Could Faithless Electors Put Hillary In Office?

Could "faithless electors" put Clinton in office? Trump has 306 electors pledged to him and needs 270 to win. So at least 37 electors pledged to Trump would have to be "faithless" and vote for Clinton or another candidate instead for the Republican to lose.

Electoral College members will meet Monday around the country to place their votes for president of the United States.

It is a constitutionally mandated ritual every four years that this year Americans will watch with interest.

The Electoral College's usually ceremonial role has come under focus in the aftermath of the 2016 election due to a number of factors -- including that Democrat Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by a significant margin, and the finding by the CIA and FBI that Russia used hacking to try to influence the election.

In light of these circumstances, pundits and members of the public are considering what role the 538 electors can and should play in deciding the final outcome of the election.

Public demonstrations opposed to Trump are expected in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., on Monday to encourage electors to vote in line with the national popular vote, protest organizers said. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is spearheading several of the events, said its goal is to talk to electors as they enter the meetings in their respective states to help them feel supported should they decide to vote according to the popular vote.

While it is possible that a few electors who are pledged to Trump could go "faithless" and vote for Clinton or another candidate, most experts expect that Trump will get the 270 electoral votes he needs to win.

Here are some quick insights into the Electoral College vote:

What Happens on Monday? Electors will gather in their respective state capitols to engage in a voting process that is open to the press. The earliest results will likely come in after 10 a.m. ET and the latest around 7 p.m. ET.

Who Are The Electors? The Electoral College has 538 members, a number drawn from the sum of the total number of U.S. senators and House members plus three additional electors for Washington, D.C. All states except Maine and Nebraska are winner-take-all, meaning that whichever candidate wins the state’s popular vote gets all the electors. Maine and Nebraska do it differently: Two electors vote for whoever won the state popular vote, plus one elector for each congressional district goes to whoever won that district.

In most states, electors are chosen among political party activists. “Generally, the parties select members known for their loyalty and service to the party, such as party leaders, state and local elected officials and party activists,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Faithless Electors? ABC News has identified only one elector pledged to Trump -- Chris Suprun from Texas -- who has said he won’t vote for the Republican candidate. Suprun in an interview on ABC News’ "Nightline" this week referred to the Russian hacking, saying he was "concerned when a foreign government intrudes on our elections. They're not doing it with our best interest in mind. I don't think we deserve a classified briefing but I do think we should get as many facts as information we can without compromising sources or methods that the intelligence community can provide."

What about Russia? As of Sunday, 80 electors, all but one of whom are pledged to Clinton, have signed a letter urging Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to give them classified briefings on Russia’s hacking and any of its other cyberactivities related to U.S. elections. Christine Pelosi, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi's daughter, who spearheaded the action, said electors needed to be fully informed on the issue before they cast their votes.

What about Hamilton? Founding father Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist Paper No. 68 that there may be "the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils." The Electoral College, he implied, could serve as a fail-safe to prevent a candidate who may represent the interests of a foreign power from taking office. Some political activists and Hollywood celebrities opposed to Trump have said Hamilton's words provide a basis for electors to vote against Trump on Monday.

Could "faithless electors" put Clinton in office? Trump has 306 electors pledged to him and needs 270 to win. So at least 37 electors pledged to Trump would have to be "faithless" and vote for Clinton or another candidate instead for the Republican to lose. Thirty states have laws that require electors to vote as pledged. However, no elector in any state has ever been penalized or replaced, and none of these state laws has been fully vetted by the courts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The last time an elector crossed party lines was in 1972, when an elector nominated by the Republican Party cast his ballot for the Libertarian ticket, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Faithless electors' votes could probably still be counted, according to Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News. Winger said there have been 157 faithless electors in our history, and Congress has counted every single one of those votes except for a case of three electors who voted for a dead man, Horace Greeley, in 1872. But Ned Foley of the Moritz College of Law said that Congress could still stop potential faithless electors, telling ABC News: "Even if there were 37 faithless electors, ultimately what matters is what Congress does on Jan. 6," when it counts electors' votes.

Congress certifies the final election results.

What if no one gets to 270? In the highly unlikely event that neither Clinton nor Trump gets 270 electoral votes, then the House of Representatives would vote and choose the next president.

Poll: Racial vulnerability linked to youth voice choice

Among the youngest white adult Americans, feelings of racial and economic vulnerability appear to be closely connected to their support for Donald Trump in last month's election.

