Let's Find Out - Does Our Vote Matter? How the Electoral College Works | ASMR

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

Short answer is Yes. The long answer is this video. 0:00 Intro 2:01 Short description of Electoral College 2:41 History of Electoral upsets (Winner of popular vote doesn't win Presidency) 6:46 Manta Sleep mask shout out. You can buy one here: https://bit.ly/2J0s0E3 Use checkout code LETSFINDOUTASMR for 10% off until 12/15/2020. 7:21 The 2000 Election: Swing States 11:48 Pledge of Allegiance tangent 16:22 Meaning of a republic/ Intention of Framers of Constitution 20:30 Function and mechanisms of Electoral College 30:12 Brief case for and against Electoral College (i'm for it, for now) 43:25 Districts: How the 538 Electoral votes are divided up among the States and Washington DC 1:10:35 The 2000 election: Why the popular vote matters (in swing states) 1:16:22 Why Election Day is a Tuesday in November 1:21:09 Walking through the Election Day voting experience... and why it's not what you think it is 1:27:40 The definition of the US Presidential election 1:31:30 How Electors are actually chosen (Bill Clinton and Joe Biden's brother are Electors) 1:46:30 "Faithless Electors": how your vote could lose value 1:53:14 The 1824 election: How elections can be manipulated by faithless electors 2:00:00 Contingent elections 2:04:56 Benjamin Franklin anecdote 2:06:19 Huge thank you for watching and supporting... The TL;DW is that the United States of America was founded as a federal republic whose sole purpose was and is/should be the representation of the citizens of the distinct States that united in 1776... just the representation, though. Not the direct input. It was never designed as a democracy, and never has been. It was agreed among most of the "Framers" of the Constitution that a direct, popular vote for President meant that 51% of citizens could be cajoled into voting for a great showman but incompetent leader. In 1776, the States had essentially evolved into their own countries, but had to form a federation (now the oldest extant one in the world) or be conquered by the 18th century European superpowers (England, Spain, and France). Because of their colonial origins though, they demanded to retain their sovereign right to make laws that represented the will of their people. So, the electoral college was created and cemented into the U.S. Constitution as a way for each State's directly-elected officials (representing the voice of the people, and liable to be voted out of office if failing to do so) to personally vet and select "Electors" from their State whose sole task was to deliberate and vote for a President. Each State would receive a number of Electors equal to the number of representatives they have in the U.S. Congress. (This is 2 senators for every State, and a number of Representatives proportional to the State's population.) Which ever Presidential Candidate wins the majority (greater than 50%) of electoral votes wins. If no majority is met (could happen if a third or fourth candidate is voted for), the House of Representatives casts 1 vote per State to elect the President. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ►my ASMR playlists... ▸Space: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVojBLpecXuXY66IZixixYf8aE-FOozO1 ▸History: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVojBLpecXuV3POreugMZyg9XTgxUZgGx ▸Science: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVojBLpecXuU3-fEgM4V1T5P8U6l2_p2D ▸Philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVojBLpecXuU5kJPgNLyObyNQwyjmxOgy ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ►Support for the channel... ▸Shop on Amazon here (kick-backs at no cost to you): https://amzn.to/2LnNXd6 ▸PayPal ......... https://www.paypal.me/LetsFindOutASMR ......... [e-mail] ▸Patreon ........ https://www.patreon.com/LetsFindOutASMR ▸📩 Wishlist (for the channel): http://a.co/9vUJ8eF ▸📪 If you'd like to mail me something: Let's Find Out ASMR (Rich) P.O. Box 1582 Palm City, FL 34991 ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ►socials... ▸📧 Discord.................https://discord.com/invite/PyUfaN7 (* I'm not very active here yet) ▸📧 Email................... [e-mail] ▸📧 Instagram........... https://www.instagram.com/lets_find_out_asmr/. @lets_find_out_asmr ▸📧 Twitter................. https://twitter.com/letsfindoutasmr @LetsFindOutasmr The podcast (audio versions) of my content: ▸🎧 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2u11T58 ▸🎧 iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/letsfindoutasmrs-podcast/id1448116527?mt=2 ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ "Let's Find Out ASMR" Introduction: video: https://pixabay.com/videos/id-10339/ Equipment used: (mic) Rode NT1-A https://amzn.to/2Da4CBa (other mic) Blue Yeti https://amzn.to/33jNrYA (USB interface) Scarlette 2i2 https://amzn.to/316c7kG (computer) MacBook Pro 16" https://amzn.to/3jXRuzT (camera) iPhone 11 (1080p, sometime use 60 fps) https://amzn.to/2PjT2pz (mic mount) Desk-mounted mic boom https://amzn.to/33kMK1s (mouse) silent-click mouse https://amzn.to/3jZMrit

So why did the U.S. wait almost 50 years after it was founded to start recording the popular vote in the first place? And if the electoral college is what determines the president, does the popular vote even matter? That's my number one question as soon as I found out what the electoral college even was. And if it does, what's its significance? Why does 95% of the airtime you often hear on old and new media only the only? focus or at least seem to me to focus on talking about the popular vote and actually what is the electoral college well let's find out i hope you guys are doing well and i hope um given that this video is ideally going to come out before the electoral decision is made in december um it'll give you

guys a better understanding of how it works and if you're anything like me and you've really had an aversion to learning anything about politics because it seems I don't know so dry and arbitrary in so many ways will at least gain a new respect for the history and some of the fundamental concepts like republicanism will find out different than the Republican Party that the Constitution in the United States, as well as its election process for its president, is founded upon. With any luck, it will help enlighten some of us on the general election process and the history behind why the Electoral College even exists and what it does. It's function. So the quickest way to just describe the electoral function in its modern form,

is that the candidate who wins a state's popular vote in November will very, very likely, and we'll break down that that little nuance later in a little bit, I guess, earn the support of that state's whole slate of electors, whole number of electors later on in December when the electors get together and vote, as outlined explicitly in the Constitution. Each state is given a number of electors proportional to its number of elections. of representatives in the Federal Congress. Now, since the U.S. began recording the national popular vote of its presidential elections, there had been five times where the winner of the popular vote lost the election.

The 1824 presidential election, just about 50 years after the founding of that nation, was the first election in American history in which the popular vote mattered, but still hadn't fully been counted all the way across the nation. 18 of the then 24 states chose presidential electors by popular vote. Six states still left the choice up to their state legislatures, the state level analog of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. When the final votes were tallied in those 18 states, Andrew Jackson actually pulled way ahead relatively.

from John Quincy Adams with 152,000 votes, popular votes, to John Quincy Adams, 114,000 votes. And until after the Civil War, the two-party system hadn't entirely dominated the elections. So a third candidate, Henry Clay, had won 47,000, and a fourth, William Crawford, won a close 46.9,000. Later in 1876,

a few years later, another 50 years went by Rutherford B. Hayes, and in 1888, shortly after that, Benjamin Harrison, both lost the popular vote and still took enough of these electoral college votes to win the office. The 1900s didn't really have one instance of misalignment between the popular and electoral votes. But Kennedy did actually only squeak by

with a 0.17% less than a quarter of a percent lead in the popular vote against Nixon while also winning the electoral college. So the 1900s, every president that was elected also did, even if by a small margin, win the popular vote. Then after 110 years of this alignment, it got out of whack and went discordant again in the 2000 election, the famous Bush-Gore election, the closest election in history. Al Gore had won the popular vote by about 500,000 votes, which, you know, roughly 100 million votes. That's a pretty tight margin. But Bush, George W., won the election. won the Electoral College by an equally tight margin

a single electoral college vote out of the 538 and we'll learn all about that just a minute here and then 16 years later so that's five, that's four different elections now but there was about a 110 year gap

until the 2000 election and then 16 years later just four years ago in the 2016 election Hillary Clinton received a pretty substantial 2.2% of the almost 130, the record-breaking, 130 million total votes cast. That's almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump. Yet she lost the electoral college, actually by a pretty significant margin. And I think this year, actually, 2020 was the record for a voter, popular voter,

turnout. So that was pretty awesome for both sides. So why did the U.S. wait almost 50 years after was founded to start recording the popular vote in the first place? And if the electoral college is, what determines the president? Does the popular vote even matter? Well, let's find out. And hey guys, as a quick aside in the spirit of capitalism and the holiday season, if I can be as bold as to fuse those two. I just wanted to plug Manta Sleep Masks because they partnered with me a few videos back. They're not sponsoring this video,

but I really do enjoy this sleep mask. The weighted one is the one I use. I figured it would be a good way to support the channel because I get a little cut if you use my link in the description and it might help a relative or someone you know you think could use it this holiday season. So check it out and back to the video. First of all, for anybody looking for a quick sound bite answer, yes, the popular vote definitely matters, definitely matters.

