Although I had planned to take a break until after the first of the year recent events have caused me to produce this episode which I will be releasing to both the public and my Patreon supporters simultaneously because it is quite timely and I believe very important. Check out this political rant that raises an issue that should be important to all Americans.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 49 of Contemplating Life.

I had planned to take a break after episode 48 to relax over the holidays and to get caught up on other items. But I was inspired to write this episode and I’m releasing it to both Patreon and the public on Christmas Day as my gift to you. Also, this episode must be timely. I’m still going to take a break and I will return after the first of the year with new episodes.

On December 21, 2023, I did something I had never done before. I’m embarrassed to admit that I have never done it. It was long overdue. It’s something that I recommend all Americans do if they care about their country. I’m embarrassed because I consider myself politically active, knowledgeable, and passionate especially about elections. I’ve served as a lobbyist in the Indiana General Assembly and helped to secure the passage of a bill that made it easier for disabled people to vote. So I was long overdue to do this. What did I do?

On December 21, 2023, I read the Constitution of the United States.

I’ve never done it before. I had probably read parts of it in various social studies classes in high school and college. I read parts of it for my own enlightenment and as research for blogs, Facebook posts, and other political rants.

This time, I read the whole thing front to back: The preamble, all 7 articles, and all 27 amendments.

I should have done it 23 years ago because I learned something disturbing in December 2020. Something that I knew on a subliminal level but never really sunk in until that moment.

In December 2020, the nation was in constitutional turmoil over the 2020 Presidential Election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. It came down to Florida. Whoever won Florida, would become the 43rd President of the United States. There were multiple recounts in various Florida counties and numerous lawsuits. I was glued to the TV for weeks watching NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and possibly other networks’ extensive coverage of the events.

During oral arguments in one of the court cases, I heard something that greatly upset me. I recollected that it was in the oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court but I found transcripts of the arguments in the famous Bush v. Gore case and the thing I remember is not in there. It must’ve been in one of the Florida state or county cases.

The statement was made, “There is no constitutional right to presidential suffrage.”

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, “suffrage“ has nothing to do with suffering, rather it means the right to cast a vote In a political election.

Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States does it guarantee that you get to vote for president nor do you have a constitutional right to have your vote counted if you do vote.

If you know anything about our presidential elections, you know that it is an indirect election. Although names such as Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, John McCain, or Hillary Clinton appear on the ballot, you are actually voting for Electors to the Electoral College. I found a sample ballot from Indiana for the 2020 election. In the section for “President and Vice President of the United States,” it says, “A ballot cast for the named candidates for President and Vice President of the United States is considered a ballot cast for the slate of presidential electors and alternate presidential electors nominated by that political party or independent candidate.”

You are voting for a group of representatives to the Electoral College. You may vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November but the actual election for president takes place but the electors choose the president on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December. The votes are then counted on January 6.

While these dates are established by law, the Electoral College system comes from Article 2 Section 1 Clause 2 of the Constitution. It states, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.”

You are voting for people you probably never heard of. You are trusting them to vote for the person who wins the majority of the votes in your state or district. Their names are nowhere on the ballot. You would have to look them up somewhere. I couldn’t tell you who were the electors from my state in any of the presidential elections in which I voted. I had to look them up on Wikipedia.

In 2020 Indiana went for Trump and I only recognized one out of the 11 names – Edwin Simcox who was a former Republican Indiana Secretary of State. Recall that you can’t be a current officeholder. Wait a minute… As I was editing this I noticed that other people on the list were current officeholders. Perhaps they were allowed because it was not a federal office. I don’t know. Simcox was also an Elector in 2016. In 2012, Indiana went for Republican Mitt Romney and I recognized the name of former governor Eric Holcomb. I thought if I went back to 2008 in which Indiana went for Obama I might recognize more names since I’m a Democrat but I didn’t recognize any of them.

The important part of that section of the Constitution is the phrase “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” That means that each state can choose its electors by any means it wants. Currently, Indiana awards all 11 of its electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote in the state as do most states. But historically the method has varied greatly from state to state and to some extent it still does.

With the Constitution took effect in 1789, the at-large popular vote winner-take-all method began with Pennsylvania and Maryland. That same year, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Delaware used a district plan by popular vote. However, in five other states, the state legislatures chose their electors with no voter input. They were Connecticut, Georgia, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and South Carolina. Notably, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island did not participate in the election. New York’s legislature deadlocked and abstained. North Carolina and Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution.

