So I guess 2016 claimed its biggest victim yet - America

Massachusetts is more right about being left. Trump lost by millions of more votes here than in California.

You can’t even refute me, because in Trump’s America facts don’t matter.

I’d take that in a heartbeat over the most disastrous Precedency (oops!) in America’s history.

You are talking about nearly an entire coast of the country and about 1 in 8 people who live in it. Just because it is designated as a single state doesn’t mean it’s some single uniform population. I mean, even states like MA and NC have distinctly different geography and cultures within them, and they are much, much smaller than CA. Discounting the state because it is one state is absurd, pure and simple. If you transplanted it to the east coast, it would cover the Carolinas, VA, MD, DE, NJ, and eastern PA. That’s a pretty diverse region.

States are generally not “geographic regions” in any sort of natural sense. They are municipal divisions that are effectively arbitrary, for the purposes of general elections. You might as well call out “coastal” as being deviant.

Geography is the least interesting dividing line to consider. Economics, race, education, rural/urban, and sex are all more informative about the state of the country and our political divide than “geography” by state.

Coastal has become a definition of liberal almost though. Coastal and urban.

But mea culpa, I started this by merely pointing out a fact the Trumpsters are pointing out and I don’t want to continue with it. I don’t even remember what the discussion was when I brought it up.

Now I think I will go “fuck myself”.

Correlation is not causation. Do you really believe there is something in ocean water that turns people liberal? Or is it more likely that the coasts are heavily urbanized? You don’t see Alaska skewing heavily liberal. Again, why the fixation on geography, rather than the more relevant political variables that overlap with geography?

But doesn’t that kind of prove my point? If the EC ‘overriding’ the election, as you say, would cause a massive constitutional crisis, then what is the point of it having that power?

If the point of the EC is to elect individuals whom will use discernment and judgement to select the president on our behalf, but then they don’t actually do so, then why give them that power. If the purpose is to prevent someone so drastically unfit, but them using said power to prevent that causes crisis, why create that possibility?

Instead we get all the distortions that the EC crates, making some votes worth several factors more than others and making it so only a handful of states even matter electorally, with none of the upside. We swallowed the poisoned pill to avoid shooting ourselves in the head. As a conservative in California I would think you would appreciate how the EC makes your vote completely and utterly pointless. Get. Rid. Of. It.

Oh, and to your point

The delta for a Trump presidency is so large that I think there is a distinct possibility that, yes, this is true.

Craig, that logic is pretty ironclad IMO. Fuck the EC. Get rid of it.

It wont happen. There is zero incentive for the smaller states to give up their leverage and it would take an Amendment.

People forget that a lot of the EC is also about giving smaller states more power to counteract the larger ones.

Of course it’s in the water. Ever since the 50’s they been putting stuff in the water.

Not really, because “the rest of the country” is not homogeneous. You could replace “California” with “NY, NJ, and MA” and reach the same conclusion.

Or you could just generally note that the coasts voted for Clinton, and CA is the largest coastal state. Which is not only more informative, and it is also pretty obvious.

Well, the good news is we did see a historic number of faithless electors – except that 5 of them defected from Clinton, and only 2 from Trump.

I have no problem getting rid of the EC. But you don’t do it between a November election and a January inauguration. That makes me think of the GOP legislators in North Carolina who upon their governor losing went out and changed the power of the new governor.

We should work towards getting rid of the EC for 2020.

Sure, that’s fine. And when I say get rid of it tomorrow, well understand that was not to imply doing so to overturn this election. It serves no purpose, it should cease to exist. If that happened tomorrow, or on October 2020 makes no difference to me.

But it’ll never happen. We know that.

Agreed. It’s going nowhere.

One scary thing I read somewhere pointed out how many state houses are now GOP dominated and how “relatively easy” it would be for them to pass amendments.

The easiest way to “fix” the EC is just to get enough states to sign on to the national popular vote interstate compact: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/. The second-easiest way would be for the Supreme Court to rule that states cannot allocate all their votes to one winner. An amendment would be the most-stable and most-fair way, though even then I doubt it would remove the extra votes the small states get, which would still leave CA with a far smaller % of the EC than of the population.

There would be absolutely no constitutional basis for such a ruling

the 14th amendment would be a good start. If people don’t have a right to have their votes count, then why would the voting rights act ever have been constitutional?

Sorry, while falling back onto hyperbole of people not having their votes counted may sound nice, it’s not actually a real argument. There’s no legal merit to it.

Your vote counts in deciding your state’s electoral votes, in accordance to your state’s own rules. There is no coherent argument to be had that would suggest your rights to due process or equal protection are somehow violated by the process described in the Constitution itself.

The Constitution leaves it up to the states - it actually says nothing about individuals voting for president (EDIT: the 14th amendment does say that the state’s representation would be decreased in proportion to the number of people inappropriately barred from voting). There is a coherent argument that says the states have set up a system that results in a massive number of people’s votes not counting and that they are unable to solve this problem by simply changing their own laws because any state that did so would suffer a significant loss of power in the Electoral College. I don’t see how this case could be dismissed out of hand, even if it would ultimately be a tough win, and there are legal scholars that have directly suggested this, so I’m not pulling it out of thin air.