Ocasio-Cortez: The Electoral College a ‘Scam,’ Prefers White Voters Over Those of Color
ACKSHUALLY, Congresswoman, the Electoral College provides a voice for every single person.
It’s weird how the Democrats complain about the Electoral College when their person does not win.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) not only described the Electoral College as a scam but screamed RACISM.
She screeched out her rant on an Instagram story. From National Review:
“We’re coming to you live from the Electoral College,” the New York Democrat said in a video on Instagram, which featured her driving along a sparsely populated highway in what appears to be a desert somewhere in the western part of the country. “Many votes here, as you can see. Very efficient way to choose leadership of the country. I mean I can’t think of any other way, can you?”
The freshman congresswoman went on to cite a New York magazine story titled, “Here’s Every Defense of the Electoral College — and Why They’re All Wrong.”
“Due to severe racial disparities in certain states, the Electoral College effectively weighs white voters over voters of color, as opposed to a ‘one person, one vote’ system where all our votes are counted equally,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Could you imagine if we had this kind of democracy-altering ‘fairness’ provision for literally any other group? If we weighed, for example, black and indigenous voters more because of unfairness?”
Everything is racist. Everything and everyone is racist.
How do I civics? Our Founding Fathers provided us with a great foundation to build the greatest country this world has ever seen. They knew mob rule would wreck us.
Believe it or not, in a weird way, the Electoral College gives us all an equal voice in the presidential election.
The Electoral College gives those in states with a small population a voice. Without it states like California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois. Gee, only one of those states is a consistently red state. Florida is a swing state. But three out of five? Yeah. No wonder they do not want the electoral college.
As it is, those states have the largest electoral college numbers so they can easily sway an election.
- California – 55
- Texas – 38
- Florida, New York – 29
- Illinois, Pennsylvania – 20
This is why candidates have to go to states like Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin, etc.
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Comments
Hard to imagine even this dim bulb think shes right. She like all liberal suffers from Dunning Kruger syndrome.
Someone tell Sandy the Talking Seal that she’s a White person (Caucasian). Anthropologists agree everyone from Western Europe to Eastern Europe and entire Middle East and Fertile Crescent are Caucasian by DNA.
She would say that because she is of Puerto Rican heritage she is a person of color… Oddly, following this sort of thinking soon begins to sound like the old ‘one drop of blood’ trope so often used by the former storm troopers of the Democratic party, the KKK.
there is no anthropological Hispanic race. Hispanics come in all races. the Hispanic race was created by the democrat party in the 1980s when they realized that most of the colonists they were bringing here to align with the blacks to take the country away from the American citizens were Caucasian. what if those colonists were to align with American Caucasians instead of the blacks? poof we have the new Hispanic race. racism against whites is the only thing the democrat party has to get the non-white to vote for them. they sure as hell can’t tell them look how good our policies have worked out for you.
Just sounds like more panic because they realize that Trump is going to win again.
Democrats like AOC are averse to the notion of “Checks and Balances”. They are unneeded when you believe that you are always right. She knows her Lenin.
Nobody is preventing “people of color” from moving to sparsely-populated states like Wyoming or North Dakota or Alaska.
And they are already represented in congress based on their numbers. The electoral college is only relevant to presidential elections, and yes Cortez, it is an efficient — and fair — way to choose the nation’s president, because it assures that all the states in the nation get a say in the decision, instead of just a handful of the most heavily populated ones.
Over-represented.
RE: “..And they are already represented in congress based on their numbers…..”
The electoral college does give extra weight to white voters over black ones, not by design, but because it gives extra weight to the smaller states, and black people happen to live overwhelmingly in the larger states.
But she gives away her ignorance when she continues “Could you imagine if we had this kind of democracy-altering ‘fairness’ provision for literally any other group? If we weighed, for example, black and indigenous voters more because of unfairness?”
As it happens, the system does weigh indigenous voters more, because so many of them happen to live in smaller states like South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Alaska. And any black person (or anyone else) who wants his vote to count for more can always move to a smaller state.
I mean, if black people were to move in large numbers to North Dakota and become a majority there, nobody would suddenly complain and propose changing the system because black people have too much say. On the contrary, those who like the current system would nod and say, yep, that’s how it’s supposed to work; and those who don’t like it because racism would suddenly change their minds because racism.