By 1800, Virginia and Rhode Island voted at large; Kentucky, Maryland, and North Carolina voted popularly by district; and eleven states voted by the state legislature.

Beginning in 1804 there was a definite trend towards the winner-take-all system for statewide popular vote.

By 1832, only South Carolina legislatively chose its electors and abandoned the method after 1860. Maryland was the only state using a district plan, and from 1836 district plans fell out of use until the 20th century, though Michigan used a district plan for 1892 only. States using popular vote by district have included ten states from all regions of the country. Since 1836, statewide winner-take-all popular voting for electors has been an almost universal practice.

Currently, Maine (since 1972) and Nebraska (since 1996) use a district plan, with two at-large electors assigned to support the winner of the statewide popular vote.

I’ve always felt that the winner-take-all method of allocating electors was unfair because I’m a Democrat in a predominantly Republican state. Consider this… during my lifetime, my home state of Indiana has gone for 15 Republicans and only 2 Democrats. Since I was able to vote beginning in 1976 Indiana has voted for Republicans 11 times and Democrats only once.

Specifically, in my lifetime Indiana has voted for Eisenhower (1956), Nixon (1960), Johnson (1964), and Nixon (1968, 1972), Ford (1976), Reagan (1980, 1984), Bush 41 (1988, 1992), Dole (1996), Bush 43 (2000, 2004), Obama (2008), Romney (2012), and Trump (2016, 2020).

Indiana voted for the winners in 11 out of 17 presidential elections in my lifetime. Only in 2008 when Obama won did my vote actually contribute to the eventual winner.

In the 2000 election, Al Gore won the popular vote but not the electoral vote. The Supreme Court halted all of the recounts because they said that the varied recount methods used by different counties violated equal protection under the law. That’s a decision that even some conservative Republicans thought was poorly decided even though it handed the presidency to their guy.

At the time, many pundits said, “This shows you just how much every vote matters.” Bullshit! Nothing could’ve been further from the truth. If we had a direct election of the president, my votes for Al Gore and Hillary Clinton would have contributed to their wins. But because I live in a predominantly Republican state, my vote has contributed to the eventual outcome only once.

I believed that after the 2000 election debacle, there would be a big push to amend the Constitution and get rid of the Electoral College altogether but there was barely a whisper suggesting that should happen.

After Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 but won the Electoral vote, I again expected Democrats to push to abolish the Electoral College. While there were some rumblings along those lines, there was no major movement to attempt to do that. Twice now, Democrat candidates in my lifetime who have won the popular vote have lost the electoral vote.

There have been multiple attempts to reform or repeal the electoral college system one of which is proposed by Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh who we talked about in a previous episode of this podcast. See the Wikipedia article I have linked which describes many of those efforts.

I think they are reluctant to change the system because it means you would have to campaign in all 50 states. With the current system, we have a certain number of states that are solidly blue Democrat and others that are solidly red Republican so you only have to focus on the so-called purple states that could go either way.

The bottom line is, here in Indiana, my vote doesn’t count. If you are Republican in a predominantly Democrat state such as New York, Massachusetts, or California your vote doesn’t count either.

But the most disturbing part is that the way the Constitution is written, your vote doesn’t have to count anytime anywhere regardless of which party you prefer or which party dominates your state.

You have no constitutional right to vote for president.

While each of the 50 states currently holds elections to determine who the electors will be, there is no guarantee that those electors will actually vote for who they said they were pledged to vote for. These are so-called “Faithless Electors”

According to Wikipedia, in 59 elections, 165 electors did not cast their votes for president or vice president as prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented. Of those:

See the Wikipedia article on faithless electors linked in the description for details.

In 2016, some suggested that the responsible thing for the Republican electors to do was to ignore that Trump had secured enough electoral votes and that they should go rogue and pick a different candidate for the good of the country and the Republican Party. Of course, most of these suggestions were being made by Democrats.

Although that was a partisan suggestion, it wasn’t entirely out of line. The original idea behind the Electoral College was that the uneducated masses should not be trusted with such an important decision. Instead, you would choose learned men to make that decision for you. This would insulate us from a populist candidate who could persuade the average voter but who was otherwise unqualified to hold the office.

