have mapped each individual incidence of that interference on a global map. An outsized amount comes from China, but there are plenty of other locations involved.

map showing real time election interference from global locations
screenshot from here

They explain pretty carefully how they got the information, and how they know it is accurate. It would very likely hold up in a court of law.

Mike Lindell says that, now that the evidence is out—where he believes even the nine Supreme Court Justices have by now had a chance to view it, as well as the general public—the obvious need to clean up our elections is something we can unite behind. (I think he's overly optimistic, but I like that in a person.)

He doesn’t call for Biden’s ouster and Trump’s reinstatement. He is simply about putting the evidence out there, in the hands of the public.

Of course, then he’s censored. I suggest you view it directly from his site. And download it as a historical record.

 

The Court Cases

I was listening to a Jordan Peterson podcast of his conversation with Douglas Murray, recorded in January. During their far-ranging discussion, they talked about the US Presidential election, from their Canadian and British outside views. Jordan Peterson said that the biggest evidence that Trump was wrong about election fraud was the mass of cases thrown out of court. So many of them—all thrown out. That's what the media has told them.

If you’re paying attention here in America, you might know that those cases that were thrown out were on lack of standing or some other technicality—without looking at the evidence. That has been frustrating. But, failure to look at evidence does not equal lack of evidence. (See Lindell’s movie, referenced above.)

Justice tends to be slow and not always satisfying. But there has been some progress.

Citizen journalist John Droz, Jr., described as a physicist and environmental advocate from North Carolina, has been tracking the 2020 Presidential Election lawsuits, on his publicly available spreadsheet, updated as of February 6^th. 

According to an Epoch Times story, 

Of the 81 cases, 11 were withdrawn or consolidated and 23 were dismissed for lack of standing or on other grounds. Both the cohort of 11 and of 23 should not be considered “wins or losses for either side,” Droz says, because they “have nothing to do with the merits of the case.”

This leaves 47 cases. Of those 47, 22 have been finalized after the court heard arguments, considered evidence, and then issued a ruling.

Of those 22, Trump or Republicans won 15 and lost 7, according to the analysis.

This leaves 25 lawsuits that have yet to be finally disposed of.

Winning two out of three isn’t a bad start. I’m guessing that’s not what you’re hearing in the uncensored news.

Included in those 25 remaining lawsuits, the Supreme Court on Friday announced they had scheduled hearing several of the highest profile cases on February 19^th. These are Sidney Powell’s Michigan case, Linn Wood’s Georgia case, and Rep. Mike Kelly’s Pennsylvania case,  plus a couple of others. (Read this Epoch Times piece on them.) 

These specific cases all allege illegalities that affected the outcome, such as expanding mail-in ballots against state law, failure to provide adequate security measures around mail ballots, issues with machine vote tabulation, and denial of meaningful access to poll watchers. I don’t know whether the “machine vote tabulation” part will include the evidence shown in Mike Lindell’s video. Regardless, the Court is not likely to actually hear the cases before October 2021. That means not until the next session, which ends around June 2022.

 

Conclusions

So, what have we learned today? Things we knew, but now with more certainty:

·         Truth comes out.

·         Justice is not swift.

·         If the enemies of the Constitution are accusing our side of something, they’re doing it.

Electorally Collegiate

We’re not a democracy. That seems to come as a surprise to some Americans. Democracy is rule—or tyranny—by majority. The axiom is that it’s two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for lunch.

What our founders designed was a constitutional republic. Democratic voting happens in parts of it—to choose our representatives, and directly choose many local leaders. But the federal government is limited, on purpose, so that coercive force, like fire, does the good it’s intended to do but does not go further and burn us free individuals to the ground.

Federal: relating to a type of organization that is made by joining together separate organizations or states

State: a politically unified people occupying a definite territory; a nation

When the thirteen original colonies declared independence from England, they were a loosely joined group of separate states (i.e., nations), a confederation. The document joining them, the Articles of Confederation, was weak and imperfect. That’s why, a few years later, representatives from these separate but confederated states worked out a new Constitution, “in order to form a more perfect union.”

They did not give up being their own sovereign statehoods, but they united with the other states in a stronger union. It’s important to remember that it was states joining together, and not merely a few million unaffiliated individuals suddenly becoming a new single nation. The nature of America is that it is the United States (nations) of America.

One of the major debates in the Constitutional Congress related to insistence, mainly from the large states, that representation should be by population number and, on the other hand, the insistence, mainly from the smaller states, that representation should be by state. What was the incentive for a small state, like Delaware, to join the union if it was simply to be ruled by whatever bigger states, like Virginia, enacted?