Whether the electoral college should favor the small states is an open question. I’m not convinced that it’s “right” in any abstract sense. But it was the price the bigger states paid to get the smaller states to join the union.
And that’s the key point people like AOC miss. The USA is not one country, it’s a union of fifty states, and the smaller ones (especially those that were in the original 13) joined on the basis of certain guarantees they were given.
We could get away with changing the contract now, because the smaller states who’d be harmed would have no way to do anything about it. They’re not big enough to fight over it, so a change could be shoved down their throats. But it would be wrong, and would delegitimize the union.
This is the same thinking that had leftist complaining a couple of years ago that every state was only allowed 2 senators instead of it being by population.
Leftists can see how well the ‘one man- one vote’ decision by the SCOTUS enabled cities to dominate individual states so they would like to do the same to the USA. 5 leftists pretending to be Justices simply have to declare the Constitution unconstitutional and they are there.
If they do that they lose their own authority. If the constitution is unconstitutional then why would anyone listen to them?
I overgeneralized. My bad
Leftists would not simply declare the entire Constitution unconstitutional. While their goal is to replace the existing Constitution with something else easier to manipulate and twist for their pursuit of power, they will not be so blatant this early on in the progressive project.
Why not simply write up that the Electoral College and the 14th Amendment are in conflict. Since the 14th was passed later and is part of the Constitution could not a Court state that the due process clause required equal representation in the election of president? That the 14th Amendment meant that a direct vote for president was constitutionally required?
Because the 14th amendment very clearly doesn’t do that. It’s just not possible to interpret it as doing that.
1) it requires states to treat people equally within each state; it does not require Californians to be treated the same as Wyomingites.
2) The 14th doesn’t even guarantee a right to to vote, which is why they needed a 15th amendment.
Didn’t we change the contract a great deal after the Civil War with the 14th Amendment? Suddenly “constitutional law” became the ever flattening of one structure after another in our country as violating “equal protection”. It’s just a question of what’s next and how long it will take.
Somebody could make AOC’s argument in the context of the 14th Amendment, and a leftist SCOTUS could probably find a way to agree. Everything gets flattened. Everything slides relentlessly toward entropy. We’re not at the stage of heat death yet, but we’re getting closer.
Every time we amend the constitution we’re changing the contract, but the ability to amend it is itself part of the contract. And the smaller states took care to make sure that the contract could not be amended to reform the senate. (Well, not without first amending that provision; they should have included it in the protection.)
The 14th amendment did not affect the structure of the union. It greatly restricted states’ ability to mistreat their citizens, but it didn’t change the relative power of the states. It notably didn’t even protect black people’s right to vote, which is why the 15th amendment was needed so soon after it. Which makes ridiculous any thought of a 14th-amendment challenge to the senate and electoral college. The 14th and 15th between them require one-man-one-vote-of-equal-value only within each state, not across states. Requiring the equal weighting of votes across states can’t be done, even by amendment (again, it would take two amendments).
do you think affirmative laws might deny white people the equal protection of the civil rights act of 1964? the affirmative action laws are just democrat party jim crow laws for white people. after a hundred years of the democrat party achieving political power by oppressing black people the civil rights act was going to make that impossible. so the democrat party passed laws to achieve political power by discriminating against white people. that strategy has worked like a charm due to the political support of the democrat party by all those white people opposed to racial discrimination.
Quotas and other forms of “affirmative action” that directly discriminate against white people are illegal. The forms that exist pretend not to discriminate, at least not blatantly.
And that’s the key point people like AOC miss. The USA is not one country, it’s a union of fifty states
As a non-American, this is the way it was explained to me: the people don’t elect a president, each individual state elects its President.
The Leftist media and Dems like to spread the myth that small states vote reliably Republican. Before the last election I remember a stat that showed the smallest 10 states were represented in the Senate pretty equally by Dems and Repubs. It was 10-10 or 11-9. It may have shifted to Dems after the election but I never followed up. The largest 10 states broke down the same way in the Senate. It’s the middle states that hold the power. Trump knows this too. Look where he visits. It wasn’t blacks or whites that elected Trump. It was the mid-size states that the Dems and Hillary ignore in favor of large urban areas.
The Constitution does not include diversitist thought, practice, and policy. It does not indulge color judgments of the racist, sexist, Pro-Choice character.
Two comments:
1) why do you even accept that minorities, say blacks, have to accept as a block?
