This is the subject of next week's 2305 written assignment.
- Click here for the article.
IT'S A FACT THAT DRIVES liberals crazy, and has become a preoccupation for President Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' choice, crushed Trump at the ballot box, winning the popular vote by a margin of roughly 3 million, but Trump cruised to a win in the Electoral College, sweeping up 304 of 538 votes.
It was the second time in recent history that the winning presidential candidate, a Republican, took office even though more people voted for the Democrat. It's also a system Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig believes is a Constitutional offense – and practically guarantees another popular-vote loser will again become commander-in-chief in the very near future.
Every four years, the presidential election "focuses on 14 [swing] states, to the total exclusion of the rest of the country," says Lessig, who ran an under-the-radar campaign for president as an independent in 2016. "Those 14 states are not representative of America. They're older, whiter and their industries" like mining and farming "are representative of 19th-century industries."
That's why his organization, Equal Citizens, launched a project called Equal Votes to sue in four states last week, arguing that the winner-take-all electoral-college system violates the Constitution's equal-protection clause and undermines the democratic principle of fair representation.
- For more, click here.
