Discrepancy Between Popular and Electoral Votes

When Jeb Bush – whose father and brother had both been fairly recent presidents of the United States – chose to compete against Trump and others for the Republican Party nomination previous year, I was irritated by Jeb’s obvious sense of entitlement and wondered whether the Bush clan regards itself as a monarchy! Clinton conceded the following day. Trump is universally understood to be “president-elect”, but that title is not technically accurate until January 6, the day Congress meets in joint session to count votes of the Electoral College.

In the last couple of days we have seen Mrs Clinton with family and friends shopping at a local store, in her now home-town of Chappaqua, 30-odd miles north of NY in the Hudson Valley.

So far, six electoral college voters said they would not vote for Mr Trump.

In 2000, Democrat Al Gore’s final lead over George W Bush, who won the election after a prolonged legal challenge, was almost 544,000. Elsewhere in The Post, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig argues that electors should vote for whichever candidate won the nationwide popular vote unless the people went “crazy” and voted for someone outside “the bounds of a reasonable judgment”. “This was a truly national victory”, said Mr. Priebus, who has been appointed as the Chief of Staff by Mr. Trump. The remaining six per cent went to all other candidates.

Large protests have erupted nationwide in response to Trump’s election victory following a contentious presidential campaign involving the two of the least popular candidates in recent U.S. history.

Before that compiled count, Trump held a 13,107 lead over Clinton. The Electoral College was a compromise – individual votes mattered, but those votes were slotted by state. Mr Trump, requiring 270 delegates is the comfortable victor.

All the while, the dismayed Hillary Clinton campaign may have been given a golden opportunity to challenge the results of the election.

Mrs Clinton is leading in the popular vote by more than 2 million, according to the Cook Political Report. In that electionapproximately 500 thousand more Americans votedfor Gore than Bush.

For those of us with a more nuanced and less self-centered view of our democracy, we see the pros and cons of our election process, and Oregon Republicans have every right to dislike the system.

Asked during a New York Times interview on November 22 about reports that he no longer wanted to prosecute Clinton, Trump said, “I want to move forward, I don’t want to move back”.

We do not live in “The United people of America” but in the “United States of America”.

The deadline for Pennsylvania is Monday and MI next Wednesday but under Federal Law, all contested results must be resolved by 13 December.

Having declared that the Constitution and Bill of Rights are to be taken without modern interpretation, they now worry enough electors will do precisely that and exercise their legal “right” to keep Trump out of the White House.