They shouldn’t, and we shouldn’t accept AOCs framing. The framing that all minorities vote as a block is racist, not the representation.
2) You mean small states like Delaware?
21% Black. Let’s say that they vote 90% Democrat and reliably beat the more republican red down state votes to turn Delaware blue at a statewide level. (I have issues with this framing of voters, but it’s factually true)
Delaware’s 3 electoral votes. 0.55% of the EV.
Delaware Blacks % of US population: 0.08%
So if we accept the ridiculous framing, we see that blacks in Delaware – as a result of swinging their state blue – get a 6x – 7x over representation of their voice as a result.
Sounds pretty racist to me.
Shall we continue with AOC’s nonsense or can we just shut it down for what it is? Racist, tribalist nonsense.
One doesn’t have to accept that black people vote as a block. But your argument proves too much. You should ask the same question of the founders from the smaller states who worried that the voters of the larger states would overwhelm them. You could ask the Delaware delegates in 1788 why they assumed that Virginians would vote as a block for policies opposed to their interests? And you could ask them why they thought their own Delawareans would vote as a block for policies opposed to those the Virginians favored.
Obviously people don’t vote as solid blocks, but people with something in common, whether it’s a state or a race, tend to have interests in common and therefore to vote in similar ways. And the fact is that, for reasons completely unrelated to racial animus, the average weight of a white person’s vote in the USA is greater than the average weight of a black person’s vote, because of where people choose to live.
And yes, I do mean smaller states like Delaware. As you point out, the votes of the 20% of Delawareans who are black do weigh more than those of most white people. But when you add Wyoming (<1% black), Vermont (2% black), Alaska (3% black), North Dakota (5% black), South Dakota (1% black), Rhode Island (5% black), and Montana (<1% black), a disproportionate number of those extra-heavy votes go to white and native people. Not because anyone planned it that way but because that's how it happens to be.
You would be terrible at arguing on television. You are trying to be too fair and would get skewered.
Yes, yes, everything that might thwart a socialist victory in2020 is racist. Honestly, these people are exhausting.
Next year when voters of her district vote her out of office, AOC should find comfort in knowing it wasn’t due to the racist Electoral College.
Then somebody better challenge her in the Dem primary.
She has a bunch of opponents running against each other in the Rep primary, which makes no sense, because the Rep candidate will not win that district.
AOC won that district because she beat the incumbent in the Dem primary. Then the general election was a formality.
Exactly. Because right now she’s a shoo-in for reelection.
Where do you get the idea that she is a shoo-in for re-election? Her voters are very upset about her so expect a challenge. And the Dem establishment is targeting her too. Most Dem voters are not communists so she CAN be defeated… so long as Dem voters don’t get infected by RINO squishiness.
Right now she’s a shoo-in because she doesn’t yet have a challenger in the Democratic primary. Nobody but a Democrat can win that district.
@Milhouse: It’s very, very early. The Dem Party is fighting for its very survival right now and believe me, the money that is backing the national party has entirely different priorities than The Squad’s. I am very certain that Bezos, for one, would love to see her and her friends disappear. Expect it.
Which is why I said “right now”.
AOC has no leg to stand on. She essentially won her election with 10% of the voters in her district. Everyone knows that whoever wins the primary there walks away with the seat. She received 27K votes in a district of 214,000. 4,000 more than her Dem opponent. I’m not sure she was democratically elected. One person one vote?
.
Let’s talk money. She’s supposed to represent her constituents but they gave her less than $2,000 in donations in the first half of the year. If you want to know who she represents follow the money.
“Fairness” in the sense of “everyone gets an equal slice of the pie” is not in the Constitution.
Neither is any sort of equal distribution across the entire country.
There’s these things called ‘states’, and they’re actually the building blocks of sovereignty in the United States of America.
Without it states like
I think you missed some words or something in that sentence and following.
“Fairness” and “Fair” are weasel words only CON Artists use.
Oh and of course spoil brats with arrested emotional developments of 2 year olds……..
Confirmed: Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is the official poster girl for Preparation H.
if breathing wasn’t autonomic, she’d suffocate.
and if stupidity was painful, she’d be in a permanent coma.
