US elections – a lesson in corruption
No, this article is not about the smoke-and-mirrors ploy that the press is always talking about… ballot corruption and fraud, but a far more corrupt practice that makes fake ballots a sideline story.
And it isn’t about the media calling for a neverending tight race, to force the candidates to spend huge amounts of money buying advertising to get every single vote. Why? If it wasn’t a close race, the winning candidate wouldn’t need to send piles to money to the media, so the media would not be happy. So, that’s why they are almost always have neck-and-neck races.
Good for business.
When US presidents are elected, unlike almost everywhere else on the planet, they are not elected by a simple majority vote, but via the “Electoral College.” Each of the fifty states (plus DC) have congressional districts consisting of voters who live within geographical boundaries, called districts. Each district has one electoral vote, so it was originally intended that the consensus of each district’s voters that decide which candidate is voted for.
It was changed to the statewide popular vote to decide what all of the electors voted for in each state.
The founding fathers wanted each district within each state to have a separate vote. So in Georgia, for example, there are fourteen districts. The original intent was for each district elector would vote for that district’s choice. The state senators would vote for whomever that had a majority number of districts in those states. In this example, Republican.
For example in Georgia with eight districts voting, Republican and six voting Democrat, that would have that representation when the nationwide vote of the electoral college which decided who won. At least, that’s what the Founding Fathers of the United States wanted. But… imagine that, it’s been corrupted.
So there are 538 votes, of which one half plus one wins the presidential election. Why? The founding fathers wanted the small, unpopulated states to have a voice so thought this method was better.
But the districts sizes and shapes are potentially changed every ten years after each national census, to reflect changes in population and density.
In the event that it was a simple majority of voters, densely populated east coast states and Texas/California would effectively elect the president every four years and the other states would not have an influence.
No influence, means being ignored for four more years by the president since he or (potentially) she would not have a pay any attention to them.
It’s all about the power and the money. Remember, that after a person votes, they aren’t of much value any more so money does the influencing.
So, where is the corruption? It’s simple.
And as you may have noticed, other parties (not Republican or Democratic) are ignored by the media to suppress votes for those candidates, but we won’t address how the media is involved in that story. That’s another article.
The problem is that almost every state (except Maine and Nebraska) changed state laws to a winner-take-all system. The fundamental corruption lies is in the redrawing of those state districts by the prevailing state government parties. If you want to suppress the black, not Black vote in those districts, for example, since they tend to vote Democrat and the majority in the state’s government is Republican, here’s how you do it.
If the state representative government majority are Republican, you just redraw the densely populated black population into as few districts as possible, and the reverse is true. So Democrats will win in those districts, but state wide winner-take-all method invalidates those electoral votes.
In my district, you’ll notice a “tail” of Republican voters to help assure a Republican winner for that district. Since including the tail in the fifth district to the south, would mean a wasted Republican vote, as the majority Democrat would win in the that district. And the Republicans don’t want that.
Of course, the Democrats in other states, such as California, that votes Democrat don’t want the Republican votes to be worth something, either.
If you ask why computer algorithms could accurately and fairly redraw districts in every state, you’ll understand corruption in action. Why change something when the general public has no idea, and is swayed by voter fraud stories. This is a much bigger story, that gets little attention.
Now you know.
Of course, knowing that and $1, $2, $3, $4, $5 will buy you a cup of coffee, cream is extra! And inflation, is yet another story.