4.9 • 797 Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2019
⏱️ 7 minutes
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0:00.0 | The Electoral College, America's unique way of picking her president, for it or against it. |
0:05.1 | You might want to know there's a plan to use the Electoral College to subvert the Electoral College. |
0:09.7 | It's a sneaky plan and to understand, remember that while it feels like citizens pick the president in one big election, they don't. |
0:16.2 | The 50 states pick the president. |
0:18.2 | Oh, and District of Columbia. |
0:19.8 | But not you, Puerto Rico. Come back when you're a state. |
0:22.1 | How the states come together and how they vote is what the electoral college is. |
0:26.9 | Each state gets votes proportional to her population plus two and is free to cast these votes however she wants. |
0:32.8 | Most look at how their citizens voted and give all their electoral college votes to the statewide winner. |
0:37.8 | But they don't have to. |
0:38.8 | A couple states cast their votes proportional-ish to their citizens' preferences. |
0:42.9 | But states are free to vote, however, including against the preferences of their citizens. |
0:47.8 | Let's make a note of that. |
0:48.8 | But back to this plus two, which is why some citizens really don't like the electoral college. |
0:53.8 | The plus two means the |
0:54.8 | states less populous produce preponderant presidential picking power per person. At the extremes, |
0:59.0 | some states get one vote per low 100,000 people, and some states one vote per high 100,000. |
1:04.0 | This is how the Electoral College sometimes picks a president that nationwide most citizens didn't, |
1:09.0 | because roughly 80% of the state's votes are given by population and 20% aren't. |
1:14.1 | This is on purpose. Dividing power between the levels of citizen, state, and federal is and was a central point of the Constitution. |
1:21.1 | It's a compromise institution. |
1:23.1 | So if you went back in time to when the states were about to finalize the deal, yelling, |
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