You Can't Vote for The President

As an American citizen, you do not have a right to vote for the President of the United States.

If you don’t believe me, ask the five right-wingers of the Supreme Court in 2000, who decided the infamous Bush v. Gore case. 

In their decision, Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas argued that, “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”

So what’s the rationale for this?

Well, unlike U.S. Representatives and Senators, the President of the United States is not directly elected by the people, and instead is elected by the Electoral College.

And while the Constitution doesn’t give Americans the right to vote for the President, it does give the states the power decide how their electoral votes are divvied up.

Currently, whoever wins the majority of votes in a state wins all of that state’s electoral votes, except in two of the fifty states. But, now that the Republican Party has been hijacked by the Billionaire Class, the party is taking unprecedented steps to abuse the Electoral College, and our current voting system.

In the first election after the Citizens United decision, hundreds of millions of dollars in outside spending by billionaires like the Koch Brothers put Republicans in control of traditionally blue states that they'd targeted for years, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan.

Once Republicans got charge of the state legislatures, they gerrymandered congressional districts to increase the number of safe Republican seats and get rid of safe Democratic seats. That's the main reason why House Democratic candidates received more than a million votes more than House Republican candidates around the nation last November, yet Republicans still hold onto control in the House of Representatives.

Republicans are now using these gerrymandered states to push their boldest step yet to rig the next presidential election, and have their eyes currently set on Michigan.

Instead of a winner-take-all system, Republicans want Michigan's Electoral College votes doled out based on which presidential candidate won each congressional district, with an extra two votes going to the state's popular vote winner. Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are considering similar changes. And, Republican party officials like current RNC Chair Reince Priebus have thrown their support behind the election-rigging idea.

So just how big of an advantage would Republicans have if these election-rigging changes went through? Well consider this: President Obama swept the six main battleground states of Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin last election. And since it's a winner-take-all system, the President got all of these battleground states’ 106 Electoral College votes, and Romney got zero.

But if this new election-rigging scheme had been in place before the 2012 election, then President Obama would have only gotten 47 Electoral College votes from the battleground states, while Mitt Romney would have won those states with 59 votes, even though he got hammered in the popular vote in each of those states. And if all the states in the nation had gone along with this election-rigging scheme, then billionaire Mitt Romney would be our president today, even though he lost the national vote by millions.

Billionaires and Republicans know they're a minority in America. Their hard-right bigotry toward gays and women turns off young voters. Their xenophobia and mistrust of non-whites have turned off the growing minority electorate. And their economic principles, like Reaganomics and devastating austerity, are slowing destroying our country.

Today, we the people and the majority have to do something before the billionaires take over completely. And the best way to do this is to embrace more democracy.

When it comes to the Electoral College, we need to get rid of it altogether. Republicans all across America are trying to subvert the Electoral College so they can steal future Presidential elections, and keep Washington under Republican control for years to come.

We should replace the Electoral College with a system of more democracy – a national popular vote model that elects our President based on which candidate got the most votes nationwide, plain and simple, and more importantly, Republican rig-proof.

Nine states have already passed National Popular Vote laws, meaning that their electors will vote for whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, even if that candidate lost the state’s Electoral College vote. The nine states that have passed national popular vote laws, which include California, Illinois and Maryland, account for 132 electoral votes, nearly half of the 270 needed in the Electoral College to win the Presidency.

If the National Popular Vote movement continues to spread, and enough states sign up to bring their combined Electoral College votes to 270, then the Electoral College will be dead, along with Republican efforts to rig elections and corrupt our democracy.

This needs to be our game-plan from here on out.  Hard-working middle-class Americans are the majority in America, not democracy-destroying billionaires and their Republican cronies. It’s up to us, the 99 percent, to push back against this nation’s corrupt Conservative minority and their billionaire backers, and stop them once and for all from rigging elections in America.