And that means our vote can and does, in fact, make a difference. I think the caveat to that is it matters in different magnitudes based on different states, different locations of the actual voter. So your vote has a different weight in different states. So states have weights. Just remember that. It turns out there are swing states. There are states that are very stably leaning towards Republican or Democratic throughout history, at least recent history historically in the last 20 and 30 years.

California being Democratic, Texas being Republican, for instance. So your vote doesn't really matter as much in those states if you're, an opposing party, but in swing states like good old Florida here that I'm a citizen of, it matters very much. In 2000 Bush, won by a single electoral college vote, like I said, but that vote was only given to him. It was a part of 27 votes at the time. Now it's 29 electoral votes that Florida has because he won Florida's popular vote. which itself out of 20 million plus people in the state came down to around the thousand votes so in a big way a big big way I want to emphasize definitely no political scientists but I'm personally pretty convinced that our vote still definitely matters in the democratic republic that the United States is founded on and we'll elaborate on what that means in a little bit is still alive and well

It's doing well, even if it's evolved a little bit. Americans choose most of their state and federal elected officials, state government officials, and the federal officials being the members of Congress. That makes up the legislative branch. The United States is at the federal national level. It's divided into three branches, and every state is actually, divided up in the three analogous branches to the executive, which is the president, or on the state level, the governor, sounds like the governor is the president of each state, basically. The legislative, which is the house, the Senate house, the two houses, the bicameral, meaning two bipartisan, not bipartisan, by-partisan, by split two ways, I guess, like our mind, actually, our brains are bicameral.

left and right hemispheres. The legislative branch is by camera. It's got a Senate House and a House of Representatives, which are meant to balance each other's powers out. And then the third branch is the judicial branch, which is essentially in charge of interpreting being made up of the Supreme Court justices, interpreting fundamentally the Constitution

in all the surrounding, amendments and laws that govern our nation, over here at least for us Americans. So we just wanted to emphasize, we directly choose and vote in our legislative members on both the state and the national level, but the selection of a U.S. president is a little different, even though the aggregate national popular vote is calculated by state officials, media organizations and federal and the federal election commission. The people only indirectly elect the president. In other words, we vote as a democracy when we vote for our state government officials

and some of the federal or all the federal members of Congress, but we vote as a representative republic when we vote for the president. Remember, I pledge allegiance to the, the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands if you were American you grew up saying that

and the one nation under God is how it ends and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all I think but there's a part in there which says under God

and I actually just found out research in this, that the under god part was placed inserted in there in the 50s during the McCarthy era when the threat of communism was really a big deal in the United States. So the communists were very generally famous to be a theistic, to make a huge denouncement of any... obvious religious affiliations. 1954, yeah. In response to the communist threat at the time,

President Eisenhower encouraged Congress to add the words under God, creating a 31-word pledge that we say today. It might be out of date because I remember that's a, it's been a contentious thing of the argument against it being that the U.S. was fundamentally founded to, have a freedom of religion, but a separation, a distinct separation of church and state. But the advocates, and I personally don't see a problem with it, because I've come to find out the Constitution and most certainly the Declaration of Independence has a very, pretty explicit

foundation and anchoring in a sense of the a notion of the divinity of each individual, and that's the framework upon which they build the rights of every individual and what we're entitled to as free people whose rights and whose right to determine who they're governed by is anchored in a, how is it put, whose rights and liberties are derived from their creator. Yeah, so the Declaration of Independence was a,

it was the original document that was the prototype, the initial document that was made to unify the 13 colonies when they united together against England. And then later on they secured and more, deliberately explicitly outlined how the government would work and how it's defined in the constitution but the declaration of independence drafted mo i think at least the the preamble was drafted by thomas jefferson begins we hold these truths to be self-evident self-evident so the that's her core axiom upon which all their other political philosophies are based

that all men are created equal. And yes, that's a huge hypocrisy, given that there was slavery at the time, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, unrevocable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But to get back on track, I just thought that was an interesting, little tangent about the under one nation under God phrase the republic it's the key idea that it's the common thread I'm going to be trying to

tie this this whole video together with that it is fundamentally a republic and it was never ever stated to be a democracy in very few of the influencers the founding fathers the influencers

the people who had influence upon the writing and philosophy that undergirds the Constitution ever wanted any form of democracy. The Constitution did not and still does not require that any popular vote be conducted for president, interestingly enough. It's a second election held about a month later on technically it's defined by the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December

that a group of only 538 people there are voters directly elected within their states and we'll find out about how that works later that they

are the only people who directly vote for the candidates who will become president and these voters are collectively known as the Electoral College. For Florida, a swing state whose popular vote has narrowly teetered between Democratic and Republican and all the past, you know, about 30 years' worth of elections since the 90s, its 29 electoral votes are determined. They determine the 2000 election, like I said, winning Bush the presidency.

But then right after Bush's, um, two terms it switched right back to like wildly back to Democratic Blue Democrats are I guess that's another ball of wax

but that was actually only a an invention of the late or no early 2000s actually where all the networks got on track of the same page with labeling on their maps you know their political maps

labeling leading states or Democratic one state's blue and Republicans red. Something else I didn't really know for the longest time. Florida is a swing state because it switches back and forth. Its population, the citizens within it are split pretty evenly so that a Democratic or Republican candidate can potentially win the 29 votes out of the pretty significant size because we have a pretty significant population here for the presidency out of the electoral college. Bush won both his candidacies, you know, narrowly in the 2000 election, but much more easily in his 2004 re-election.

And Obama, in his 08 and 012, candidacies, won Florida. And then it switched back in 2016. Hillary lost it to Trump. It went red. And yeah, it turned out this year, it also went red 2020. And then for, like I said, historically democratic states like California, it being the most popular state is actually the most significant, but in terms of its huge chunk of electoral votes that it gives, but it's always a guaranteed win since helping Clinton win the presidency of 92 in his first term. It's been voting blue or democratic ever since.

So in that sense Your vote if you're a Republican in California And then Texas is a pretty You know red state And then there's a lot of smaller states They have much smaller Electoral votes And we'll get into how

How those The number You know a number of votes is given to each state But it's essentially based on their population And those your vote isn't going to matter nearly as much If you're not living in swing states. So the quickest way

to just describe the electoral function in its modern form is that the candidate who wins a state's popular vote in November will very, very likely earn the support of that state's whole slate of electors, whole number of electors

later on in December when the electors get together and vote as outlined explicitly in the Constitution. Each state is done. given a number of electors proportional to its number of representatives in the federal Congress.

And that's two senators for every state, no matter what, it's always a constant two, so that each state has an even playing field. And then the other half of that bicameral branch of government, the legislative branch, is the House of Representatives in which... Sorry for the dog out there. What are you going to do? Which aptly enough, I guess, is a lot more noisy because it's, well, it has a larger number. It has 435 people representing the 50 states and the districts within those states.

So this amounts to being proportional to each state's population. So out of 538 votes, California, for instance, has 55. it's the most populous, and Connecticut being one of the least populous states. Not the least, though, but one of them closer towards that end of the distribution. It has only seven electoral votes. It was written very purposefully, purposely, it's important to note, into the Constitution that the method and ultimate choice of these electors is up to each state legislature. So the analog of the three branches of government at the federal level exists at the state level.