That's according to an analysis of a new GenForward poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30. Other surveys of white adults of all ages have found a similar pattern.

Among young people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, feelings toward President Barack Obama and about the way the government is working were related to support for Trump's Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The pre-election survey data comes from a GenForward poll conducted by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The survey is designed to highlight how race and ethnicity shape the opinions of a new generation.

Things to know about young voters in the 2016 election:

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DEMOGRAPHICS

The GenForward polls showed that even the youngest voters were deeply divided along racial and ethnic lines in this year's election. Large majorities of young black, Hispanic and Asian-American likely voters in the surveys said they planned to vote for Clinton, compared with less than half of young white likely voters who said the same.

Among young white adults, more than half of those with a college degree supported Clinton, compared with less than 4 in 10 without such a degree.

The surveys suggest that support for Trump among young white likely voters increased in the weeks immediately before the election. Exit polls conducted for the AP and television networks by Edison Research show that young whites were ultimately slightly more likely to support Trump than Clinton.

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WHITE VULNERABILITY

Among young whites, the survey suggests that feelings of racial and economic vulnerability and racial resentment appear to have played a role in support for Trump.

In particular, among young whites who scored highest on a scale measuring "white vulnerability," or feelings that whites are losing out socially and economically in today's society, more than half said they planned to support Trump, compared to only about 6 percent of those scoring lowest on the scale.

The analysis shows Trump performed well among young whites who felt that gender discrimination is not a problem in society. Likewise, both young whites and young Latinos who felt that blacks need to work their way up in society without special favors and haven't been significantly held back by racial discrimination were more likely to vote for Trump.

Both of those attitudes were closely linked with feelings of racial vulnerability among young whites, and those feelings of vulnerability had the strongest relationship with choosing to vote for Trump when all three attitudes were analyzed together.

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POLITICAL ALIENATION AND EQUALITY

The surveys show that feelings about the political system were linked to vote choices among young people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Young Asian Americans and Latinos were less likely to support Clinton if they had feelings of political alienation, such as that leaders in government are looking out primarily for themselves and don't care about people like the them.

Young whites and African Americans who felt that American society and government were moving toward greater political equality were more likely to support Clinton.

Whites, blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans were all more likely to support Clinton if they had warmer feelings toward President Barack Obama.

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The analysis is based on two polls of young adults age 18-30 conducted Oct. 1-14 and Oct.20-Nov. 3. Both used samples of about 1,800 people drawn from the probability-based GenForward panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. young adult population. The margins of sampling error for all respondents are plus or minus 3.8 percentage points and plus or minus 3.7 percentage points, respectively.

The survey was paid for by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago, using grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods, and later interviewed online or by phone.

France and the impossible Trump domino effect

Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election has unleashed a media barrage suggesting that France was next in line for a possible shake-up of the political system.

Voices across the political spectrum posed the same question: What if the American scenario were to repeat itself in France, with Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right party National Front, elected president of the republic in the May 2017 presidential elections?

French President Francois Hollande went so far as to speak of a "period of uncertainty", while right-wing candidate Alain Juppe warned the French people of "the risks of demagoguery and extremism". The left-wing newspaper, Liberation's headline screamed "Trumpocalypse" While Johan Hufnagel, a Liberation columnist wrote that xenophobia and the far-right are on the rise in Europe thanks to "ultraliberalism without limits."

Even the right-wing daily Le Figaro spoke of an"Electroshocked Europe after Trump's election" while Jerome Fenoglio, Le Mondenewspaper's director, commented that Trump's election is "an earthquake, a game changer for Western democracy".

It is quite understandable to see comparisons between the ideological aspirations and political programmes of Trump's camp and French far-right party National Front's candidate Marine Le Pen.

However, similar ideologies do not necessarily guarantee the same political accomplishments, given that the political, social and economic contexts are quite different in the US and France. In fact, these key differences make a Trump-like victory for Le Pen almost impossible.

Different political systems

At a first glance, the parallels between France's Le Pen and America's Trump may seem overwhelming, but the two operate in completely different political and electoral systems.

The US political system, based essentially on the bipartisan principle, is much more predictable than the French multiparty political system. The latter allows all types of political alliances to form, which could generate a multitude of configurations rendering a Marine Le Pen victory very much avoidable.