Comes now a judge in Colorado:
“DENVER — A U.S. appeals court in Denver said Electoral College members can vote for the presidential candidate of their choice and aren’t bound by the popular vote in their states.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the Colorado secretary of state violated the Constitution in 2016 when he removed an elector and nullified his vote when the elector refused to cast his ballot for Democrat Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote.
It was not immediately clear what effect the ruling might have on the Electoral College system, which is established in the Constitution. Voters in each state choose members of the Electoral College, called electors, who are pledged to a presidential candidate. The electors then choose the president.
Most states require electors to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in that state, but the Denver appeals court said the states do not have that authority.
The Constitution allows electors to cast their votes at their own discretion, the ruling said, “and the state does not possess countervailing authority to remove an elector and to cancel his vote in response to the exercise of that Constitutional right.””
One good thing about this ruling is that it would basically take the teeth out of the National Popular Vote Compact.
I don’t expect the NPVC ever to get enough support, and states can drop out as well as join, even during the election as some state decides it really isn’t willing to give up its electoral votes this time.
Whereas the other thing is immediate, whether a faithless elector gets to vote differently on the first ballot from the popular vote’s direction.
Exactly.
I never expected the NPVC to go past 1 or 2 states, but that was wrong.
That’s exactly right. That’s what I was arguing here during the kerfuffle in 2016, and every time we discuss that ridiculous “national popular vote compact”. The constitution gives state legislatures the authority to decide how electors are chosen, but not the authority to tell those electors how to vote.
Laws purporting to bind electors are just as much an anathema to the constitution as would be laws purporting to bind congressmen and tell them how to vote. Even when state legislatures chose the senators themselves, they could not dictate their votes. Once the legislature elected a senator he was independent for the next six years.
Political parties try, and mostly succeed, in avoiding this problem by nominating only die-hard party loyalists as their candidates for the electoral college. That way, while they can change their minds, they’ve extremely unlikely to want to.
“The constitution gives state legislatures the authority to decide how electors are chosen”
Wrong. The Constitution gives the states the authority to determine who they want in the WH, with or without electors. Elections are not mandatory under the Constitution.
LIAR. I don’t get it, do you get off on making up bullsh*t like this? Why would anyone do that?
The rest of that story – my apologies for fat fingering the submit button too soon:
“The elector at the center of the case, Micheal Baca, was part of a group known as “Hamilton electors” who tried to convince electors who were pledged to Clinton or Donald Trump to unite behind a consensus candidate to deny Trump the presidency.
After a flurry of filings in state and federal courts, the electors met on Dec. 19, 2016, and Baca crossed out Clinton’s name on his ballot and wrote in John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio who also ran for president.
Then-Secretary of State Wayne Williams refused to count the vote and removed Baca as an elector. He replaced him with another elector who voted for Clinton.
Baca’s attorneys said the U.S. Supreme Court will likely hear the case because it conflicts with a decision from Washington state’s Supreme Court. That court said in May that electors could be fined for not casting ballots for the popular vote winner.
Colorado’s current secretary of state, Jena Griswold, decried the ruling Tuesday in Colorado but did not immediately say if she would appeal.
“This court decision takes power from Colorado voters and sets a dangerous precedent,” she said. “Our nation stands on the principle of one person, one vote.”
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Just a hateful attention whore.
“Could you imagine if we had this kind of democracy-altering ‘fairness’ provision for literally any other group? If we weighed, for example, black and indigenous voters more because of unfairness?”
Frankly no, because then the country would go down the tubes. And many of the most productive would see a good time to go elsewhere, unwilling to be governed under such terms and having other options.
Had to say it.
Also, I believe that final “because of unfairness” tacked on the end is what the left now calls “nuance”. Nuance is their favorite word, and they’ve stolen it to have this new meaning. They can’t make any declarative statement without trying to say “because of unfairness”, “due to racism”, “stemming from disadvantage” …
Which is logically wrong unless they have proof that those are the major causes of the thing, which they never do.
The Dems/Progs will put Comrade Sander’s wife in charge of the Electoral College. She will run it into the ground and out of business by 2024. She has the experience.
She’s an idiot. What else can we expect from her mouth but stupid things she repeats at the bequest of the most vile of anti-American fascists?
Dust off those old drink mixer instruction books dipship, you’re going to need them after the next election.
I hear she will be back in New York because the game shows will be picking new contestants up-state in Random, New York
The removal of the electoral college is a de facto dissolution of the United States. All States would need to vote to rejoin. State rights granted in the constitution all hinge on the equal representation of each state in electing the president of the republic.