It's at the state level the ultimate choice built into the constitution for who elects these electors exists. After arguments on all sides for both the popular vote and a, direct election straight by Congress, you know, kind of bypassing any input by the popular vote to the extent that, you know, people elect members of Congress, so they can't immediately have any say there. The electoral system was never explicitly said to be, you know, the ideal solution. And it, you know, it turns out that there was decisions to be made during the Constitution Convention and topics that they just put on the back burner and this was one of them was

deciding who you know who's going to elect the president how he was elected it reinforced the representative as opposed to the direct election method of governing that a republic actually stands for it reinforced that representative aspect of it it was deliberately designed to add a layer between both a small number of congressmen or women in Washington and the masses, as many would argue, of generally uninformed citizens. I think I'd generally argue that, too, because I'm really part of that demographic, for sure. But, you know, both of these, whether the president was elected by a group of senators or elected by popular vote, both groups,

the framers of the Constitution thought could really be manipulated and was open to being manipulated by a crafty enough, you know, radical politician that got in there. They wanted to retain, and that's an important point, the separation of federal powers between the executive and legislative branches. So they didn't want the seat of the president's, to be determined by the, you know, incumbents in the legislative branch, because that would be a disruption of that supposed check and balance of power. Their main reasoning was that if the president was elected by any members of the legislative branch,

president being representative, being the head of the executive branch, that would be a breach of the direction of powers, and that would give the, you know, make the president essentially subject to, to cater to any of his voters in the Congress. Whereas in the case of the popular vote, they simply wanted to avoid the madness of the crowds and the manipulation that large crowds are subject.

to so the college of electors was originally intended to consist of entirely independent men of good reputation remember this was the 1700s here they had a specific demographic of white landowning males and i don't know if i included this in this final script but um you know that really wasn't even among white males that wasn't a huge it was maybe six percent of them so that left out 94 out of every 100 men didn't get any say in the government at all initially. So, and then within, you know, within 50 to 100 years, within 100 years of that, definitely after the Civil War in the 1860s, every male, regardless of ethnicity, had a vote.

And then women came along, I think, of the 1920s. And we'll talk to talk about that towards the end here. The electors were originally intended by the writers of the Constitution to be able to make an independent choice. They wanted to have the state officials, state legislatures, elect them directly for their ability to apply thoughtful, reasoning, deliberation to select the best candidate for the job. That's essentially what they, you know, they intend.

They wanted people to be elected specifically for this job of electing the president and no other job so that they wouldn't be influenced. At least no other job at the federal level. So they couldn't just hop out of their position temporarily and elect a president that would favor their policies. But they could be part of the state level governments. So there might be a little conflict there. but, you know, they didn't want to overly define the parameters of how these electors would be elected because the Constitution in general was a very lightly, minimally worded document. They didn't want to have these long, drawn out elaborations of rules,

and they pretty interestingly, purposefully left out a lot of, elaborations and delineations of rules and they left a lot open to the interpretation of both the states and the Supreme Court justices because they recognize that you know people are our living beings in a document couldn't be a stale rigid unamitable authority that couldn't change with time so they wanted to give it room to breathe if if you know, so to speak. And it certainly has.

It's been amended over 20 times. Right off the bat, it was given its first 10 amendments as the Bill of Rights. And they recognized it wasn't perfect, but it had amenability built into it. So they purposefully, purposely left these specific methods for choosing the electors by the state legislatures pretty vague, pretty vague, left it up to the people of the state. So despite the noble intent of the framers of the Constitution, though, the all-to-human tribalism of partisanship emerged as early as 1800.

It was founded in 1776. George Washington had two terms and then stepped down, and within the first couple elections, since 1800 and essentially since 1824 in a national level elections in the states have used the popular vote to decide which party, which of the, at first multiple, but then by about the Civil War it boiled down to two parties and it's been that way since.

It gets all the state's electoral votes. And in all transparency, I want to get this out of front. This might be like another hour or something. So after reading about it, it seems like, although it's not ideal, it is the best current situation to most fairly distribute the votes based on the way populations move. And we'll talk about that later. States aren't static. You know, they are themselves living, breathing, sovereign entities. And to me, essentially, the case for a national, direct, popular vote for president just doesn't hold.

merit enough yet. So I just wanted to be transparent about that. Because I do agree with some of the arguments against having the electoral college. And I'm sure some of you will have strong opinions too. And, uh, you know, let's let's engage in the comments. Absolutely. But, uh, I'm not fully convinced. I, I guess yet. I haven't hit that threshold to, uh, be flipped, if you will. It's defenders for the third time, would say that the Electoral College was designed by the framers of the Constitution deliberately, like the rest of the Constitution, to counteract the worst human impulses and protect the nation from the dangers inherent in democracy, the madness of crowns being, you know, a pretty strong point there. For example, James Madison, we all know

famous James Madison, one of the founding fathers in the Federalist paper, number 10, by the way he, him and Alexander Hamilton helped him. They published these, these papers, a series of multiple tens of papers, elaborating and sort of, you know, clarifying a lot of concepts in the Constitution, because the Constitution itself is a very, like a very small and short, minimally worded, like I said, document. And it was designed that way. But there's, you know, a lot of interpretation and a lot of room. And it was built in to have a lot of room for interpretation.

But at the same time, Madison, Hamilton, and some others wanted to make a point to document their intentions for a lot of the parts of the Constitution. In the Federal's paper number 10, it's specifically called... for a constitutional republic, insisting that a representative democracy, as opposed to a direct democracy, and representative democracy, is again where the popular voters vote in delegates or officials

to represent them in a smaller group of representatives from all around the country at the state level or at the federal level in Washington, D.C., to make and help make decisions at those levels for them so that they don't have to, the popular people don't have to vote for tons of laws and appeals to them, amendments and all that, all the time, like in ancient Greece.

Madison specifically calls for a constitutional republic saying that it's the best way, to shield the individual citizen from the will of the majority. And even says the phrase tyranny of the majority, as a lot of founding fathers actually did. And they agree with that sentiment. Alexander Hamilton agreed, saying, quote, a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proven that no position is more far.

false than this. So he kind of roped you in at first, but he hits you over the head at the end, just saying empirically looking at history, even back then in the 1700s, experience has proved there is no position more false than saying a pure democracy would be the most perfect government. He continued saying that the ancient democracies in which the people themselves directly deliberated, never possessed one good feature of government. Their character was tyranny, their figure, deformity. So he's, they weren't a fan. Now it's retractors against, arguing against the, you know,

continued use of the electoral college, primarily argue that it's not an accurate reflection of the national will. and even gives the less populous states an unfair advantage. So there's also the potential problem of, we'll get to this much more thoroughly in just a minute, of faithless electors. And that's a technical term that electors

that although officially pledged to vote for a specific candidate ahead of time, vote their conscience, so to speak, and deviate from that plan. This inserts in uncertainty that they'd argue is too much power for anyone individual to hold. So that would be one out of 538 people, which is way much, way more power than one out of, you know, 150 some odd million people voting. So yeah, it's a lot of power. But like I said, I really, I haven't been convinced of this opposing side yet. But I want to be fair that, you know, these are.

legitimate points. I think it's something that shouldn't be just dismissed. I think we should have a dialogue and see if we can maybe come up with a middle ground. The Constitution was literally written by revolutionaries. And in my opinion, if they were wary about leaving government, their brand new blank slate government that they had, you know, painted, so to speak, open to the excesses of the popular will, I think we should tread lightly there and not be too quick to throw out.

You know, something that they, although agreed that it wasn't the most ideal situation, they had also pretty thoroughly and summarily dismissed having a national popular vote as a viable option. So they just hadn't come up with anything and really we haven't since.

There's one thing I've got to add that is called the National Popular Vote. It's a movement. I mean, it's kind of, it's one of those phrases that sort of manipulatively uses a regular everyday phrase and makes it into like a corporation, you know, a slogan, an entity. So that when you say it, you don't know, you can't distinguish right away. what you're talking about, but this is, you know, all capitals, the national popular vote. It's a proposition to, it's a workaround to not, you know, break a constitutional law as the electoral college essentially is by saying that we'll keep the electoral college, but this will be a

compact if they go along with it. The national popular vote is proposing that all states agree to this compact mutually that whoever wins the national popular vote all those states will automatically give their electoral votes to that candidate. So effectively routing around any authority the electoral college might have had

it would be purely a formality at that point. And a few states have signed up for this already, mind you. So it's not inconceivable that we could go this way ultimately. but not enough to, you know, for there to be a domino effect and for it to spill out over into the custom of all the other states, for it to be adopted, you know, be adopted widely among the other states. I think the last thing I'll just add before we get into the details now of how the electoral college works, because it's really interesting, you know, and I,

I think everything on the table to be amended and, you know, hacked away and updated needs to at least be given its fair shake. And that's what I hope to do with this electoral college. I knew nothing about it, and it's pretty interesting how it works. And it has a whole history. It's evolved. It doesn't work quite like it was originally intended. But we've adapted and we've adopted new customs. new approaches.

So it's worth taking a look into the mechanics and the function of the electoral college. That said, I might be more convinced to adopt a popular vote if we as a nation ever reached a level of popular education such that I'd have to pass some sort of basic understanding

of the U.S. government's function, some sort of primer on the constitution you know some some basic aptitude test about knowledge of history both you know the founding fundamental philosophies that supposedly all our laws are made up of or built upon and you know i personally right now probably wouldn't pass So I'm trying as much as possible to be objective about this. I've always kind of thought that even before I knew anything about politics. I always wonder why the vote is up to so many people. Because, yeah, when I used to think that the popular vote directly elected the president, that is.

