Considering What Just happened in the US, It should Be Painfully Obvious Why Canada Should Change Its Voting System

It's hard to believe but it's true.  Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States of America.  A man who has never held a public office in his life now is Commander and Chief of the most potent and lethal military force in history.  Put another way, the fate of planet rests in the apparently small hands of a man many consider to be a narcissistic sociopath. 

Yes, this man now has access to the nuclear codes.  I sincerely hope and pray he doesn't decide to nuke anyone.

So, how did this happen?  Much has been written in the aftermath of Trump's victory.  Most of the analysis concentrates on socio-economic variables centered on gender, class, and race.  But the fact of the matter is that Trump did not win the Presidential election.  He lost the popular vote.  Indeed, Hillary Clinton received approximately 2.5 million more votes than Trump.  What occurred is that the Electoral College awards its votes on a state-by-state basis.  Whoever gets the most votes in the state (with the exception of Maine) gets all of the state's electoral college votes.  Add them up and the President-elect is the one who gets the majority of electoral college votes.  In other words, it is the distribution of votes in the winner-take-all electoral districts that determine the winner of the electoral contest.

Was this election democratic? No! Clearly, the democratic result of the popular vote was overturned by the mechanics of the voting system.  The name of the game in a Presidential election is to win as many states possible that produce the greater number of electoral college votes.  The margin of victory in any given state does not matter.  For example, the fact that Trump did poorly in the most populous states of New York and California did not matter since he won a greater number of smaller states that in the end produced 20% more electoral college votes than what Hillary won.

This is not the first time the candidate who loses the popular vote has gone on to become the American President.  The last time it happened was in the 2000 election when Bush defeated Gore despite not having the support of the majority of American electors.  Electoral results carry consequences like the war in Iraq, which was clearly the result of the lie that claimed that the Iraqis possessed arms of mass destruction that required a US military invasion.  What now lies in store for America and the world at large has given rise to great concern for the safety of the global community.

Certainly, the question that needs to be raised is how can the most powerful nation in the world use such a dubious electoral system to decide who will lead the nation?  Simply put, the problem is that the Americans have never gotten around to modernizing their electoral system, which is, for the most part, a relic of its colonial past as an English settler state.  Winner-take-all electoral districts are still in use in England, the USA, Canada, and Australia.  The rest of the world, however, has moved on to adopt electoral systems that do not produce such aberrant electoral results.

It just so happens that Canada is now in the process of deciding whether to change its voting method.  During the last federal election in Canada, the soon-to-be-elected Prime Minister Trudeau promised that the 2015 election would be the last using the winner-take-all, plurality system called first-past-the-post.  Ironically, Trudeau became Prime Minister as a result of the distortion brought on by the voting system: his Liberal Party only received 39% of the popular vote; but in one region, the Maritimes, he won 61 out of 61 electoral districts with only 56% of the popular vote, thereby giving him a "majority" government, meaning that the electoral system had created a majority when in reality his party only had the support of the minority of the population.

Fabricating majority rule and the reversal of popular vote are only two of the major problems of first-past-the-post.  It also systemically under-represents or denies altogether representation to smaller political parties.  Essentially, the supporters of such parties are effectively disenfranchised.  In the 2004 federal election, for example, the Green Party of Canada received almost one million votes but was denied any representation in Parliament thanks to the electoral system.

Canadians have been aware of these problems for almost one hundred years.  In fact, in the provinces other voting methods have been used, but for many reasons we have never taken these problems serious enough to make a qualitative change to the voting system at the federal level.  Looking at what just happened in the US, we should realize that a hostile take over of one of Canada's traditional governing political parties by a demagogue is wholly possible.  In fact, Germany adopted proportional representation largely to prevent this possibility from ever happening again given the tragic turn of events leading to carnage of the Second World War.

Let's not be smug Canada.  It could happen here.  Do the right thing.  Adopt proportional representation and make Canada Trump proof.




























 

Deja Moo: The New York Democratic Primary

Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth  (Lucy Parsons)

Well, the Democratic primary in New York has come and gone and Hillary won.  What a surprize!!!  Tens of thousands of people flock to see Bernie Sanders live compared to the couple of hundred who attend Hillary's event.  Yet, Hillary wins going away.

Do my eyes deceive me?  No.  It's just another case of using the rules of voting to gain advantage.

