Millions sign petition urging Electoral College to elect Hillary Clinton

Even before the 12 Amendment, our presidential electors had a choice up to the date they cast their ballot at the perspective state legislatures on a certain day in December.

Americans head to the polls in the 2016 presidential election today to vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. In 1876, Samuel Tilden had more popular support than Rutherford B. Hayes, but lost the electoral vote. Harrison’s presidency was ineffectual and economically turgid, and he easily lost a rematch to Cleveland.

“In measuring voter intensity, the Daybreak poll’s results do not contradict the consensus that Hillary Clinton has consistently attracted more supporters than Donald Trump”, he wrote.

In 1967, a commission of the American Bar Association recommended that the Electoral College system be scrapped, finding it to be “archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous and risky”. In addition to Republicans gaining control of the White House, the Senate and House of Representatives remain in the hands of the GOP. That is because they were not creating a government with “majority rule” being the highest goal.

The New York Times reviewed the history of the Electoral College on Election Day, and noted that while there have been examples of faithless electors, majority are from long ago, and they’ve never affected the final result of a presidential election.

Following Trump’s momentous presidential election win on Tuesday, a huge number of Americans have come out to oppose the result with riots and protests in cities across the country.

So yes, it’s possible that Gary Johnson or Jill Stein could still get some electoral votes. Each state gets as many electoral votes as it has members of Congress, and the District of Columbia gets three.

Comey originally cleared Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president, of wrongdoing, although he highly criticized Clinton’s handling of sensitive State Department emails.

As for the controversial so-called “bathroom bill”, two-thirds of voters said they opposed it.

There was only one other time that a president entered the White House without winning the popular vote, and that was in 1824, due to a four-way race that did not produce a victor in the Electoral College, forcing the House of Representatives to decide, in accordance with the 12th Amendment.

For those seeking change, there are two avenues: Amend the Constitution, which is extraordinarily hard, or do an end run around the Constitution, which a group called National Popular Vote has been trying.

The one-party era ended, but little changed about the electoral process itself. In his tweet on November 7, 2012, Trump called the Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy”.

“I will look at it at the time“, Trump said to Wallace.

In different times, there is some chance that members of the Electoral College might have deviated from state returns and brought the popular vote into alignment with the electoral vote.

In Nevada, where more than three-fourths of expected ballots have been cast, Democrats also lead, 42 percent to 36 percent. Let the civil unrest speak to those states’ electors and let us see if the electors will honor the wishes of the total USA popular vote and adjust their pending votes accordingly. The would-be president needs to secure 270 of these to win. The founding fathers sought to ensure that residents in states with smaller populations were not ignored.

In 2008, CNN projected Barack Obama as the victor of the presidential election after the then-senator skyrocketed from 220 electoral votes to 297 votes after results from some Western states, including California, came in. But, she said, it’s unlikely voters were lying about their support. Better to kick back with few bottles of your favorite adult beverage and denounce the Electoral College as a tool of white supremacy and sexism.

“And I suspect you will have unintended consequences, that it comes down to what’s the risk, what’s the reward?”