So to me it makes sense to have a put a little filter on the, general education, general knowledge of the voting public. And I don't, you know, I think there's, it's a gray area. It's a very complicated matter. I don't think it's as simple as saying give everyone a test. And if they pass, they can vote. Because a lot of people simply aren't given that opportunity to even be able to be exposed to the level of knowledge that would be.

required for them to pass the test and I think we have a lot of work to do on our school systems and you know local ways in which we take care of our citizens beyond education just in fundamental room and board and basic human health care and rights ability to eat and live so I think the universal basic income principles is pretty interesting. To me, I'm not sold on that either because it seems to be a pretty big tax burden. But something like that seems interesting, and I think we need to be open to all ideas. So, again, I'm really ignorant. Don't take this as any endorsement of any particular candidate or political policies.

Just mulling these things over, trying to find. out as much as I can with my limited brain so in in just a bit we're gonna get into the we're gonna dive deep in the history well relatively deep when we're talking about politics I guess we're gonna go you know two 200 250 300 years in the past and really good a good understanding of how the groundwork was was laid for the U.S., the United States government, really, by looking at the history and the context in which the states and the people who made the Constitution

lived in the late 1700s. But I want to get into the modern mechanics of the Electoral College. I thought it might be useful first to carry that, you know, to understand where. it is and then we can kind of break it down reverse engineer it almost the 538 electoral votes is the sum of the 500 435 seats in the house representative and the 100 seats in the senate house and then three votes are given to Washington DC because there is actually a significant population of people living in that 68 square miles wedged between Virginia and Maryland

at our state capital on the east coast. Most states are divided into counties for state-level political reasons, but they're also, this is very important here, divided up along different lines, independent of counties, called congressional districts.

These district boundaries now are even, and even the number of districts in each state can change based on movements of populations of people. That's where the decennial or every 10-year census comes into play will learn about very shortly. They're designed to break each state

in a roughly equal-sized chunks by population. And this is for fair representation in the House of Representatives. So each district is roughly, not exactly, but roughly equal in population size. So that's why there's a ton of districts in very populated, dense, metropolitan areas that have broken up in the many districts where a state like i think montana or

wyoming has the entire state is just one district the house was purposely defined by the constitution to balance the senate and i guess i already talked about this i got a little ahead of myself here um but to clarify uh so each state regardless of population or geographic size is given just two seats in the Senate. And again, that's to favor, or at least not give an undue assertion of power, you know, position of power to large, populist, economically powerful states. And this bicameral legislature, the Senate on one side of the house on the other, is meant to stabilize itself. The Senates give sparsely populated states

in equal representation at the federal level, so they aren't pushed around by potentially wealthier, you know, more populous states, while the House of Representatives adjusts that balance for any distortions

in the power in the Senate by giving the number of seats proportional to a state's population. Districts matter in a big way dealing with the electoral college because the number of electoral votes like we just said, each state gets

is directly defined by it. And since the reapportionment, what's called the Reapportionment Act of 1929, there's actually been a cap at 435 on the number of voting seats in the House, which seems reasonable to me because the Constitution, interestingly enough,

only specifies, again another example of how the Constitution is leaving it to the states and other entities to interpret it so that it's not too heavy-handed. I love that aspect of it. The Constitution only specifies that there can't be any more than one representative for every 30,000 people. So you can't have a small population packed with representatives in the House of the House of. of representatives at the federal level, meaning, and this meant by 2010, there could have theoretically, according to interpretation, been more than 10,000 members in the House. So luckily, you know, in the early 1900s, they recognized that potentiality, I guess, and put a stop to it.

So since early 1900s, I think since like 1911, they just made it a bill in 1920s. there's been a cap of 435 seats and then briefly when Alaska and Hawaii were brought into the United States, the Federation of States, it popped up to 437 but now it's back down. So the larger, the population of any given state, that means the more districts and corresponding representatives, one representative for, every district, it's going to be given to retain a fair percentage of representation in Congress. For example, California has, like we said, by far, by far the largest population. It has almost 40 million residents. So it takes 53 of the 435 seats, and that's about 10%, a little over that and then Wyoming with its only about 500,000 residents needs only one seat to represent them in the house we could see this map here is a great representation of

that you see all the the vast land until you get to the very very west coast on California there's very few areas west of you know west of Texas basically Even Texas itself is interestingly, like, divided almost in half, where its right side is divided up into a ton of districts. And the left side is pretty sparse. It's only a handful of districts, it looks like. I don't know if I wrote it down here, but Texas has some crazy, like, oh no, that was a number of counties I was looking at. Texas has something like 240 different counties in Texas But as far as districts they don't have as many as California, but they are the second most

And we can see here here's a little graphic that breaks up the actual like the physical kind of seeding It's like a half sphere seating in the house and we see California's huge chunk and Texas is massive chunk Then New York in Florida is fourth. So California, you know, is the most populous gets 53 seats. Wyoming only needs one. It's pretty straightforward.

But for all the middle ground states, it's not so clear. And this is the really interesting part of how it actually works. To me, it was, at least. That census, I mentioned, the decennial, it actually... came in March of this year 2020 and they sent out emails and mail physical mail snail mail to let you know that to log online on i think april first and uh they take this only once every 10 years uh this is this 2020 was the 24th time only the 24th time since 1790 when they started doing it and that's how they check and they keep tabs on the just general trends in populations movements and numbers of people

in and across states so the census is crucial to figuring out how many seats each how many of those 435 seats each state gets and there is pretty significant population shifts so it's pretty interesting the 2020 census was done in April and the way it works is that each state is given the remainder of the year after April to consolidate their numbers and work it out and submit it to Congress at the very end of December of this year so when the new year comes around 2021 the next election for Congress in 2022 will use the new updated

numbers so until we've for the past 10 years we've been using or the past 8 years because it began in 2012 we've been using data from the 2010 census to determine

how many seats each state gets so as of the making of this video right now we do not currently know we're currently operating still with the 2010 data it's used to like I said determine population shifts whether within states or among them so that the number of seats can be adjusted accordingly and this adjustment is called apportionment it's the actual process of dividing up the 435 seats in the house the US House

of Representatives not the state level house and to the extent that you know I I know me personally I don't know if I should go on records saying that I didn't answer it but there there you haven't to the extent that the census is since I are accurate shifts in congressional representation will reflect updated regional trends and this was something I actually didn't realize until I went on the US Census Bureau's website And you can see this map here. The regional patterns between, again, we were working, you know, the data isn't in for the 2020 census.

So working with the 2000 to 2010 census, it reflects a nation's continuing shift in the population from the northeast in the Midwest to the south and west. And they break up the United States in the four areas. The south looks like probably, along with the west, I guess, the biggest. So that might have something to do with the claimed movements, you know. But the northeast here we can see is the line is dividing at the bottom of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. So Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are the Northeast. The Midwest, North South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. And then the south is pretty big.

Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, along the Gulf Coast, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, then Georgia, North and South Carolina, then the states to the west, Tennessee, Kentucky, West, in Virginia, in Maryland and Delaware, I guess, in there too. In the west is, of course, California, and Oregon and Washington. Then the northern area is Idaho, Montana, Wyoming. And the bottom is New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, and Utah. And Alaska and Hawaii, I think, I would assume, are included in the west. So the nation has been shifting a lot, and therefore the seats in the House of Representatives

has been adjusted in as of 2012 accordingly. Something that was pretty, I really wouldn't have guessed this, is that the South, I mean, maybe looking at the map, like I said, the South is a pretty big, it's a pretty big region the way they divided it. Maybe if Texas wasn't included, I'd be more surprised But you know A lot of Californians apparently moving to Austin

Joe Rogan being one of them The South has the largest share of house seats But it has since 1940 Pretty interesting stuff And the West has gained As of the 2010 election The West gained four more seats They lost none

The Northeast lost five seats and gained none. In the Midwest, also lost six seats and gained none. That means the South Texas and Florida. Texas gained four. Florida gained two in the 2000 election. They had 27 electoral votes. Now Florida has 29.

In the other six states, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah, Washington, will each, or each gained. When they wrote that, it was Will. I guess it was in 2010. They each gained one seat. In New York, on the other hand, lost. And Ohio lost two seats. And the other states up there all lost one seat.

Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. All lost. One seat. And we can see this map here, a percentage. distribution of house seats by region 1910 to 2010 we could see the south and the west are gaining percentage of seats while the northeast and definitely the Midwest is shrinking quite a bit and I think I wanted to include that and it was a while ago I added this to my little script here because the Midwest is argued by

opponents of the electoral college, you know, to have too many, the North Midwest states have too much power with the Electoral College, but, you know, I think geographically they're still very important members of the United States, and they deserve not to be overpowered by the vastly over, what I think seems like, overrepresented states. Not, not vastly overrepresented, but potentially politically dominant states if we were to use the national popular vote. And it's important to remember the number of house seats is constant. So that means the average size of the districts. You know, the districts are always moving around.

Florida, I think around the Miami area, got two new districts added to it. It might have been Orlando. That's getting pretty big too. and if you live in Orlando, by the way, I'm sorry. The district size, though, in all seriousness, will rise, given that there's a finite number of house seats and districts in the U.S., and the population is increasing, and they're trying to make them roughly equivalent in population size.

So the boundaries of each district are going to shift, you know, every 10 years a little bit. And the actual numbers of people in each district, meaning the number of people that each representative represents, is going to increase. And I was impressed in how they keep tabs on which state has priority when, you know, they have to choose, you know, which states lose and which states gain seats. Because that's pretty significant when you're voting, you know, as a state. groups as majorities and two-thirds majorities, I think in the house. I might be wrong on that, but California has a huge say

about votes in the House of Representatives. And they calculate this with this cool little equation right here. PV, which means priority value, pretty self-explanatory, is the priority, is based

on the state's population in the number of its next potential seat in the house. These two variables are inserted into this equation, and the state apportionment population is divided by the square root of the multiple of the house seat and its next potential seat number. So, you know, if California has 53 seats, its next potential seat number would be 54. So you multiply those and take the square root. You're going to get, for, you know, all intense purposes, it's just the average, but it's the geometric average, aka the geometric mean.

It's probably used because they use that geometric mean concept in a lot of economic equations. I would guess. Don't hold me to it, though. But what this fundamentally means is that the more seats any one state gets, you know, California being up in the 50s, if you divide that population it's in the numerator so that's going to make the priority value very high at first but if you divide that by its large number of seats 53 you know 53 at the moment that's going to the bigger the denominator the larger or the smaller it makes the priority value excuse me the more it you know the more chunks it breaks

the population into so as states get more seats the priority value goes down and down it's a pretty cool method of figuring out who gets what seats who's next in line and we got a pretty cool graph here we got a pretty useful pretty useful graph let's use useful words here we have an insightful graph that is the number of representatives number of people that each representative or

when we're talking about the electoral vote now because remember stay on topic rich the reason I'm bringing all this up is because the electoral vote is directly determined by the number of districts each state has every state's going to get their two

electoral votes based because of that represent the number of senators that they have each state has to and then the other electoral votes are determined by the number of representatives that they have in the house and that is of course changing it's gone way up for California in the last 50 years for instance and let's see yeah just to cap off the explanation for how districts are re-apportioned this chart is from 2008 so it's a little outdated but it's a pretty good example of how roughly even the states really are in their representation by electoral votes which is why I was you know pretty impressed overall

let's see what did I say here yeah so the percentage here let's show the chart is essentially the relative power of each vote voter in the state so if an elector is representing a hundred thousand people well let's use you know real numbers the national average in 2004 was 545,000 people it went up in 2008 to 565,000 people so if a an elector you know representative represents a district with 500,000 people or let's say 300,000 people in a very minimally populated state and then elector in you know california a very populous state is going to represent 700,000 people each person in that californian representative's

district is therefore not going to have as much power in their vote and so that's what i mean by each state has weights when i said that in the beginning um or i hope i did i've recorded so many intros for this. So it does, you know, you have the variable of swing states where, like Florida, a lot of the population of Miami, Lauderdale and Orlando, and kind of up by Tallahassee even, leans very heavily left, Democratic, blue. And the rest of the state is actually surprisingly, if you're not from here, even a stones throw away from the coastline.

And there's lots of that. is very rural. There's lots of cow pastures, lots of farms that obviously those traditionally tend to vote red Republican rights. And anyways, that number has been for the last 30 years pretty evenly distributed in Florida. And it's been increasingly unevenly distributed in state-like California. in Washington, D.C., voted, I think, like, some crazy number, like almost no Republicans live, or at least vote in Washington, D.C.

But, you know, other than some outliers like Alaska, Wyoming, particularly Alaska, Wyoming, the Dakotas in Vermont, they have a pretty significant vote weight. So because there's so few people per, you know, really geographic land area and district areas, their votes mean a lot more for their state's electoral votes. So good on you if you live in those Alaska, Wyoming, Dakotas, and Vermont. But most of the other states are pretty, pretty on par with one another. More populous states like Florida, you're not going to have as much weight to your vote. But if you're a swing state, like I said, it matters probably a little more than the weight of your vote. California is only 85% of the national average. Whereas, what is it, Vermont is 273%.

Your vote has 2.73 times more weight than the national average. Most of them are pretty close to, you know, surprisingly close. It's good math, I'm impressed, to 100, to the national average. Texas, it's pretty low, 79%. Arizona, pretty low, 87. Florida and Georgia, probably because Atlanta. 83 and 88, respectively. And here's a little dot plot of the number of electoral votes.

Each dot just means the state. It doesn't mean the number of votes. It's position on the line. tells you the number of votes that it has. And you could see how far out, how much of an outlier, how much power California has in this pretty interesting, you know, graphic. Most of the states have less than 10, maybe less than 12, would cover like 90% of it, a huge, not 90, but a huge percentage of the states.

and then past 15 there's only you know 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 states have more than 15 What was it, Florida and Ohio or Pennsylvania Where's my other little graph there?

No, New York, that's right So right here, around 27, 8, 9 Florida, New York, Texas Way ahead of them and I almost said Jupiter because immediately thinking of the, it's like if we graft the mass,

all the mass in the solar system, it might be something like this. About the planets, if we exclude the sun, Jupiter, California out here, as most of the mass, heavily weighted at 55, way out there. And that would be Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and the inner planets. So the Bush-Gore election was the best example in 2000 of why every vote matters. Even in this indirect system, I just wanted to point that out because, you know, I want this to be practical, useful. The 2000 election basically panned out that on election night, it was pretty unclear, as it were used to this year, who won.

And the electoral votes on Florida in particular were still undeclure. decided. In fact, multiple news networks actually had early, you know, too early called Gore as the winner and they had to retract their statements in favor of Gore because the, you know, they tried to predict it as we're seeing everything goes now. But after the election day, the returns actually showed that Bush had won Florida by such a close margin. So they did end up, you know, calling it for Bush. But it was so close that by, state law, it's in the state law, required a recount. A month-long series of legal battles resulted after this.

And fundamentally, long story short, a 5-4, very close supreme, like the U.S., not the state, but the U.S. Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore ended the recount. They started a recount because it was so close, but there were so many hangs and snares. and hanging chads that they called it. They decided it was to, I think Justice Scalia said that it was too, it wasn't constitutional to consider votes that whose validity was in question like that. So kind of an interesting relation to today's, this year's election. And yeah, this video's coming out, if I hadn't mentioned it already. today as as of right now when I'm talking it's November 13th

so it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out but yeah I mean you know I don't want to sound partisan by even saying that offhand remark I just simply want to point out that it is interesting with the whole coronavirus

and how many mail-in ballots there were and all of that and how seemingly uncoordinated so many states seem to be with the Associated Press and all this but also simply that the electoral college hasn't yet voted

and we're actually going to talk about that in just a minute about the details there yeah the Bush to drive home the point of how important our votes really are. The recount got ended, but the close election was influenced by multiple things, avenues of voting, overseas and local mail-in ballots. The state ended up coming down to like

a thousand votes, and that was the, I guess that's the fundamental point of the 2000 election. And there was an infamous failure of like whole punch ballots. That's why I said hang chads. They were called Chad's when they're like hole punched, physically punched through paper ballots. And there was a lot of them that got stuck and didn't fully rip off. And when they ran them through machines, the results in the machines were misinterpreted. A lot of errors that went. In some of the counties in South Florida, there was a lot of claims of fraud. and they weren't a some of them weren't even able to even if they got the extended deadline to

continue recounts of elections they weren't even able to meet that deadline so the Florida Supreme Court Florida level state level allowed an extension of the deadlines but then it went up into I think Bush contested it and it went all the way up to the state sorry US the federal Supreme Court and they called it off. They overruled the Florida Supreme Court and completely called off the recounts, giving Bush the victory by 537 votes.

