sundin13 said:
JustcallmeRiff said:
Travel back with me to the election of 2004 where incumbent President George W bush defeated Democrat John Kerry. Across the country Bush received about 3 million more votes than John Kerry ,of course the popular vote does not matter in u.s. presidential elections because of the Electoral College. This is a strange and anachronistic feature of our presidential elections. Every state is allotted electorial votes based on Congressional representation, so every state has two senators so they get to electoral votes and from there it's decided by population like California has 55 electoral votes where Montana has 3. Most states allot their electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes in that state. A candidate needs a total of 270 electoral votes to win but might win some states by a large margin and lose others very narrowly it is possible to win the popular vote in the country but lose the election example Bush V Gore. If you're thinking all of this sounds bananas, I agree. But one of the very few even arguably upsides to the electorial college is it makes the u.s. presidential elections extremely hard to rig, because we're not actually having one election we're having 51 each governed by the separate states but in fact it's even more complicated than that because in every state counties and townships have their own elections with their own independent oversight so we're having thousands of Elections. This massively decentralized system protects against widespread fraud. Now none of this is to say our elections are perfect, voter suppression has been the Hallmark of US voting and suppression efforts have disproportionately targeted systemically disadvantaged voters. The poor initially and then when the franchise was extended women and people of color. Even today there are many political strategies for suppressing voters. Voter suppression is real but is not the same thing as widespread voter fraud which is not. In Most states observers from both major political parties monitor polling places to prevent fraud and fraud among voters is very rare. In the past 14 years that it there has been 31 substantiated cases of in-person voter fraud and 36 people have been killed by lightning strikes in this year alone. So the u.s. presidential election will not be rigged. Despite one of the major party presidential candidates is loudly and consistently claiming the election will be rigged. That there will be widespread voter fraud that people may vote 10 times that undocumented immigrants will vote and on and on. These are all simply lie's, they are not substantiated in any way and normalizing those conspiracies theories frankly scares the crap out of me. Because it means fewer Americans will trust our elections even when they are free and fair. I guess I understand fear mongering is part of of US politics but undermining the legitimacy of our political institutions without cause isn't. Hearing that unfounded rhetoric from a presidential candidate is a new and disturbing development in American political discourse. So I want to be very clear your vote will count the election will not be rigged if you're fortunate enough to be an eligible voter in the United States make your voice heard. |
Did you just type out an entire vlogbrothers video?
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NO. not the the entire video.
