Politics

Comic Nails the Biggest Flaw of the Electoral College

December 19th 2016

With the Electoral College vote on Monday, a new comic about the nature of the electoral process puts it into prospective for anyone still unsure of how and why it's in place. Ruben Bolling's comic shows an object explaining to a young man that the electoral process was created by the Founding Fathers so that the people couldn't elect an incompetent figure into office.

An image of President-elect Donald Trump is used in the comic. 

Electoral college comicBoingBoing - boingboing.net

A young man says it's undemocratic for electors to vote for someone other than the person elected president, prompting the object to explain that the current president-elect lost out on the popular vote to his opponent.

Electoral college comicBoingBoing - boingboing.net

The electoral college has 538 electors with a majority of 270 votes needed to elect the next U.S. president, according to the National Archives and Records Administration. The electoral college includes representatives from each state who vote on vice president and president. The electoral vote is separate from the popular vote, which is decided by the people.

"Your state’s entitled allotment of electors equals the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for your Senators," the National Archives and Records Administration states on its website.

The meeting of electors always takes place on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December following each presidential election. The votes of states will be tallied on Jan. 6, and for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to win the electoral vote, 38 of Trump’s electors would have to change sides, according a report by The Huffington Post. Trump is anticipated to win the electoral college vote this time around, according to CNN, but at least one Republican elector from Texas gained attention for writing on Dec. 5 in The New York Times that he won't cast his vote for Trump.

Check out the full comic at BoingBoing.

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