537 votes, a margin of 0.09%. At 0.009%. Not even a percent of a percent, less than that. And 537 votes meant that if you're one person who happens to know half of that 270 people and you swayed them you would have swayed the state popular vote which then went gives the Florida's at the time 27 electoral votes

now it's 29 but then those 27 votes gave Bush just enough to have one more than he needed at 271 electoral votes. It's pretty significant. So I want you guys to, you know, if anything, I want you to walk away, go to sleep with that insight. And I'm much less relevant, but very, I think, you know, interesting and insightful, I don't know, historically,

a fun little tidbit is that the reason it's on, the popular election is on two, is because back in the day, the 1700s, factors, some of them like weather still impact voters, but weather, harvests, and worship were a huge part of the culture and the determining implementers that would or would not get voters out. So voters often had long travel along, you know, ways. some of them would walk some a lot of them by horse

to get to the pole booths and the day of worship in Christianity is Sunday so having it on Tuesday would give them Monday to travel so they wouldn't have to forego their day of worship

they got their Monday night evening enjoyed themselves voted Tuesday and you could ride their ride to their county seat on Monday, vote on Tuesday, and all this before Market Day on Wednesday, and then go back home.

And the month of November was chosen because it nicely fits between harvest time in harsh winter weather, in which it could be especially bad to people traveling in horse and buggy. I thought that was pretty interesting. And here's a quick diagram to hopefully. clarify the relationship between the state legislature and governors that's the legislative branch and the executive branch of states and then the state courts is the judicial branch of the states and the electoral college you could see fits within the numbers of the state's jurisdiction I guess and then here we have

the president who's got influence on the executive office, armed forces, cabinet, some influence on the Supreme Court, you know, because they're all supposed to balance each other out. And then Congress, we have the vice president. Interestingly enough, I didn't know this, he's, any vice president is the head of the House of Senate, the Senate House.

And the, I don't think that's exactly what you call it. That's embarrassing, but... And then the House of Representatives in the Senate make up the Congress, and together that makes up the legislative branch. So the electoral college, you could see the arrows here. Is...

The enfranchised people, the voting people, normally 18 years older, with no felonies, votes for their president. And we'll get to that. But yeah, it's essentially the flow chart of power. The states make up how the people are going to vote and how that vote influences.

They, by the Constitution, are granted any way they please. But it's worked out to where there's a common custom for all states to use. That the states, by constitutional right, are granted the power to decide how the electors in the electoral college are chosen, who then vote directly for the president. All that's getting to the modern procedure. And you know what?

I might break this up and get to the history in the evolution of the electoral college in a second part. Because we still have a little bit to go. But here is, now that we got all that under our belts, We understand how the districts are in direct relation, how they themselves are determined based on the population, which is in direct relation to the number of electoral boats that each state gets, and how those votes are weighted. Now let's understand in how those votes can affect elections.

Let's understand. Let's get our feet on the ground. and go out and vote. It's election day. We go out and vote. The process of popular voting every year that's divisible by four is called the quadrennial.

And the quadrennial is just another way of saying that. Traditionally, the election day. It's the first Tuesday, like I said, after the first Monday in November, all the districts and the District of Columbia which is its own national territory

outside of any state's jurisdiction holds the power to choose where the people are going to go vote. They hold the popular election at physical locations usually, especially nowadays with cars. With the advent of cars, those fancy high-tech gadgets.

They're pretty accessible to voters. Now at these locations, all eligible citizens. Again, 18 without a felony, essentially, legal citizen. You vote for mostly one of two candidates. There's always a couple third-party candidates. This year it was Joe Jorgensen. Last 2016, it was Jill Stein and Gary Johnson. And when you get there, you're a lot of times, And I got this little nap here because I actually was pretty surprised to learn that not all states need any ID at all. But in Florida, there's a photo ID requested. What does that say about me?

And I'm just now actually reading that. Because they did ask. I didn't refuse, though. So that's interesting. It wasn't required, but it was requested. They either don't. So it looks like California, Oregon, Nevada. Arizona, I guess, no, New Mexico.

And Virginia, a lot of states in the Northeast, do not require any photo ID to vote. And you get there, you do or do not show them for your photo ID, and then you vote. And then as a caveat, you don't necessarily have to get there. It's been an increasing trend, and I got, I got a little graph here that shows how the percentage of early votes. So it doesn't necessarily mean it's been mailed in.

It's just meant that you have up to, I think, 50 days nowadays. You can go in and vote early. In 92, there's only about 7% early votes until 2000 through 2016. It went from 16 all the way up to 36%. And then of course, this year for obvious reasons, 2020 was 67% as of early November. That did early voting. And there used to be a...

I mean, in a lot of states, I actually didn't realize they still have 30... We'll cover my butt by saying roughly 20 states still require. require an excuse. I'm sure it's changed to less now that COVID has been out and about. But yeah, 30 states, something like that require, don't require an excuse. You go there early, you get in your vote and you don't have to wait in line, ideally, too long on election day. Now six states, no, three states, and I guess maybe earlier than 2020,

Oregon, Washington, Colorado, very progressive states, by the way. Also very interesting that Oregon decriminalized all drugs, all of them, conduct all early voting by mail. So no, even before 2020, I think. It seems like they didn't do any voting early at least at physical locations. The COVID-19 pandemic, of course. led many states to reduce the number of polling stations for the 2020 elections and relax requirements for both mail-in and early voting. And here's a picture. You can see Dropbox at a public library in California and then early voting in Rockville, Maryland there.

So we get there. We maybe show our ID, maybe get there a few days early, a few weeks. weeks early maybe they give us at least in Florida I got a paper ballot and you fill out you scribble in a completely the circle next to the candidate and the vice presidential candidate that you want to vote for what you might not have known before you know an hour ago this term is the popular vote popular is technical here meaning that the presidency is uh Arguably, literally America's, if not the world's, most important popularity contest. But seriously, the popular vote is the national popular vote is made up of our votes,

to the extent that you're not an elector watching this. Then, so that's in early November, and then in mid-December, I think we said after the first Wednesday, after the second Monday in December, there's the actual vote for president. And it's important to point out here, the United States is a constitutional federal republic, not a direct democracy. So if you have an impulse to get disgruntled

that your vote is not a direct vote, it was never meant to be, and it was never written anywhere that it was. The United States presidential and vice presidential elections is an elect, an indirect election in which the citizens, here's a technical definition for you now, who are registered to vote in one of the 50 states or D.C. as of, I think, well, I don't know how long that was,

but the electoral votes for D.C. have been in effect since the 60s. Cast ballots, not directly for those offices, but instead, despite the names of the candidates being what you, you bubbled next to for members of the electoral college. The electors then cast direct votes themselves a month later known as electoral votes separately for the president and separately for the vice president for historical reasons because there was a confusion before that and they had to add the 12th amendment. So the presidential candidate needs to win the absolute majority of votes, electoral vote,

sorry. We already went through essentially the I briefly mentioned at least the popular vote the winner of the plurality rather of each state gets all that state's electoral votes and the difference between plurality

and the word majority is something I had to clarify for myself is that the plurality is simply who has the most votes so if you have a race of four people any one of those four people might not get over 50% of the votes. They might only have, you know, the winner of most votes might only have 30%. And the others have like 20 and 15 and 15%.

