DJ Trump, The President of the United States?

            Today InkingDifference presents its views on the recent US presidential election, its electoral college system and its role in the presidential election. We, on behalf of team InkingDifference, would like to congratulate Donald John Trump on his triumph over becoming the 45^th POTUS.

           

            Trump has won the US presidency in a shocking political upset, backing his prediction that an underground movement and a series of victories in key states would catch pollsters and pundits by surprise. He has also vowed to more strictly control immigration into the country, at various times vowing to block Muslims from entering the country, and promised to re-examine a host of foreign military alliances to ensure that American taxpayers aren’t footing too much of the cost of fighting terrorism overseas. During his speech to supporters after winning the election, Trump pledged to get along with nations that want to get along with the United States.

President-elect Donald Trump with President Obama

Electoral college system of USA

            With Trump as the new President-elect, certain sections of people in America have been looking for a way to avoid Trump Presidency. But is it possible to avoid the winning candidate to become the President? How could Hillary Clinton still win the Presidency? Isn’t it their decision to make him sit in the hot seat?

            Well, in order to understand a Clinton-win scenario, we have to understand the Electoral College. In a nutshell, the President is not actually elected on Election day by the voters. In fact, the President is elected by an influential group called the “electoral college”. Each state gets a certain number of electors, indirectly related to the size of their population. The electors’ only job is to cast their vote based on their state’s popular vote, thereby acting as an election representative. For example, California, the most populous state, has 55 electors, which are all expected go to Hillary Clinton when they officially vote on December 19th. The US uses such an indirect system of voting because in early 1700s counting the votes on the same day was impossible at that time. Instead, each town or city would select a representative to travel to the nation’s capital, and let them know how they had voted.

            In short, the Founding Fathers of America didn’t seem to trust direct democracy, but didn’t want to make it seem like they were the ones choosing the Presidency, alone. Now this system has worked so far, in fact, so well, that there is NO federal law requiring electors to vote for their state’s preferred candidate. 21 states have no rules on the issue whatsoever. An elector can vote for another candidate or refuse to vote altogether. Moreover, in the other 29 states, plus Washington DC, which do require the elector to vote alongside the population, they still don’t really have to, because the punishment for doing so varies from state to state, but is generally a small fine.

            Only a few states actually cancel the vote. Electors who do this are called ‘faithless’, and in the history of the United States, there have been 157 of them. In nearly half of those cases, electors didn’t vote for the preferred candidate because the candidate had died before the vote. In 3 cases, electors have refused to vote altogether. The rest of the time, the vote was changed based on political or personal reasons. To date, faithless electors have not influenced the outcome of an election. The last faithless elector voted in the 2004 election in Minnesota. Rather than casting their vote for “John Kerry”, the unknown elector cast their vote for Kerry’s VP, John Edwards, and also misspelled Edward’s name as “Ewards”.

            However, this year, the chances of actually overturning Trump’s majority are close to impossible, and would require 42 faithless electors. Clinton has already conceded; Trump has begun his transition into the White House. Chances of avoiding a winning candidate to become a president is very less. So, the people should accept the outcome and continue to have faith in democracy. 

Source: seeker daily (YT channel)