New Court Decision Imperative

Just as a recent court decision has decided reapportionment in 2011 in Wisconsin was discriminatory against Democratic voters, the Electoral College ought to be ruled unconstitutional.  The Electoral College violates the One Person One Vote doctrine because swing state voters have vastly more power than non-swing state voters do.  The Electoral College also violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment, not treating all voters equally.  Nations around the world have adopted many parts of the US constitution, but no one has ever adopted anything like the Electoral College.  What we call the "popular vote", is "the vote" in other countries.  Supreme Court Justice Kennedy looks like a possible swing vote in favor of ending gerrymandering as we know it, and may well vote to abolish the slave era Electoral College as un-constitution according to the amendments passed after the Civil War.  A case in favor of the popular vote winner and against the Electoral College could emerge from the DC appellate court where snubbed Supreme Court Justice Nominee Merrick Garland presides.  However, a 4-4 Supreme Court tie would then let the Appellate Court decision stand.  Then Hillary Clinton would be the presidential winner.  Her 3% margin of victory is much greater than the 1960, 1968, 1976 and 2000 margins.

Past Rigged Elections

In 1876, Democratic President Tilden won the popular vote by about 3% and then cheated out of office in favor of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by the Electoral College.  Rachel Maddow gave an account of the affair on her show this week.  Rachel pointed out that three states offered competing slates for the Electoral College vote, Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina.  Hayes made a deal to pull federal troops out of the South and abandon all the Southern black elected officials and governors to the tender mercies of the KKK.  Reconstruction was over, and the path to Jim Crow was wide open.  Also on MSNBC Monday night, it was stated that Podesta was told the vote in Michigan was shown to match the exit polls in paper ballot optical scanner areas, but was 7% in favor of Trump in electronic voting machine areas.  This is similar to the 6% shift in the 2004 election where swing states dominated by electronic voting without a paper ballot audit trail showed a shift from the 3% Kerry national win in exit polls to the 3% Bush win.  Numerous voter suppression and counting discrepancies county by county were documented in a 62 page report by Congressman John Conyers on the Ohio 2004 vote.  Conyers, a black progressive from Detroit, was the only elected official ever endorsed by Martin Luther King, jr.  Nearly all the swing states in 2004 were going to Kerry in the exit polls, but went to Bush in the reported vote.  The one swing state with a paper ballot trail and optical scanner counting machines, Wisconsin, went to Kerry by the exact same margin in both exit polls and reported vote of 0.4%.  Similar stories of October surprises and/or rigged elections pertain to the elections of 1960, 1968, 1980, 2000, 2004, and 2016.  Electronic voting analysts have stated that the Obama victories were understated, but the margins were too big to make a difference in the outcome.

Electoral College Designed to Benefit Slave States

Three-Fifths Compromise (from Wiki)

"The Three-Fifths Compromise was a compromise reached between delegates from southern states and those from northern states during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention. The debate was over whether, and if so, how, slaves would be counted when determining a state's total population for legislative representation and taxing purposes. The issue was important, as this population number would then be used to determine the number of seats that the state would have in the United States House of Representatives for the next ten years. The effect was to give the southern states a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than if slaves had been ignored, but fewer than if slaves and free persons had been counted equally, allowing the slaveholder interests to largely dominate the government of the United States until 1861.^[1] The compromise was proposed by delegates James Wilson and Roger Sherman."

Justice Becomes New Law

One Man One Vote (from Wiki)

"The phrase was used in this form in an important legal ruling in the United States related to voting rights; applying the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution, the Supreme Court majority opinion in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) ruled that state legislatures needed to redistrict in order to have congressional districts with roughly equal represented populations. In addition, the court ruled that both houses of state legislatures needed to have representation based on districts containing roughly equal populations, with redistricting as needed after censuses.^[1]"

Equal Protection Clause (from Wiki)

"The Equal Protection Clause is part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction "the equal protection of the laws".

"A primary motivation for this clause was to validate the equality provisions contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed that all people would have rights equal to those of all citizens. As a whole, the Fourteenth Amendment marked a large shift in American constitutionalism, by applying substantially more constitutional restrictions against the states than had applied before the Civil War.

"The meaning of the Equal Protection Clause has been the subject of much debate, and inspired the well-known phrase "Equal Justice Under Law". This clause was the basis for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court decision that helped to dismantle racial segregation, and the basis for many other decisions rejecting discrimination against people belonging to various groups.

