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General News    H3'ed 11/10/16

About Our Recent Miselection...

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You voted, but most Americans didn't.
You voted, but most Americans didn't.
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The mechanics of the election process are in terrible shape.
There's long lines in swing states, especially minority neighborhoods, election fraud, voter disenfranchisement (see Greg Palast's articles on how up to 2 million so-called duplicate names might have been purged from the voter roles), videos of vote-flipping electronic machines.

This article isn't about any of that. It is about the official results, which are themselves, an example of how corrupt our election process is.

There are really only 2 sources of election counts that virtually all MSM uses: the Associated Press and the Green Pages. Both are still showing 3 states uncalled, even though 100% of the votes have been tallied.
Two of these states: Arizona and Michigan, went to Trump, giving him a narrow victory in votes, less than either Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, or even some even lesser known third party candidates received. It's always hard to tell how votes would have gone if third party candidates hadn't run. Would people have stayed home, voted for a major party candidate, voted for another third party candidate? We can't know. We can't even know how many votes were "peeled away" from the major candidates by third parties (why is it never suggested it goes the other way around too, which is much more likely in our vote-for-the-lesser-evil evil system).

Arizona will give Trump 11 electoral votes and Michigan 16 electoral votes, for a total of 27 more votes on top of the 279 the mainstream media keeps blaring in its headlines as if it was the final result, for a grand total of 306 electoral votes. Hillary Clinton will get New Hampshire's 4 electoral votes for a total of 232 electoral votes.
All 3 of these uncalled contests were decided by 0.3% of the votes, all less than 1/10th of the votes Gary Johnson received, and in Michigan, less then the 50,000 votes (1/6%) Jill Stein received or even Darrell Castle of the U.S. Taxpayers Party. Who? Besides these third party candidates, there were nearly 1,800 other third party candidates running, some of whom may have been entered as write-in candidates, in many cases, never even tallied. Trying to makes sense of whom "stole" who's vote is a fool's game.

Despite the 3:2 electoral vote win by Trump, he actually lost the popular count.

We almost had a remote chance of a president McMullin, but he lost in Utah and Trump won, and then went on to win by more than the 6 electoral votes Utah provided.

The NY Times, which, like all MSM relies on the Associated Press to do the counting, is showing:

60,071,781 votes (47.7%) votes for Clinton

59,791,135 votes (47.5%) vote for Trump

But, there are 3 outstanding states not being counted yet, though all of them, New Hampshire, Michigan and Arizona, are 100% counted. This has been a pattern throughout the campaign, for major news outlets to simply stop adding up the votes 12 hours or so after the polls close, possibly forever. Perhaps they are too depressed too...
If we add the votes in Michigan (2,279,202) and Arizona (973,997) which Trump won, we get: 3,253,199 more votes.
Clinton gets Michigan (2,266,122) and Arizona (889,107) = 3,155,229 more votes.
New Hampshire breaks down:
Clinton: 346,816
Trump: 345,379

Totals for these 3 states:
Trump: 3,598,578
Clinton: 3,502,845


Adding that to the existing totals shown by all the MSM still:
Trump: 59,791,135
Clinton: 60,071,781

and we get:
Trump: 63,389,713
Clinton: 63,574,626


Trump loses by 184,913 votes.
Does anyone still doubt we need to abolish the Electoral College?

Small states are over-represented in the vote and this is Trump country. Large urban areas are vastly under-represented. California's 39 million people are represented by 53 Representatives, about 1 per 800,000 people, while Wyoming gets 1 Representative covering all its 586,107 people. That Representative serves the whole state, practically like a Senator that's elected every two years.

Together, Trump and Clinton split just 126,964,339 votes. There are 321 million people in the country. Even if you discount children under 18, felons and ex-felons (and some state allow ex-felons to vote, but some critical swing states, like Florida, do not), illegal immigrants, and people too incapacitated to vote, that still leaves about half the country who could have voted, but didn't, or who voted third party.

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Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of (more...)
 

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