Hillary clinton kan fortfarande bli president
In almost any other democracy, Hillary Clinton would be president today. She won the popular vote but still lost the election. So what happened?
2016 Election Forecast
The Electoral College is a uniquely American process enshrined in Art. II, Sec. I of the U. Constitution through which the President and Vice President are elected. Each of the 50 states and the District of Colombia , has as many electors as it has Representatives and Senators in the Congress. There is a total of votes, and at least are needed to win the presidency. This year Clinton won electoral votes while Donald Trump won , according to the most recent figures.
Illinois has 18 Representatives, and like all states has two senators. California has two senators and 53 Representatives for a total of 55 electoral votes, the most in the nation. So on and so forth for all states. All states, except Nebraska and Maine, have a winner-take-all system, which means whoever wins the popular vote gets to keep all the electoral votes. Get it?
The Democratic presidential nomination isn't set yet. Could Hillary Clinton replace Biden?
Well, back in , a bunch of men met in Philadelphia for a constitutional convention to try and fix the weak central government that was in place at that time. Because the United States is a republic, they had to come up with a way to elect a president, and they considered three alternatives on how to accomplish that. The first proposal was to have the Congress choose the president but this suggestion was quickly thrown out.
Some of the conventioneers felt this method was too divisive and would leave the system open to corruption, interference from foreign governments and other bad behavior.
In other words, what would pass as normal stuff these days. The second idea, which was also rejected, was to have state legislatures select the president. The biggest drawback to this idea was the fear that a president would be so indebted to state legislatures at the expense of the federal authority, it would undermine the whole system. Finally, they settled on indirect election of the president.
Thus the Electoral College was born.
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It should be noted that this was not an original idea in itself and it can be traced back to the Roman Senate of which many of the men present at the convention had a deep admiration for. It seems that the founders of the Republic in setting up the process had not counted on one thing: the emergence of political parties. As the parties grew, their influence started to expand beyond state lines.
Party bosses became powerful enough to handpick electors who surprise, surprise voted for candidates the party bosses not the people wanted. Things came to a head in the presidential elections of when the two candidates, Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson, tied in electoral votes. The tie was eventually broken by the House of Representatives on the thirty-sixth ballot.
To resolve this crisis and to make sure nothing like it ever happened again, Congress passed the 12th Amendment in that required separate votes for President and Vice President. But that is how the system is set up, and it all comes down to local balloting. Electoral votes are awarded not on a national level but state by state. If you look at the map of the presidential election, you will see the map is almost all red because Donald Trump won with a disproportionately larger geographical spread.
Thus, by taking more states, he captured the election. Hillary carried states with some of the highest populations, like California and New York, while Trump won in places with smaller populations, as in most of the country between Montana and Florida. It seems to be happening more frequently these past few elections.