"The Equal Protection Clause itself applies only to state and local governments. However, the Supreme Court held in Bolling v. Sharpe (1954) that equal protection requirements apply to the federal government through the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment."

Electoral College is 'vestige' of slavery, say some Constitutional scholars

By Kamela Kelkar  PBS Newshour  November 6, 2016

"The ability of states to make voting more difficult is directly tied to the legacy of slavery,"  Juan Perea, a law Professor of Loyola University Chicago said.  "And that ability to make voting more difficult is usually used to disenfranchise people of color."

"It's embarrassing," said Paul Finkelman, visiting law professor at University of Saskatchewan in Canada. "I think if most Americans knew what the origins of the Electoral College are, they would be disgusted."

Rigging the Election

When Trump started repeatedly saying the Election was Rigged, the rigging by forces who wanted him to be elected president was already well underway.  Hillary had been demonized and compared to Satan since 1992, and Bill's referring to the concept of a co-presidency alarmed many on the right who expected her to bake cookies instead.  Putting her in charge of health care exposed her to constant vilification on the right.  After serving as Secretary of State under Obama, her approval rating soared to 68% and the right knew they had to bring that down.  Benghazi hearings, eight of them, were started as Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted on camera, in order to pull her ratings down.  Her eleven-hour testimony in the final set of hearings lead to the committee chairman conceding they had found nothing on her.  However, the fishing expedition did lead to discovery of the private email account she used for unclassified discussion, as recommended to her by Colin Powell, who had done the same.  Nevertheless, she used a private server in her home.  When all this was discovered, she knew the right wing would use anything to vilify her.  She knew from long experience about the vast right wing conspiracy to destroy her politically.  Therefore, she released the work emails and desperately tried to keep the personal emails confidential, expecting they would be unfairly used against her by her opponents.  She expected violations of her constitutional rights not unlike the Russian hackers who hacked campaign emails in an operation reminiscent of the Watergate situation that brought down the Nixon presidency in the seventies.  This time we still do not know how much Trump operatives Richard Stone and Steve Bannon were working with the Russians.  Putin was overjoyed when he heard Trump had won.  We do know Rudy Giuliani was boasting something was coming up just before Richard Comey threw the election to Trump by unethically bringing up unfounded charges against Clinton eleven days before the election.  Richard Comey, FBI Director, violated the Hatch Act according to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid.  He knew better than to bring up unfounded charges sixty days before an election, so he clearly intentionally sabotaged the Clinton campaign.  The evidence for this is the college-educated women Republicans in places like the Philadelphia suburbs suddenly switched back to Trump when they were going to vote for Hillary after the "Access Hollywood" tape was released.  Trump went from 81% support among Republicans to 86% support among Republicans before and after the Comey political assassination.  Hillary, the most honest Senator Senator Tom Harkin had ever served with, had been smeared by the vast right wing conspiracy into the more dishonest candidate.  Politifact, which judges campaign statements on their honesty, rated Trump 72% dishonest, the all time record worst for any presidential campaign, and Hillary was rated 27% dishonest and Sanders was rated 28% dishonest, the most honest in 2016 compared to all the Republicans and Trump.  In the rural areas of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, Trump outperformed Romney by about 12%.  Whether that can be explained or that is an indication of vote rigging had yet to be decided.  The recount may not be enough to prove the case one way or another when there is no audit trail on electronic voting machines, but will help focus attention on major discrepancies between the presidential results and other races down ballot and other ways of discovering cheating. Three other important ways Republican legislatures, governors, and courts have stacked the deck against Democrats are 1) suppression of the vote.  Suppression includes closing voting dates and locations, requiring voter IDs that blocked hundreds of thousands of older and younger voters from voting in each of five key swing states, and allocating more voting machines in white districts compared to black districts by a factor of two to one or worse. 2) Destroying public unions and creating "right to work for less" states leading to lesser Democratic get out the vote efforts. 3) Allowing unlimited private funds thanks to the Supreme Court decision in "Citizens United" to advertise in elections and ballooning those employed in the ground operation from 680 under Romney to the 3000 claimed by Reince Priebus and the Republican National Committee.  These all contributed greatly to Trump and the Senate.  In all 34 states voting for the US Senate, the presidential and Senate races went to the same party.

Recent 22 page history of 2004 documents, a situation much like the 2016 election:

https://www.academia.edu/s/a93f3df0f9/election-stealing-2004-and-2000doc