That would lead to one of those people winning the plurality of that vote. And nobody in that case would win the majority. The majority is the 50% threshold. You have to have 50% of the vote plus one. you know, to exceed that threshold. And the presidential candidate for the electoral college to definitely determine who wins the presidency must give one presidential candidate

at least 270 votes, a majority. That's half plus one, 269 plus one, electoral votes. half of 538 plus one. And if not, if someone doesn't receive an absolute majority, and this is how we'll get into third party candidates or faithless electors, could affect actual elections, although they haven't in a couple hundred years. The absolute majority not being met,

the votes go into the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote for the president. So 50 votes are cast, and I don't think it's ever been the case that that situation hasn't elected a president, but they do have a contingency that we'll talk about in a little bit. If something, if the, for some reason, the vice president can't get elected

by an absolute majority of electoral votes, then the Senate is, the house that elects the vice president. I'm going to divide this up into two separate videos I have so much to talk about. We're going to discuss how the electors... I think this was the... This is sort of the hardest part for me to really nail down

and understand, because it varies from state to state, but most popular articles from news sites don't ever go into this detail of how the electors are actually chosen. They only mention that they're just chosen and whoever wins the popular votes wins the slate of electors, not really further clarifying what that even means. So I want to tell you guys exactly how that works. And what happens if the electors become faithless electors? That should pretty much outline how it works. Maybe next time I guess we'll get into the very very interesting history about the

electoral college in the context of colonies establishing their independence in the 1700s being the first ever colonies to win their independence from their empire. it deeply ingrained and defined the American psychology to this day, I would say. So electors are officially chosen. How are they officially chosen? Although the electors were initially supposed to be chosen directly by state legislatures, to be independent voters like we mentioned before, We also mentioned that major parties quickly emerged not too long after George Washington's best attempt

although he tried desperately to set an example for how to be a nonpartisan leader. He famously didn't take sides with any particular party and he was the first and last president to do that. It became clear that only after his... few elections. The popular vote was gaining traction and it wasn't going to be reversed. Initially it didn't happen though. There wasn't a need for it because it wasn't outlined in the Constitution, but people were directly, you know, voting for other matters on local and state levels and county levels and I guess it sort of, you know, worked its way into the custom and tradition of things. Certain states picked it up and other states ran with it and before long within

30, 40 so years all all the states were tallying their popular votes even if initially they didn't actually mean anything. But once they did the electors that were voted in, the more people showed up to the polls to add their, you know, essentially their opinion to fill out an opinion poll for the presidency because it didn't technically mean anything. The electors and other state officials who were in charge of electing the electors recognized they themselves were, of course, partaking and joining the, uh, joining the parties as they were emerging you know political ideologies were gaining strength and

they were dividing they were bifurcating and political factions were you know if you can't beat them join them when you're a lone wolf among among packs of wolves you it is in your favor and advantage to join and cooperate with others and And so the political system just emergently became dependent on parties. And the electors initially meant to be these independent free-thinking voters were eventually, you know, influenced and, of course, they were elected by state officials who themselves have agendas and who themselves were a part of particular parties. and the states recognizing slowly that they had

you know only a certain amount of electoral votes to influence the election with so it's inevitable you can see where I'm going with this it's inevitable that eventually all the electors were going to pledge one way or another and say listen if the state vote wins if the state popularly votes all the citizens vote for a particular candidate,

let's just say that all of us electors are going to pledge to vote for that particular candidate. You might wonder if there's two parties, how did they make sure that all the electors were voting on the same side? Well, they decided,

and now it's law, you know, and I was kind of too lazy to look up the law for all 50 states, so I just looked it up. for Florida. In the Florida's fancy website,

it's actually terrible, it looks like it hasn't been updated since 1996. But it outlines that the presidential and vice presidential ticket has an associated slate

and this is the phrase here that they use. Slate of potential electors in 29 in Florida, for example, that are chosen by the respective state elective state executive committees for each political party. So a separate committee for Republicans and Democrats.

Two separate committees, they choose two separate sets of 29 people. Democratic committee gets together whether, you know, other, weather, weather, rain or shine, at a convention or some other way of networking. And they vote for 29 people who fundamentally they know will tow the party line and vote for their candidate. And the Republicans do the same. And by September 1st of the election year, so 2020, for instance, this year, they have to submit their list. That's, you know, two months before the popular vote, two of their 29 qualified electors to the Florida legislature, some elective office essentially.

And the governor is going to verify that those people qualify, that they're not part of political office. And interestingly, again, I haven't done too much research, and I'm sure it's the same on the Republican side, but Bill Clinton was one of the electors for Connecticut, whatever his state is. in 2016. So you know who he voted for,

Trump for sure. And this year, one of the Democratic electors, which is a null point because Florida didn't go Democratic. But for Florida, one of the Democratic electors

was actually Joe Biden's brother, which is pretty interesting. So, you know, there's nothing illegal there. if the whole state, and it was fairly close, it wasn't crazy close, but if we would have voted in Florida for, popularly for Biden, Joe Biden's brother would have been, by Florida mandate, officially recognized and certified as a one of Florida's 29 electors. You know, I definitely guaranteed vote for jail.

So by September 1st, these separate, 29 people, separate lists of 29 Republican electors pledged to vote for the Republican Party and 29 Democratic electors are submitted and verified, you know, before the November election takes place. Then on Election Day, the candidates whose bubble we scribbled in get our vote for their associated electors. When the statewide popular vote comes in, the governor of the state and the state, and at least, you know, again, this is how it works in Florida,

then officially certifies the winners previously submitted in September. And that becomes Florida's slate of electors chosen officially, as in the Constitution through the legislature. I think even though the governor is the executive branch, I think either the term legislature covers both those branches or, you know, by way of law. state constitution the legislature just gives

the governor of the power to make that decision for them and this is how the winner of the plurality like we said they don't have to win the majority of popular votes within the state but the plurality of the vote so even if

you know for instance this year Trump won Florida so even if Trump got 49% Biden got 409% Biden got 47. Neither of them hit the 50% majority, but they won the plurality. They would get that states, all of them, mind you.

That's the important part, I guess. Electoral votes. And it's from this point in December that the electors are now granted the state authority as outlined in the Constitution to directly vote for the president in vice presidential candidates to the extent that either their state doesn't penalize them

for being a faithfulist elector or they don't die before then. And yet we could see here the 2016 Florida statutes says the removal of a county executive committee member for violation of oath if the essentially I think Florida will remove them

from office if they violated their oath. I don't see faithless elector, so maybe that's a, I think that might be a way, yeah, of defining that if you essentially pledge a vote, what you're going to be doing according to Florida statutes, Florida law is legally binding yourself to guarantee that you vote for the winner of the popular vote. otherwise Florida, you know, wouldn't elect you.

So some states don't do that. Some states do. And here we have in the Title IX, Chapter 103, 103.111. Electors of president and vice president, known as presidential electors, shall be elected. Here's the Florida statute now for those of you just listening. On the first Tuesday after the first Monday and November of each year, in which the year is a multiple of four, votes cast for the actual candidates for president and vice president

shall be counted as votes cast for the presidential electors supporting such candidates. The Department of State shall certify as elected the presidential electors of the candidates for the president and vice president who receive the highest number of votes, being the plurality. and specifically it says here in 103.0211

again that's not a radio station that's the Florida chapter and I guess paragraph or something in the Florida statute the governor the governor shall nominate the presidential election electors of each political party

the state executive committee of each political parties shall by resolution recommend candidates for presidential electors and deliver a certified copy to the governor by September 1st. And then the governor shall nominate only the electors recommended by the state executive committee. So the winning candidate needs a majority of electoral votes to win the presidency. And in each of those 48 states, or 48 out of the 50 in D.C., the winner of the plurality, just like we've been saying, receives all that state's electoral votes.

Now, the two that are oddballs are Maine and Nebraska, and they haven't always been this way. They actually just, within the last, like, 50 years or so, changed to vote their electoral votes by district. So the winner of the plurality of the state gets their two senatorial representative votes, but the other, based on the number of House of Representatives, or number of districts in Maine and Nebraska are given to the winners of those districts.

With Maine and Nebraska, they're both like three or four votes, something like that. So not a whole lot, but because they do this, this method, they do get a lot more attention by the presidents or the candidates, rather. But the faithless electors is probably the most interesting part of all this. There is no federal law or constitutional provision requiring electors to vote for the party that nominated them. Remember, you know, remember I told you that they were initially intended to be individuals of good conscience, good faith, and intelligent, and, autonomous, independent of partisanship, electing the best candidate for the job.

