GINANDTACOS CLARIFIES ITS STANCE ON THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Posted on | by Ed

Loyal readers of ginandtacos.com may be thinking "The election is nearly upon us, yet your recent articles have not made clear how you feel about the electoral college….it's a good thing, right?"

Bitch, I will disabuse you of that misinformed notion.

How many Americans realize that the way in which we elect the President is largely a matter of custom and not law? The Constitution lays the framework for the electoral college in a minimalist manner. Each state has electors equal to its number of Congressmen and Senators. The manner of selecting electors is left to the Legislatures of each respective state. There is no emoticon or HTML tag of which I am aware that allows me to emphasize that enough.

  • Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress."

    That's it. It's up to the states, period. South Carolina, for example, selected electors in its legislature until 1840. If states want to appoint electors by order of the Governor, majority vote of the Legislature, or proportional representation they have every right to do so. If they feel like appointing electors by cock size, random selection, or ability to play Slayer's "Angel of Death" while riding a gay horse through a trench filled with pudding, they may also do so.

    Here's a little-known (actually, just "little-reported") gem from 2000. When Florida was in the midst of its recount crisis, the state legislature (Republican-controlled) convened a special session for the purpose of altering the state's method of selecting electors. The popular vote was just too inconclusive and controversial, they said. We need to go ahead and make that decision for you, good citizens.

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    Florida: The state that brought you Hooters Airlines

    See, most people have absolutely no idea that there is nothing in the Constitution that says we get to vote for the President. And this, my friends, is what some in the field of Political Science call "the electoral time bomb". If a state decides that it will no longer pick electors based on popular vote, they have every right to do so.
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    If Kerry wins 55% of the vote in Florida but the Legislature convenes (even after the election, as no timeframe for settling the selection process is specified) and decides that it will choose electors itself, there is nothing anyone can do about it.

    Short of, of course, rioting in the streets, which I heartily endorse.
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    Before you write it off as a crazy conspiracy theory, they were very willing to do this in 2000 under the pretext of the election being "inconclusive". And it's not a "republicans vs democrats" issue. The real horror of it is that whichever party were to strike first, the other would return the favor in a different state.

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    And pretty soon we'd have a large number of states – maybe all of them – in which the rabidly partisan legislatures selected the electors, and we'd have one less thing to (not) vote for as a nation.

    Congratulations, America! I hope you enjoy the next phase of the end-justifies-the-means, illiterate, corrupt politics you've rubber-stamped into existence. With partisanship in government empirically at an all-time high, I hope you're prepared for the final ludicrous chapter in the 1994 Republican Revolution's brand of "Fuck you" vs. "Oh yeah? Well fuck you" politics.

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