2020 US election - It Came from Washington DC

[Labster]

So... Just looked at the not-yet-obvious states - all five of them.

The incumbent has to take all of them to be re-elected. He's leading in four of them. The challenger needs six more electoral College votes to win, which is how many are up for grabs in the one state where he's leading.

Assuming, of curse, that all of the Electoral College delegates vote the way they're instructed to by their states' voters. If the current projections are accurate and it comes down to being one elector away from a tie, and that one elector ignores his or her instructions and votes for the other guy, then you've got a deadlock. You won't know the Presidential results until January 6. (Honestly, it's as if your Founding Fathers purposefully designed a system that's inherently broken. Are you sure you don't want to switch to the Parliamentary system, or a system of direct election of the head of government? All it would take is a Constitutional Convention.)

As for your Senate... the numbers are evenly split (since the independents caucus with the Dems), with four seats still not announced. All four are in states that are currently leaning toward the GOP in the Presidential election.

The Founders feared "the imprudence of (direct) democracy" because they feared it would be even rifer with the potential for fraud. It's also why we have a bicameral legislature, and electors are chosen after assessing the popular votes.

The system of American government is designed, at the legislative level, to pass through at least two different checkpoints before it's signed off on, and if a discrepancy is detected between either level, it was intended to let this serve as a political tripwire to root out potential abuses so they can be corrected.

I agree it's still flawed, but I consider not as bad as some of the potential alternatives.

But it didn't achieve the goal of preventing abuses.  Look at the Tilden v. Hayes election in 1876.  States used their powers to create enough electoral votes to ensure Hayes would be elected with unlikely support in the South.  Then a commission that wasn't described in the constitution was created to resolve the issues of multiple state officials certifying different results.  This commission made a party-line vote, even with one-third being members of the Supreme Court, and essentially made a corrupt bargain that Hayes would get the presidency in exchange for the end of Reconstruction in the South.

In 2000, the Supreme Court intervened to end the recount in Florida.  Had it continued, Al Gore would have been elected President.  But the electoral college played no process in ensuring abuses were checked -- in fact, it allowed the abuse to happen.

Functionally, it's just another system that can be gamed, exploited, and corrupted.  The Electoral College does not meet the design goal of preventing abuse, and never has.  It did meet the design goal of upholding slavery for a long time, and it continues to empower the agrarian South.

And it looks like the history of a partisan Supreme Court goes back pretty far.  Dred Scott v. Sandford was decided on a 7-2 party line vote.  Democratic justices voted that blacks could not be citizens, Whig justices voted in favor of Dred Scott's freedom.