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Why do we need the Electoral College?

Posted in Just for Fun, tagged , , on December 24, 2016|

Another good article on why we need the Electoral College…

Remember, the darker it gets, the brighter and farther our little light shines!

Maranatha, Lord come quickly!

myblessedhope

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COMMENTARY: Why do we need the Electoral College?

Posted on Dec 23, 2016 at 9:00 a.m.

By Jeff Backer, MN State Rep., Browns Valley, MN

We have just experienced an election when the popular vote went to Clinton while the Electoral College votes went to Trump. This outcome has happened four times before and should not be regarded as a first-time event in our nation’s history. The outcry is that the election is somehow rigged. However, our presidential election process was set up to accomplish exactly what happened. Here’s why:

When the Constitution was being framed, several smaller states would not sign on to it because they justifiably felt the more populated larger states would be in control of all legislation. In effect, the small states would be out voted and have no voice in the government. It was not until the “Great Compromise,” authored by Roger Sherman, that the smaller states joined the United States.

The Great Compromise created the House of Representatives and the Senate in the Legislative branch. The House seats were based on population; the more people in the states, the more representatives in the House. The Senate was based on each state having two senators no matter the size of the state or its population. The Senate provided a check on the power of large and heavily populated states. If a bill the smaller states did not like passed the House, they had a very good chance it could be defeated in the Senate. Finally, unless both the House and Senate agreed upon a bill it could not be passed and sent to the president.

The Electoral College is based on the same principle. Each state elects its choice for president. The Electoral College votes are equal to the number of representatives and senators each state has. For example, Minnesota has eight congressional seats and two senators. Therefore, it has 10 electoral votes. The Electoral College members are supposed to support the popular election results of each state. While not absolutely bound to this outcome, it is justifiably assumed that they will vote with the will of the people.

If you take a look at the United States election results county by county, it is obvious that except for several pockets of blue in the densely populated urban areas, most of the nation is red. If the Electoral College were not in place, all these red counties would be out voted by a relative handful of blue urban counties. That is not fair representation for the whole nation. In fact, if the Electoral College were not in place, the only places for a candidate to spend a lot of time campaigning would be in the most populated counties. The popular vote would be all that mattered since it would govern the country.

The Midwest, including “blue” Minnesota, would rarely if ever get much attention from presidential candidates. All of the “flyover country” between the two coasts would simply be ignored by presidential campaigns because the number of their votes really would not matter much in the final result.

Only the Electoral College ensures that the more sparsely populated states will have a real say in the outcome of a presidential election. And this is why the founding fathers wisely put the Electoral College in the Constitution. Eliminating it would be at our own peril.

 

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Click on the article title for a link to full original referenced article.

In Romans 10 Paul lays out how salvation is open to all, Jew and Gentile.  He writes:

“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” – Romans 10:4-5

What he is saying is now it is not about works or how closely to a “T” you follow the law.  But that it is through God’s gift of grace through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ.  It is really that simple, and yet a hard step for some of us.

“That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” – Romans 10:9

Christ is the narrow gate (Matthew 7:13-14), through faith in Him you will be saved.  It is the only “works” that God requires for eternal salvation.

It is The Gospel of Jesus Christ.  To learn more check out the following link.

Read Full Post »

Our Founding Fathers were correct… yet again!

Posted in Deception, Just for Fun, tagged , , on December 19, 2016|

The truth is out there, you just have to be open to it, and it may be a little harder to find these days with the state of our media.  I try to keep politics out of this blog but when I saw this article I just had to share as it is the plain truth.  I do not know about you but I get so frustrated these days by people putting down and name calling on our founding fathers and the republic they installed for us.  I am absolutely certain it was God inspired and has since its inception allowed us the freedom to spread His word and values to many world-wide.  It has been a light in this dark world for a long time but has started to flicker lately.

Recently, what has gotten under my skin a little is the criticism of the electoral college system we have in place.  It is such an important part of our republic system and something that tends to be hard to understand or explain.  The article below does such an amazing job showing why it is needed that I had to share with all of you.  It worked for us as a nation, yet again, and the truth of why is explained below.  Enjoy!

Remember, the darker it gets, the brighter and farther our little light shines!

