Regarding the electoral college
I've been reading. It's never healthy to do this to excess during an election year, and 2016 is no exception. #trashfire2016
Clinton won the popular vote, and she won it by a large margin. Much, much bigger than Gore's margin in 2000. Last count is something like a million votes. I'm betting it will be at least two million by the time December 19th arrives. And yes, I've seen that change.org petition.
All eyes are on the electoral college. The dilemma they face now is: what to do? How best to protect their own existence?
This is more vicious than it might seem at first. Gaming the electoral college is old hat in American politics, but up to now there's been (apologies!) a gentlemen's agreement to keep the electoral results within earshot of the popular vote. This way they maintain the facade that the electoral college is representative enough to keep.
Whatever you think of him (personally, I think he's a psychopathic monster who never even should have been admitted to the republican primary, but whatever), Trump shattered that facade. His campaign gamed the electoral college way past any point of plausibility, exposing its fundamentally non-representative roots. Now, the electoral college must face the music.
Option one: They elect Trump. (Trump murders the poor outright, ravages the dying middle class, pushes racist horseshit that kills hundreds of thousands and ultimately wastes decades of Congressional session time, steals trillions of dollars for himself and the 1%, blatantly betrays the USA to Russia and China, rains down nukes on eastern Europe and developing nations, poisons the biosphere beyond repair, etc.) The survivors - who, in majority, voted for Clinton - resolve to abolish the electoral college, and it is eventually stricken from the Constitution. We might even get some vote reform out of this version of events, although the cost in human life could well be total.
Option two: They elect Clinton. (Clinton continues Obama's legacy of treating the poor and middle class relatively humanely, pushes centrist legislation that disappoints liberals but murders very few, steals mere tens of millions for herself and the 1%, tries to maintain the current global power balance with mixed success, pursues a saner climate policy, etc.) The survivors are much more numerous and mostly sanguine. The outraged here are the wealthy and powerful elites who moved to put Trump on the throne - and they will spend accordingly. Electoral college would certainly be considered disposable by those elites in this version of events. No vote reform, regrettably.
Neither one looks particularly good if you're an elector, does it? Because of the contentiousness of the election, they will be forced to accept culpability for one of these timelines.
"We represent the will of the people" was always a hollow claim, but never more hollow than it is today.
(The implied shakedown and polarization amongst power elites, I will leave for a later post.)
