I didn’t listen to the speech, but I would cynically note that in this day & age merely implying that Biden is the rightful POTUS is divisive.
It obviously shouldn’t be, but in point of fact it is.
The BBC had an article about this and were questioning it as well.
Might note that there are others (and not on the far right) that made comments about the general dark tones that seems to be more dominant than patriotic.
States are free to determine how their electors vote in the electoral college. Currently not every state awards all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in that state. There’s a possibility that their electoral votes will be split. If the state sets up a system that completely “ignores the voters in that state”, that’s their perogative. There are neither any constitutional requirements nor federal laws which require that electors to vote according to the results of the popular vote in their state. Some states do have state law with requirements, but again, that’s their perogative.
Heck, it’s even less “democratic” when choosing the nominee for the political parties. We go through a charade where people vote, and actually think they are choosing the party’s candidate. Boy, were people sure surprised in the 2016 democrat primary when this fallacy was exposed.
Huh?
The way I remember things, Bernie was challenging for the lead in the popular vote in many of the states, doing very well, when Hillary supporters started mentioning “Super-delegates”. Everyone gets a vote, but some people get more and bigger votes.
And in those states, Republicans like Ron Johnson attempted to illegally submit alternative electors to subvert the will of the state and his oath of office.
This was the point AI was making.
But, i have a feeling you chose to ignore that and bring up a lot of completely unrelated garbage.
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Per Googling, especially Superdelegate - Wikipedia
superdelegates already existed for the Democratic convention, and apparently no changes were made for the 2016 nomination. Some delegates to the Democratic convention (about 15% of the total) are not selected by primaries or caucuses.
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What is undemocratic is being unwilling to lose.
This is exactly how i heard trump describe himself in an interview at one point (to the best of my memory). He said that, above all, he simply cannot lose.
That is exactly how he has acted. It is how his followers have acted, up to and including using violence to win.
That is what makes him undemocratic. And the lies he tells to justify himself winning, that marginalized groups are secretly in control and subverting the democratic process, is fascist.
The fake electors, which are also unlawful by the way, are just the symptom. And your post doesn’t address any of that.
I’ll agree with you that the staging of biden’s speech looks really bad to my eyes too. but biden does not typically subvert the line between art and politics, nor does he dog whistle (or sometimes just whistle) to white nationalists and neo nazis the way trump does, so it bothers me less.
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And i believe they had zero impact on the final 2016 democratic nomination. I was a bernie supporter. Did not caucus for him in 2016 due to a work trip that took me out pf state.
They may have had an impact a half century ago in Chicago, but i not certain.
The most important change for 2020 was that superdelegates could not affect the first-round result by voting. They could not vote unless a candidate was guaranteed to win even with no superdelegate votes. I believe that remains in effect for the future unless changed.
This is correct.
And, all 50 states have set up systems that award their electors based on the popular vote in their state. 48 have winner-take-all systems for choosing electors by popular vote, 2 have mildly proportional systems for selecting electors by popular vote. The systems they set up explicitly delegate the choice of electors to the voters.
The issue is the idea that states can establish these systems by laws, then, after the election, they can retroactively throw out the results of the system they set up because the legislature doesn’t like the result that their system produced.
That’s why “putting aside the votes” is an accurate description of substituting electors after the vote in 2020.
(Note that the practice of legislatures choosing electors died out fairly early in our history. By 1836, 25 of 26 states had moved to popular vote, with South Carolina as the only hold out.)
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All or virtually all superdelegates are superdelegates by virtue of winning elections (not elections for superdelegate, but elections for governor or Congress, etc, where all registered voters could vote, including non-democrats). Some of the elections were not for government office, e.g. elections for office of the DNC; I don’t know who votes in those.
The power of superdelegates was further weakened in 2020: Beginning with the 2020 presidential election, they are prohibited from voting on the first ballot at a contested national convention.
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Sanders won big in his backyard, New Hampshire.
Clinton won in Iowa, Nevada and she won big in South Carolina. Then they each had some lopsided margins on Super Tuesday, but Clinton got considerably more votes / delegates on Super Tuesday as well.
So Sanders certainly had some wins, but I wouldn’t say he was ever challenging Clinton for the nomination. Being from Vermont, he was always expected to win New Hampshire by a large margin. Clinton had even bigger margins in Alabama, American Samoa, Arkansas (where she was former First Lady of the state), Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
Sanders won his home state of Vermont handily on Super Tuesday but he couldn’t even carry next-door Massachusetts. He did also win Colorado, Minnesota and (just barely) Oklahoma.
I’m not sure exactly what timeframe you’re looking at, but about the only point where he could claim to be ahead was immediately after New Hampshire, which he was always expected to win decisively.
Maybe for an hour or two on Super Tuesday when his landslide win in Vermont was in but the bigger states carried by Clinton were still counting.
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My point about super-delegates is not that they exist, not that the rules were changed during the 2016 primary nor at the convention. I’m not making any accusation of rules changing or back-room deal-making by the democrats. You guys can all simmer down. I’m only pointing out that most people in this country had no idea that any such “super delegate” creature existed. Most voters in the primaries thought the candidate selection process was based on the primary votes. Most voters are very ignorant of the process used to choose a POTUS. Most voters actually believe they are voting for the POTUS.
This too is very true - but misses my point. The state might have a winner take all system of awarding electoral votes - but in how many states are electors required to award their electoral votes according to the results of the popular vote in that state?
How about I requote AI so we can see what he wrote rather than your desired intrepretation of what he wrote.
That sounds exactly like the point to which I am responding. States put in place the laws/rules they want for their state to follow in awarding electoral votes. And these rules can, and have changed over time.
Are you in favor of fake electoral slates being submitted by the GOP in multiple states? What should happen to the GOP leaders that did this?
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That’s not my argument tonight. That’s not the point I am making. Maybe we can address “fake” electoral slates at another time. Since others want me to stay on point, I 'm asking the same of you.
Well that was half of my original point that you conveniently ignored. Jump right in there as your silence speaks volumes.
To my knowledge none of the GOP efforts to date have proposed eliminating the popular vote for presidential elections. It is theoretically possible and constitutional, but so far that isn’t happening to my knowledge. Why specifically are you advocating for that approach?
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