Maranatha, Lord come quickly!

myblessedhope

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Published: Dec 19, 2016 8:11 a.m. ET

The Founding Fathers got it right, and California is proof

By James E. Campbell

Shocked and appalled by the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency, some supporters of Hillary Clinton have turned to minimizing and even delegitimizing Trump’s election. In an era of severe political polarization, in an election with two candidates seen from the outset in highly unfavorable terms, after the most brutal campaign in modern history, and with an outcome that astonished just about everyone, these reactions are understandable, but wrong.

Many die-hard Clinton supporters cannot bring themselves to believe their candidate could lose to Donald Trump. They think: How could such a crude and inept con man be elected president? Even after it has happened, it is unthinkable, a nightmare. So, the election must not have been fair.

Those on the fringe raise the specter of diabolical Russians hacking away at our democracy. More grounded Clintonians have less malevolent boogeymen — our Founding Fathers. As they see it, the election’s outcome should be blamed on a dysfunctional and archaic electoral vote system. Hillary won the national popular vote. She should be president. It is as simple as that. The Electoral College should go the way of Trump University.

They are right about one thing: Hillary did win the national popular vote. As votes continued to trickle in three weeks after Election Day, Clinton received 50.9% of the two-party vote to 49.1% for Trump. With about 135 million votes counted, Clinton has 2.3 million more votes than Trump.

Yet Clinton has only 232 electoral votes (in 20 states plus Washington, D.C.) to Trump’s 306 (in 30 states plus one from Maine), making him the president-elect. So Trump’s election without a popular-vote plurality is regarded as an injustice. Some Democrats claim a moral victory as victims of an electoral vote system that once again horribly “misfired.” Their claim, however, neglects two facts.

First, had the election been conducted with rules awarding the presidency to the popular-vote winner, the candidates and many voters quite probably would have acted very differently and the popular vote would not have been the same. Trump and Clinton would have campaigned in the “safe” states. Potential voters in those states would have felt more pressure to turn out and to vote for “the lesser of two evils” and not to waste their votes on third-party candidates. Some additional Clinton voters would probably have shown up, but gains on the Trump side would probably have been larger as more reluctant Republicans would have been pushed to return to the fold, particularly in big blue states like California, New York, and Illinois.

In short, a comparison of the national popular vote as cast and the electoral vote division is no simple matter. This is particularly true in our age of pervasive polling in which people should have a good idea about whether they live in a state where their presidential vote might make a difference.

Second, Clinton’s 2.3-million-popular-vote plurality over Trump depends on the votes in a single state: California. Clinton has more than a 4-million-vote plurality over Trump there. In the other 49 states plus the District of Columbia, Trump actually has a 1.7-million-popular-vote plurality over Clinton. So California single-handedly turns a Trump plurality into a Clinton plurality.

The electoral vote system in 2016 (as in 2000, when George W. Bush became president despite losing the national popular vote) functioned as its defenders have long claimed. It prevented a single region (in this instance, a single state) from overruling the verdict of the more populous and diverse nation.

Donald Trump’s election is difficult for many Americans to accept, but there is no good reason to question its democratic legitimacy. For better or worse, Trump won the presidency by constitutional and sensible democratic rules that guided both campaigns and were known to any politically conscious citizen. He also won the national popular vote cast outside of the single state of California. Moreover, Clinton won all of California’s 55 electoral votes despite the fact that 4.3 million of the state’s voters voted for Trump. That big winner-take-all advantage for California’s Democrats and Clinton was certainly felt, but it wasn’t enough to override her losses in many other states.

Under our electoral vote system, American voters elected a national president, not California’s choice. It is in the nation’s interest for Democratic Party’s leaders and for Clinton voters to fully recognize the legitimacy of the election as they had urged Trump to do after the third presidential debate.

The Electoral College system worked as it should. It did not “misfire.” The election’s outcomes were ultimately about what Americans wanted and what they did not want—not about electoral mechanics.

James E. Campbell is a UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and is the author of “Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America”.

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Click on the article title for a link to full original referenced article.

In Romans 10 Paul lays out how salvation is open to all, Jew and Gentile.  He writes:

“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” – Romans 10:4-5

What he is saying is now it is not about works or how closely to a “T” you follow the law.  But that it is through God’s gift of grace through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ.  It is really that simple, and yet a hard step for some of us.

“That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” – Romans 10:9

Christ is the narrow gate (Matthew 7:13-14), through faith in Him you will be saved.  It is the only “works” that God requires for eternal salvation.

It is The Gospel of Jesus Christ.  To learn more check out the following link.

Read Full Post »