The Electoral College
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fabian Hilfrich joined me on the podcast to talk about the US electoral college.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody, welcome down snow's history. If I sound a bit croaky, I've been up all night, |
| 0:03.6 | OVS. It's exciting. It's November the 4th, 2020. It's the morning after the election, |
| 0:09.9 | the US presidential election. Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. I'm recording this, |
| 0:14.6 | first thing in the morning, this November sun is streaming through the window. The results |
| 0:18.6 | are still being counted. The counts taking longer than usual this year because there are only absentee |
| 0:23.0 | ballots and early ballots. And added to the fact that it is clearly very close. Trump managed |
| 0:28.6 | to hold on to Florida and Ohio. So it's very close and it's going to come down to maybe a few |
| 0:35.6 | thousand ballots in a few states. It's that time of the election cycle and people realised there's |
| 0:40.7 | something called an electoral college. The US like the UK does not elect. It's executive branch |
| 0:45.7 | using a national popular vote. Whoever wins the most votes wins the top job. In fact, the UK is |
| 0:51.2 | far more complicated than that. The US instead has something called an electoral college. You vote |
| 0:55.2 | for electors who then transmit your wishes, who then translate your electoral preferences |
| 1:01.9 | into who gets the top job. It was never designed to work like this. And in fact, it never, |
| 1:06.7 | ever, not even once, worked as it was supposed to. And it is like so much the US Constitution, |
| 1:11.6 | something that dates back to the end of the 18th century. As you know, it's my wheelhouse. It's |
| 1:15.7 | my sweet spot. I'm always happy talking about this. Just because we wanted to get this episode out, |
| 1:20.3 | we're actually going to repeat the episode we played four years ago. It's one of our most |
| 1:24.7 | listened to episodes to short one. It's kind of an emergency podcast at the time when there was |
| 1:29.1 | some suggestion that there might be something called faithless electors who had been elected by |
| 1:34.1 | Republicans, but who might not cast their votes for Donald Trump. So this is a podcast all about |
| 1:39.7 | the electoral college. What is it? It is with senior lecturer head of American history, Dr. Fabian |
| 1:45.6 | Hilfrich. He is at the University of Edinburgh and he was able to talk me through this. |
... |
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