It is also the nature of the electoral system applied in both countries that preclude a Le Pen victory a la Trump. While the US presidential election takes place in a single round, in France, the process is accomplished in two rounds allowing the two candidates who come first and second to make political deals and attract the votes of any of the disqualified candidates for the second round.

In that sense, several key political figures from both the left and the right, such asFrancois Fillon, Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy (who is no longer in the race), have already announced their intention to ally with the candidate who will stand against Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election, in case the latter managed to reach the final round.

If the past was anything to go by, the overwhelming majority of left-leaning voters would vote for any centre-right or right-wing candidate in order to block the far-right candidate in the second round, as was the case in the 2002 presidential election when Jean Marie Le Pen (Marine Le Pen's father) made it to the final round.

A "republican front", incorporating conservatives backing the right-wing candidate and socialists whose candidate, Lionel Jospin, failed to reach the final round, was initiated and unanimously voted against Le Pen in favour of Jacques Chirac, who won the election by 82 percent of the vote.

winner in the French elections is simply the candidate that manages to collect the highest number of votes, unlike in the US where the president gets elected by the Electoral College, which does not necessarily reflect the popular vote.

Different political contexts

The social, racial and historical factors that dominate the US political landscape do not really match those in France, although the French far-right candidate may embrace many of Trump's electoral campaign slogans.

Trump's electoral campaign was very successful in stirring racial fears and flirting with white supremacist sentiments. Although Le Pen has used xenophobia and Islamophobia profusely in her political repertoire, she has not gone as far as conjuring the Nazi ghost of the 1930s.

In fact, in France, the weight of history, particularly the legacy of the World War II and the German occupation of a large swath of French territory where a pro-Nazi authority was established (the so-called Vichy Regime), still has a traumatic effect on the French collective psyche.

It is due to this historical trauma, that partnering with a far-right party remains the ultimate taboo in French politics that no major party has ever broken, or is ready to break.

While indeed the far-right is on the rise across Europe, feeding on economic instability and the refugee crisis, France's society and political system still hold the necessary mechanisms to keep this resurgence in the political fringe.

The Fake News Conundrum and Facebook

         

                                              The spread of fake news on Facebook became a focal point of discussion after Donald Trump was elected president, drawing comments from the likes of President Obama, and had Hillary won the presidency, the hypocrite and the stuck up-for-Hillary-media, would have not only ignored fake-news, but it would have had upheld them.

A Twitter cofounder nailed the scope of Facebook's 'fake news' problem with one screenshot

On Tuesday, Twitter cofounder Ev Williams neatly pointed out how big Facebook's fake-news problem is with one screenshot.

Williams was reading Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's November 18 Facebook post, which updated the world on Facebook's progress and goals in tackling the spreading of fake news, when he noticed some suspicious posts on the side. Both turned out to be fake news.
Here is the screen shot:

"Despite appearances, the first one doesn't point to espn.com," Williams wrote in a Medium post. "It goes to espn.com-magazine.online and attempts to sell a muscle-building supplement using ESPN branding and a fake news story. The CNN-branded ad goes to less work. It just takes you to a site called Fine the Racers with an exclusive offer for a 12-week program to strengthen your toes. 

Though Facebook has already pledged to ban fake-news sites from its ad network, both of the posts that Williams highlighted were ads.
But, they do. 

"We do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news," Facebook said in a statement to Reuters on November 15.

The spread of fake news on Facebook became a focal point of discussion after Donald Trump was elected president, drawing comments from the likes of President Obama. A recent 46 by BuzzFeedshow showed that in the lead-up to the election, the top fake-news stories on Facebook outperformed legitimate news stories shared by some of the most popular media companies. One fake-news writer even said

 he thought he might have helped Trump win the election.

Facebook has said it's working on fixing the problem. Zuckerberg wrote on Friday (in the post cited by Williams) a few things that Facebook was working on to try to combat fake news. Here's a summary:

• Stronger detection: better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.
• Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake to catch more misinformation faster.
• Third-party verification via "respected fact-checking organizations."
• Warnings: labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties and the Facebook community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.
• Working with journalists and others in the news industry to get input and better understand their fact-checking systems and learn from them.

But it seems that Facebook has a long way to go.

Williams does have a bit of a bias here, however, as he founded both Medium, a publishing platform that in some ways competes with Facebook, and cofounded Twitter. But his point is certainly still well-taken.