In New York, the primary is closed, meaning that you have to be registered months in advance as a Republican or a Democrat in order to vote in the primary.  All the independents and all the recent converts to Bernie's cause were shut out.  Imagine that.  And to add insult to injury, more than a hundred thousand registered Democrats in Brooklyn, Bernie's home town, had their names mysteriously vanish from the voters' list, a troublesome occurrence to say the least, causing the state's comptroller to demand an audit of the Elections Board, a classic example of too little too late since by the time the investigation wraps up, Hillary will probably be in the White House.

Related Posts

Everybody Knows But Not Everybody Gets It

Bernie's Plan B: Run As An Independent

America's Quiet Revolution

Different day, same old bullshit of voter suppression.  In Arizona, they reduced the number of voting stations, forcing people to stand in line five hours or more in the dessert heat if they wanted to vote.  In both cases, these voting irregularities swayed the results in favor of Hillary.

So, what is playing out in the Democratic primary is a grass roots movement, primarily made up of young people, challenging the system by mobilizing with great force to demand fundamental changes to the American political economy, and the old guard that uses its control of the voting procedures to engineer a result that is more favourable to their interests.  If I were a betting man, I would place my money on the old guard to win this contest.

Given that this electoral contest has been rigged in advance, I think its just a matter of time that this wave of progressives come to the realization that to get to the place they would like to go, they just can't get there from here.  The way is blocked.  The rich are not going to let the population at large vote away their wealth, and the two party political system is set up to protect the status quo at all costs.

In the end, it all depends on how Bernie is going to react to his defeat.  Will he accept the bitter result or will he say, "Fuck this", I'm going to run as an independent"?

I think it would be a historic move that would bring to an end the two-party political system in the United States.  Surely, the specter of Donald Trump as President will be used to encourage people to choose the lesser of the two evils: the more popular (Hillary) of the least popular presidential candidates of the major parties since records have been kept.

It won't be until the summer before Bernie makes his decision, and in the meantime I guess I'll have to sit tight and watch this pathetic rerun of an electoral script to see if there will be a surprize twist to what appears to be a predetermined ending, bought to you by the good people of Corporate America.

Inequality Is What America Is All About

Change you can believe in.

Yeah right.  There are some things that never change and one of them is the tendency for the rich to get richer at everyone else's expense, especially in America.

Since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, 95% of the gains have gone to the top 1%, and during the same time period the median income has dropped.

It would appear that within this context the inequality of income should be the major concern of the political class.

No way.  Not in the US of A, where more than half of the members of the US Congress are millionaires.

Instead, as a close analysis of President Obama's State of the Union speech reveals, Americans should be more concerned about the equality of opportunity than the equality of incomes.

You can't get anymore American than that.

After all, America is a fundamentalist nation founded on the Protestant wealth ethic articulated by the 16th century French-born theologian, John Calvin.

Related Post

We Are All Protestants Now, Slouching Towards the Apocalypse

Sanctifying Success

Calvin's universe was ruled by a petulant and vindictive deity, one who toyed with his followers by designating a select group of them to share in his divine bounty, only to leave them in the dark as to who these lucky chosen might be.

The faithful were, then, left to fret and worry whether they were in God's good graces and, more importantly, whether they would share the common and inescapable fate of eternal damnation that was the certain end of the non-elect.

How, then, was one to know if they were one of the elect?

The answer: material success.

If a businessman's coffers were fat and he was benefiting from what appeared to be a shrewd and effective business acumen, then surely it is evidence that the Almighty had smiled on him, welcoming him, perhaps, into the Divine's august company.

This, of course, is a ready-made philosophy for any self-flattering elite - no matter what the century - anxious to justify their good fortune as divinely mandated.

Moreover, it provides a justification, based upon a widely-held religious belief, why we should not increase the taxes upon the rich.  To do so, according to this fundamentlist Protestant mindset, would be against God's will.

Instead, we should have faith in the market, which left on its own, without the interference from government, will provide the opportunity for everyone to join God's Elect.

And that ladies and gentlemen is the essence of the American Dream because you have to be asleep at the wheel to fall for that bowl of malarky.

Equal opportunity in America? 

In a country where more than 47 million people live off of food stamps?  In a country where millions of students take on mountain loads of unforgiveable debt just to have the hope of some day making it?  In a country that has the largest number of incarcerated people in the world?

Get out of town! No way!

But that's what it takes to live in America.  You have to "live the lie", I mean "hold the faith" if you want to get by.

Otherwise, you might do something foolish like raise the taxes on the rich and that would most certainly "hurt" the economy.

And God would be really pissed off if that ever happened.

Who knows how he would react? He might even let catastrophic climate change to occur.

So, let's not piss him off and everything will be fine.