Um, no, the states do not have equal representation in electing the president. Each state’s representation varies with its population, but not in direct proportion. California, with 12% of the US population, has 10.3% of the electors. It takes 700,000 Californians to elect an elector, and only 200,000 Wyomingites; but since California has 66 times Wyoming’s population, it has 18 times as many electors.
Um, yes.
Um, yes, what? Are you agreeing with kyrrat’s ridiculous claim?!
Time for the right to remind everyone once again that we live in a republic, not a democracy.
Math ain’t exactly AOC’s strong suit, is it? The EC would have to be abolished by constitutional amendment:
2/3 vote in both houses of Congress to send to the states
and 3/4 (38) of the states to ratify with a 7 year deadline.
The key number to remember is that only 12 states need to nix the amendment to kill it. As it stands nearly 12,000 amendments have been proposed with only 33 actually going to the states and, of these, only 27 have been actually ratified.
Bottom line for AOC: She’s got a better chance of bumping into Elvis at a Bronx bodega than she does of seeing the EC abolished.
Naw, just get 5 leftists on the Court to declare that the 14th Amendment meant that the Electoral College was unconstitutional, that’s all.
No honest court could find that. And a court so blatantly dishonest as to pretend to make such a finding might finally trigger a revolt by the states affected.
I wish I had faith in honest courts, however the past few years has proven to me that at least for now we have more activist pretending to be judges, who do not give a tinkers damn about the actual rule of law.
“No honest court could find that.”
Well, I did note that the Justices voting to decide that would be leftists so we already know that honesty would not be an issue. After all, an earlier court decided that the 14th Amendment overturned centuries-old and congressionally-approved approach in states to provide some balance between the populous cities and other parts of a state.
“And a court so blatantly dishonest as to pretend to make such a finding might finally trigger a revolt by the states affected.”
Maybe, maybe not. While not a constitutional scholar by any means the only peaceful way to accomplish that a revolt–as far as I can see–would be for an Amendment. Unfortunately the hurdle seems very high for that approach to succeed since more than 15 states would believe they would benefit by shifting the nation to more of a pure democracy and away from a republic of states.
The deliberate unequal distribution of districts within a state was neither centuries old nor (as far as I know) ever approved by Congress. Not that Congress would have had any business or authority to approve it. And it is blatantly against the 14th amendment.
That expensive Boston College (or was it Boston University?) education did not teach AOC much. The Founding Fathers were educated men–they knew their Greek and Roman history. Athens was a direct democracy–one man, one vote, and voting mob rule.
Unsuccessful generals (and yes Athens invaded a lot of places including what’s now Sicily) would come back, vace a mob vote and get executed.
Founding fathers knew better than to embrace direct democracy in all things. The Electoral college is one such safeguard.
Remember: princeton AND harvard law both gave diplomas to michelle obama.
Enough said.
You know when you’re done as a novelty radical? When an animal like rashida tlaib steals your headlines.
Is it Whitey’s fault that non-Whites congregate in urban environs?
The fact that anti-EC articles invariably point to states like Wyoming and North Dakota, and almost never New Hampshire, Delaware, or Connecticut kinda gives the game away.
I used to think the Electoral College was fundamentally unfair. I was 11 years old… I didn’t understand. Then I grew up(I grew old). There are still many things I don’t understand, but, I do know about the meaning of Republic, and I am grateful for it. How the hell did a 11 year old get into Congress? Rhetorical question..
I think the disconnect comes from there being 535 votes in the Electoral College, 100 coming from Senate representation. Every state gets 2 senators, no matter the population. What sort of arguments would exist if the electoral college number is reduced to 435? Wouldn’t it then be truly proportional? Every state would lose two electoral college votes, but all would be apportioned in the same manner as the House of Representatives. Does anybody see anything wrong with this? I kind of like it but haven’t fully thought out the pros and cons.
Yes, that is the main source of the weighting in favor of smaller states. And yes, eliminating it would make it “fairer”. But the problem remains the same: this was the deal on whose basis the smaller states joined the union, and they’re unlikely to consent to change it.
If you did get rid of those extra 100 electors, there would still be a slight weighting in favor of the very smallest states, which have less than 1/435 of the population, because each state is guaranteed at least one representative, and thus (under your proposal) one elector.