Lennox: A case for Electoral College reform

Certainly there were a few outlier polls predicting everything from a six-point Clinton victory to a five-point Trump triumph heading into election day on November 8.

Dunn also maintains that the Electoral College is more representative of the country as a whole.

“Campaigning to win the Electoral College is much more hard & sophisticated than the popular vote”, Trump tweeted Wednesday. Oh, and 62 percent of white working class women voted for Trump. But in terms of the actual impact of the Electoral College, and the winner-take-all system applied almost everywhere, the states which have a genuine level of greater influence are the battlegrounds – that is, states which are more evenly divided between the two parties are in a position where each vote is meaningful. “They focused on the wrong states“.

Just think of how the 2016 campaign might have played out had Trump competed for the votes of blue-collar voters in western and upstate NY or forced Hillary Clinton to spend time and money in California as opposed to say Virginia and New Hampshire.

But with video pleas featuring various celebrities, numbers of online petitions, and scores of e-mails and messages sent directly to electors themselves making headlines, information about the apparent faithless electors and the outcome of their protest seemingly got lost in the mix. In the last century there has never been more than one in each election.

That might not seem like a lot – it has occurred less than 9 percent of the time – but consider that it has happened twice in the past 16 years: the infamous 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore and this year’s just-as-infamous election between Trump and Clinton.

The three-fifths compromise gave Virginia enough representation to earn 12 of the 91 electoral votes in early presidential elections, law professor Paul Finkelman told “PBS NewsHour”.

Even those who are now arguing for the system to change are being disingenuous and harmful to their own cause.

Specifically, as The Huffington Post cited, ME elector voter David Bright chose to cast his vote for Sen.

Former President Bill Clinton cast his ballot for his wife, failed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, at Monday’s Electoral College meeting in Albany.

The former president made previous comments to the Record-Review, a local paper near his home, about his wife’s loss. In 1872, 63 Democratic electors did not vote for candidate Horace Greeley since he had died. In 1888, Grover Cleveland, who won the popular vote, lost to Benjamin Harrison. They had hoped to convince Republican electors to follow suit and vote for Powell as a compromise candidate.

In Obama’s final press conference of 2016, he pledged to make himself available to Trump “as issues come up”, and reiterated his commitment to ensuring a smooth transition process.