The brilliant compromise of the Constitution was to divide the representative branch, the legislature, into two houses: one representing population number—the House--and one representing each state equally—the Senate. Until the 16^th Amendment, the two senators from each state were chosen by the state legislatures, rather than by direct election as they are today. The idea was that the House represented the interests of the people from their home district, and the Senate represented the state’s (nations) interests. Even with the change in how senators are elected, they are still supposed to represent their state’s interests while working together on federal issues.

Over time, with inadequate history and civics being taught, too many people think of the states as just provinces.

Province: any one of the large parts that some countries are divided into

America didn’t divide itself into provinces that it called states; states united together to form America. We’re all Americans, but we’re also members of our respective states. You might forget that in some states, but you don’t forget it here in Texas.

Now that we’re clear on what United States are, we can talk with a better understanding about the election—and specifically the Electoral College.

The 2016 Electoral College Map,
image found here

Direct election is what some (many) voters think they’re doing in a presidential election. But they’re not. They’re actually voting for a slate of electors from their state who have promised to vote for a particular candidate. It seems complicated, but its purpose is to preserve both the voice of the people and the voice of each state.

If the popular vote directly elected the president, the campaign would look very different. It would concentrate on areas with the highest populations—big cities mainly, like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Dallas. Add in Florida and DC area. Ignore the rest of the nation, because you can’t garner enough votes in any particular place to sway the election. Flyover country gets flown over.

So, the system allots electors per state based on population (1 per representative in the US House of Representatives) and state (2 senators per state). Each state decides how its electors will be chosen, but most give all the state’s electors to the vote winner in the state.

Without Electoral College illustration
by Ramirez for The Daily Signal

If the vote is decisive in the state, it’s possible not all the votes will be counted. Don’t cry foul. All the cast ballots on election day are counted. All early voting ballots are counted. It used to be that absentee ballots were only counted if the number could sway the election, but since ballot by mail has become more prevalent, those are usually included in the voting day tally. (That’s what showed up in my county’s tally within 24 hours of the polls closing.)

However, there are provisional ballots—paper ballots cast by people who are not showing up as registered but whose registration was turned in on time; those votes will be handled individually, and if they are valid, they will be counted eventually.  Sometimes these have to do with providing proof of residency or some other detail that didn’t happen in time to show up in the books, but the voter has five days in which to provide documentation. But most provisional ballots end up being people who went to the wrong polling place, because they moved and didn’t go to the place where they are still registered, or because they just showed up at the wrong place and don’t have time to go elsewhere. These votes are not valid and will not be counted.

Anyway, the final tally on these votes may not show up in the original tallies, or even official tallies within 24 hours. If they will not change the outcome, there’s a good chance no one will change the count later. In other words, the popular vote count, because it doesn’t matter, isn’t always the count of all valid (and only valid) votes.

There’s also voter fraud to think of. In the last election, the difference was an average of about 10 votes per precinct. I was a poll watcher at a heavily democrat precinct that ended up with 20 extra votes on the machine that weren’t included on the voter list—the handwritten list of each voter that signs the book, used to verify the count. If one party decided to add votes from non-voters at a rate of 10-20 per voting place, they could turn a national election. If there was a corrupt party not being watched in some state, they could purposely add hundreds or thousands of fraudulent votes. As it is, at least they can only affect no higher than the state level.

So the Electoral College is a protection against tyranny of the majority, against tyranny of urban over rural or suburban areas, against large states over small, against populous regions over sparsely populated regions, and against tyranny by voter fraud.

Rarely has the Electoral College chosen a different president than the popular vote. When it has done so, that means the election was close. And in a close election, we ought to be glad the decision was made with the input of all states and all regions, instead of just the most populous cities.

There’s been a fair amount of conversation about the Electoral College the past couple of weeks. It’s a good time to get more educated on the subject.

I suggest this PragerU video:

Then there are these additional brief video explanations:

·         Mark Kaye, "Why the Electoral College Sux!"

·         Larry Arnn interview, and opinion piece he wrote in the Wall Street Journal November 14, “The Electoral College Is Anything but Outdated”

·         The Day I Found Out video, "Why Does the United States Use the Electoral College and Not a Popular Vote to Decide the President?"

And if you’d like to learn a little more in depth, I recommend a book I read about a decade ago that has been updated in 2012: Enlightened Democracy: the Case for the Electoral College, by Tara Ross, the presenter on the PragerU video.

It keeps happening that, when we look at what our founders thought through, they did a remarkable job of working out how to get just the right amount of government, with limits to safeguard our liberties. They deserve something much better than an ageist assumption that they’re outdated. Chances are they thought it through and came up with a brilliant idea.