But over the years, but, you know, that famous but, a number of electors have actually voted against the instructions of the voters. In 2004 is a really minor example, but it was kind of funny. A Minnesota elector nominated by the Democratic. Democratic Party actually cast a pallet for John Kerry's vice presidential running mate John Edwards

Apparently, apparently accidentally, but I don't know how you mess that you got that's literally a case of you had one job Because remember these these electors are elected to do this one job and that's it every four years And they're not you know I don't know if there's any inhibition on our prohibitions on them being able to do it more than once but you know in multiple presidential elections but they certainly have one job some states have passed laws that require electors to be to vote as pledged most of these laws either impose a fine and if you're politically connected you're a

The fine's usually about $1,000. It's obviously nothing severe. It's just a slap on the wrist. To finish that trend of thought, if you're politically connected, you're probably pretty well off. I don't know many politicians who are, you know, buddy, buddy enough,

or heavily immersed party members who, you know, go to state conventions or are well-known enough to be elected as electors. And there's a, thousand dollar fine there or some states actually have you know avoided the lack of severity of a minimal thousand dollar fine by disqualifying the elector if they violate their boat and completely replacing them some go further though Oklahoma does the thousand dollar penalty North Carolina does five hundred dollars

The faithless electors is deemed to have resigned and a replacement is appointed in North Carolina. So guaranteed vote if you win that popular vote. Popular vote in that state. In South Carolina, I think this might be the, yeah, South Carolina and New Mexico, don't play around though. An elector who violates his or her pledge is subject to criminal penalties. And in New Mexico, it's a four. degree felony. In July 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it is constitutional for states

to enact this type of law. So it's not written into the Constitution itself that, you know, faithless electors, because again, it was never intended to have faith towards one party or another, simply faith of good judgment, I suppose. but it was written into the Constitution that the manner in which the electors are chosen is entirely up to the state legislatures. That's exactly how it's worded. So there have been many cases

where the electors who went faithless and were penalized in one way or another or just simply removed and replaced fought legally, fought for a legitimate claim to be able to validate, their vote, even if it was faithless. And the Supreme Court held that it is, in fact,

constitutional for these states to enact laws to penalize these faithless electors. The states with the laws that attempt to bind the votes of the presidential electors are in this list right here. Alabama and Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, which is actually a name of a local American Indian tribe, by the way. Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina,

Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, and then Vermont. Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. So quite a few states. But 18 states do not have provisions specifically addressing this behavior. This is probably the most valid point of current contention among those electoral college, against the electoral college,

is that these guys can be free radicals in the election. And I think the most interesting aspect I found out about this is their ability to conspire with each other to swing a vote. Because remember you need, there's only 538 electors, electoral votes. You do need a majority. So if you have a huge close to a majority voting for both candidates,

and then you have like, you know, 20 electors that might conspire, they could prevent that, you know, the potentially winning candidate otherwise, from getting the majority, hitting that 50 plus 1% threshold of 270, and thereby pushing the election into the House of Representatives. Something similar to this actually happened in the 1824 election. The two-party system hadn't yet dominated the national scenes, so that didn't really happen until after the Civil War, it turns out, So in addition to the main two candidates, Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, there were two fairly popular third and fourth place candidates.

So unlike the third party candidates today that, you know, get like a fraction of a percent of the national vote, rarely get any electoral votes. These guys actually had a pretty good chunk of both. So they effectively prevented a majority of election. the majority election of Jackson or Adams, but it turns out Jackson was favored. He had almost 40,000 more votes than Adams on the popular level, obviously. And having a decent electoral vote lead of 99 to Adams is 84. And this is 1824, remember, so we didn't have a lot of states. there certainly weren't 435 house seats back then

nowhere near 538 electoral votes so Jackson with his 99 votes missed the required majority by 32 he needed 131 to have the majority so Clay and who's the other guy I guess I didn't write him down but Clay and I forgot the other guy's name

but the third and fourth leading candidates had electors vote for them and they prevented Adams or Jackson from winning the majority vote. The interesting part here gets interesting because famously the fourth place candidate Henry Clay had been the very, very influential, very well-connected speaker of the House at the time. and he was mysteriously appointed Adams's secretary of state after the House voted Adams in once the, due to the, you know, again, lack of the majority vote going to any of the candidates. They went to the House of Representatives where each of the, oh, I forget how many states, but, you know, 30, maybe some odd states, 20, 30, had one vote. And so you needed a majority vote, and somehow Clay later on became the recipient of a high-status position in Adams' cabinet once Adams won. And Jackson understandably claimed corruption, but he ended up winning the next race four years later. There have been only a combined total of 155 instances in pretty much 200 years of presidential.

elections. So that's not many. That's an average of, you know, only a couple of year. Not nearly enough for them to actually have any say and affect the outcome. But this is the closest I'll get to, you know, talking about contemporary stuff. It's worth pointing out that in 2016 or 2016 was the first election in over 100 years in which multiple elections, electors worked to alter the result of the election. In 2016, 10 members of the Electoral College, 10 of the 538, so not very significant, but enough to be interesting.

There had never been that many defect before. They conspired to vote for a candidate different from the one for whom they were pledged. These faithless electors were part of actual movement dubbed by two of them Michael Baca of Colorado and Brett Chaffalo of Washington dubbed the Hamilton electors

because they elected they advocated voting their conscience as Hamilton and Madison the writers of the Federalist papers specifically number 68 had advocated

voting your conscience to prevent the election of someone they viewed as unfurial fit for the presidency. And out of the 10, three were immediately discarded based on laws that said, you know, faith, faithless elector laws, said, you need to vote or else we're going to replace you. Three got replaced. Out of the remaining seven, five, interestingly enough, were pledged to Clinton.

One voted for Bernie Sanders. Three voted for Colin Powell. One voted for Faith. Spotted Eagle in Washington. four of those five defectors were in Washington so that's you know they were grouped together by state there and two of the seven were pledged to Trump and one both of them were for Texas

one voted for Ron Paul and the other for John Kesh or Kasek the movement initially its goal was to find 37 Republican electors willing to vote for someone other than Trump which is interesting how it panned out that out of the seven, five of them weren't for Trump. They were for Clinton and they, you know, voted for someone else. So, in a way, it actually helped Trump, interestingly. They would have needed 37 votes, essentially.

The point was to prevent Trump, deny him the majority election. And vote caused this contingent election. in the House of Representatives. Faithless elector laws, the Washington delegates were fined $1,000 each. And that's where the 12th Amendment came in. It requires the House of Representatives to go into session immediately to vote for the president. If no candidate or president for president or vice president receives a major majority. In this event, the House Representatives is limited to choosing from among the three candidates

who receive the most electoral votes for president. Each state delegation, this in a real way, could lead to a third-party candidate winning. I guess not a very practical way, though. They vote on block, each delegation, having a single vote. D.C. doesn't get a vote in that circumstance. A candidate must receive an absolute majority, 26 votes, you know, one state, one vote,

in order to win the candidate. and become president-elect. And additionally, delegates from at least two-thirds of all the states must be president or present, present, for the voting to take place. And the House continues balloting until it elects a president. So this has happened only twice in 1801 and in 1825, as we said. And then in 1837, the vice president went,

to the Senate. In that instance, the Senate adopted an alphabetical roll call and voted aloud. And now in the event of, that's never happened, but a rare event of the deadlock. Section 3 of the 12th Amendment, a 20th Amendment specifies if the House of Representatives has not chosen a president-elect in time for the inauguration by January 20th, then the vice-president-elect becomes acting president until the House. selects and the speaker of the house becomes president if the vice or president is not chosen. So the president is picked by the states as opposed to the districts or cities and even the nationwide popular vote and it's always been this way. It's never purported to be the ultimate

solution just the best compromise and we'll get into the deeper fundamental you know colonial times, more historical reasons, I guess, to sound less incompetent. In part two, the fact that states get electoral votes based on population instead of just getting one vote per state was really fundamentally a compromise to get the more populous states to accept the Constitution. Pennsylvania delegate, the famous Benjamin Franklin, might be a good anecdote for us to wrap this up on. He summed up the disagreement after walking out of the Continental Congress, saying if proportional representation does take place, the small states contend that their liberties will be in danger. if an equality of votes is to be put in place, the large states will say their money will be in danger. That was settled with the establishment of the bicameral houses in the Congress,

and having the electoral college was designed based on the House, with each state having a number of electoral votes based on their number of U.S. representatives plus their two senators. So we'll get into a lot more of the understanding and really justification because I want to try to make a case for what already exists and I don't see a strong case for the opposite but it isn't clear enough to just be apparent and I think there's a lot

there's a lot of interesting things to be said about the the history and the background and the reasoning that went into a system that was created in a world of empires and still exists and still works in many ways today. Interestingly, it's called a short ballot when you don't have the elector's names on it and just the president that they represent names on it. Well, actually, might be at the end. There's a story often told that upon exiting the constitutional convention, This was what I thought I was reading a second ago.

Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens, asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was, a republic, if you can keep it. This meant that democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people. They're also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued existence. And that's the most positive that I can possibly end this on.

I think we got that. I think there's a lot of work to be done. There's corruption everywhere. But so far we're doing all right. It's up to us to be informed and we have no excuse in this age of mass communication, these vast bandwidths of information at our fingertips.

So I hope you guys got something out of this. I just hope you got revivified a little bit and not discouraged. Thanks for watching guys. We'll see you next time.