Buying the Election

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Donald Trump’s Delegate Woes Worsen (Huffington Post)
Hillary Clinton’s superdelegates should stop whining: Why Sanders supporters have every right to challenge their super-votes (salon.com)
An Obscure Ohio State Law Could Shake Up the Republican Convention (abcnews.com)

One of the things that struck me when I was studying American history back in the day was how indirectly American democracy works, and how that actually used to be more common in the early days of the republic. Sometimes it’s jarring to remember how indirectly things like presidential electors and senators used to be determined by voters. This is hardly a unique phenomenon of American politics — just look at how governments are constructed in parliamentary democracies — and perhaps the effect is magnified by today’s instant-gratification culture and its electronic tools, but it’s not something that’s been discussed that much until recently, with the internal conflicts arising in both the Democratic and Republican parties about this year’s presidential primaries.

Of course, it needs to be stipulated at the start that both major political parties are private organizations, not public entities, and so they’re totally free and within their rights to pick their presidential candidates by whatever rules they see fit to implement. Some might say that this is just one of the problems with the two major political parties and how they’re constructed, and I might be among the people who would say that, but that’s an aspect of the debate that needs to be addressed later. For now, the current struggles within both parties need to be focused on because of how they illustrate a huge problem we could face in December.

Although the superdelegate issue on the Democratic Party’s side isn’t quite as cataclysmic as what Republicans are going through, it’s still worth looking at. If nothing else, I find it hard to believe that I’m the only person who finds it troublesome that so many people need the concept of superdelegates explained to them when we just went through this same thing eight years ago during the 2008 primaries. Unlike then, though, Hillary Clinton does hold leads in both voted-on delegates and the popular vote over her opponent, and while Bernie Sanders certainly could catch up with Clinton before the primaries, right now superdelegates are, as they’ve been since the 1972 McGovern debacle, a moot point. This situation has the potential to blow up into something huge before the Democrats get to Philadelphia for their convention, but as much as I’d like to see Sanders get the nomination, I still think that Clinton will wrap up the nomination beforehand.

Obviously, though, the in-fighting going on in Republican circles over who should get their presidential nomination is much bigger, and definitely more interesting to look at. Although 19th century Americans were probably less invested in the primary process than they are now because of the lack of direct voting — remember that the idea of every state holding its own primary or caucus is a relatively recent thing in American history — they were probably much more well-educated on the political party rules that surround presidential nominations. Even if people are aware of the fact that a candidate needs to get a majority, not just a plurality, of delegates on the first ballot to get the nomination, a lot of Republicans, and especially Trump supporters, are saying that those rules are stupid. Honestly, I tend to agree with them, especially if the GOP ends up in a situation where Trump doesn’t get a majority of delegates but is in first place by a significant margin.

The biggest potential for chaos, though, comes in the fact that ultimately it’s not voters, but delegates, who are going to be tallied this summer in Cleveland, and the way that Ted Cruz and his campaign have been courting those delegates is providing this primary with more intrigue than a whole season of House of Cards. It’s not like this is unprecedented even in recent Republican party politics — just look at what Ron Paul’s campaign did in states like Iowa four years ago to get a majority of delegates from those states despite not winning any contests among state voters — and it could even lead to a situation where Trump walks into the Republican National Convention after having won a clear majority of delegates, but doesn’t get the nomination because some of those delegates don’t vote for him on the first ballot. (I’m never one to advocate violence, but if it’s going to happen then I can think of more than a few Clevelanders I’d like to see hit with stray bullets.)

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Electing people to go make a tally at a later date, instead of using the raw numbers on their own, is one of those vestiges of the early days of our democracy, just like how we’re still voting on the first Tuesday after the end of the harvest season because we all need to travel to our poling place all day on Monday after going to church on Sunday. Unlike the laws governing elections, the private political parties don’t have the excuse of saying that it takes time and a long legislative process to change those rules; they could eliminate the whole delegate thing tomorrow if they wanted to, and they could certainly do it before this summer’s conventions. Just change the delegates to a hard, fixed value determined directly by votes — call them “points” or whatever you want to — and let the party’s voters decide without the risk of human intervention basically jettisoning their votes.

Here’s the problem, though: This process by which delegates, and not the raw vote totals, determine who gets to be each party’s presidential nominee? That’s how it works for the big election this autumn as well.

Who gets to be the next president is not determined on Election Day in November; it’s actually determined in the middle of December, when the electors for each state go to the floor of Congress to cast the votes as determined by November’s election. Just like the party primary process, humans can mess up the intended results here as well, and we’ve already had two examples of it since the turn of the millennium. In 2000, one of the electors from Washington DC, who was pledged to Al Gore, cast a blank ballot in protest of DC not having voting representation in Congress. Four years later, a Minnesota elector — possibly by accident — cast their presidential vote for John Edwards, the Democrats’ candidate for Vice President, instead of Presidential candidate John Kerry. This is not ancient history here; these are events that happened in every adult American’s lifetime.

What does this mean? Well, let’s construct a pie-in-the-sky scenario for the Democratic faithful, where Donald Trump gets denied the Republican presidential nomination despite getting the most delegates, and decides to run an independent campaign against Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton (or hell, make it Bernie Sanders if we’re this deep into fantasyland), splitting the conservative vote right down the middle. Not only do Democrats take back states like Indiana and North Carolina when the election comes, but they even make inroads into plains and southern states. Maybe they even approach the kind of blowouts that the GOP enjoyed during the eighties.

Right after the election, though, Trump and his campaign team start going to all those electors in each state, just like Ted Cruz is going around to Republican electors pledged to Trump now, and starts offering them some of his huge stockpiles of money to vote for him instead of the Democratic candidate who won their state on Election Day. This strategy would be complicated by the fact that some states legally require their electors to vote for the candidate designated by voters, but hey, it’s not like Trump hasn’t already offered to pay the legal fees of people who break the law on his behalf, right?

As much as any of us can be said to be “looking forward to” Election Day this November, it could be that what we really need to watch out for is what happens the following month, when all those electors get tallied up on the floor of Congress. Even without the kind of Democratic fantasy scenario I discussed in the last paragraph, it could very well be that the Democratic candidate wins both a majority of the popular vote and a majority of electors in November, but still loses the presidency when some of those electors switch their vote to the Republican candidate when everything really counts in December. Just like what’s going on with the primary process in both parties right now, those are the rules, and as stupid as they might be, they’re all we have right now.

If thinking about that scenario scares you then you’re not alone. After the way Republicans have booed during the concession speeches of their last two presidential candidates, I don’t think there’s a realistic way for this election to end that isn’t going to scare the crap out of me. Honestly, just getting to Election Day feels like it’s going to be a huge struggle with how crazy our country is getting. I can only hope that some sanity is restored after the election, but I’m not counting on it.

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