According to Wikipedia, as of 2020, 33 states and the District of Columbia have laws that require electors to vote for the candidates for whom they pledged to vote, though in half of these jurisdictions, there is no enforcement mechanism. In 14 states, votes contrary to the pledge are voided and the respective electors are replaced, and in two of these states they may also be fined. Three other states impose a penalty on faithless electors but still count their votes as cast.

In July 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that states could penalize faithless electors yet it did not outlaw faithless electors. It is constitutionally valid for any of the winning electors to vote for whomever they want for president or to abstain from voting altogether.

One of the reasons I bring up this entire topic is that many states are enacting laws that make it difficult for people to vote. Also, some proposals would allow states to throw out an entire election if it didn’t go in favor of the ruling state party’s candidate. If you live in a state with a Republican-controlled legislature and governor but somehow the Democrat candidate wins the popular vote in that state, they could throw out the election and appoint electors for the Republican candidate. And to be fair, the opposite can happen. If the Republican candidate wins a Democrat-controlled state, Theoretically they could throw out those results and submit Democrat electors. Honestly, that is much less likely to happen on the Democrat side than it is on the Republican side. Then again, if Trump wins in 2024, God only knows what Democrats might do to prevent him from returning to office.

Of particular importance are the state Secretaries of State who are typically in charge of elections. For example, Trump tried to persuade the Georgia Republican Secretary of State to “find him” more votes. The Republican official refused to cooperate or give in to that pressure. Trump is currently under indictment in Georgia for attempting to subvert the Georgia presidential election results.

One of the reasons I decided I should read the entire Constitution is that on the day before, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump was ineligible to be president because he participated in an insurrection against the United States culminating in the events of January 6, 2021. This is based on the 14th Amendment Section 3 which states…

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

This amendment was passed after the Civil War to prevent former Confederate officials from holding office.

The New York Times reports lawsuits in 16 states have been filed to attempt to stop Trump from being on the ballot based on the 14th Amendment prohibition against insurrectionists. I provided a link to a website that is tracking these cases.

Some of the cases have been dismissed because the 14th Amendment doesn’t specifically list the president. It mentions senators, representatives, electors, those who “hold any office, civil or military” and who have taken an oath as a member of Congress or as “an officer of the United States to support the Constitution.”

The lower court in Colorado had ruled that because the president was not specifically listed it did not apply to him. It specifically lists senators, representatives, and electors but it does list “officer of the United States”. The Colorado Supreme Court decision says that obviously, the president is an officer because the Constitution refers to the office of president 25 times. In contrast, Congresspersons are not officers, they are members. So that is why they, and electors who cannot be officers, are listed specifically.

The case will undoubtedly be appealed to the US Supreme Court. From what I hear, the Colorado decision was extremely well-crafted in a manner that the Conservative justices should appreciate. They have frequently argued that the Constitution should be strictly interpreted in a way that the words mean what they say and that you should use the meaning of the words as they were understood when the article was drafted. The Colorado decision does exactly that even citing dictionaries published at the time it was written post-Civil War. The decision also cites the various debates that went on during the adoption of the amendment in an attempt to understand the original intent of the amendment.

My guess as a nonexpert is that the Supreme Court decision will boil down to whether or not they believe Trump’s activities constituted “insurrection”. Yet the Colorado decision notes that when the amendment has been applied previously, it did not require that the subject actually be convicted of a crime. As to the question of whether or not his speech at the Ellipse rally constituted the incitement of a riot, the Colorado decision cites Trump’s refusal to call off his supporters as well as praising them for their actions as giving aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. His refusal to bring in the National Guard also constituted support to the insurrectionists. So even if he didn’t personally participate in the insurrection, his activities to organize the event and his inaction to stop the event count under the 14th Amendment according to the Colorado court.

Critics of the Colorado decision say an unelected judiciary is robbing the voters of their ability to vote for the candidate of their choice. The counterargument is that this ineligibility provision is no different than the requirement that the president must be at least 35 years of age and a natural-born citizen of the United States. The 14th Amendment was ratified by the elected Congress and the state legislatures at the time. It is as much of the Constitution as any other provision. We the people chose these rules. If you don’t like it, repeal the 14th Amendment.

Whatever happens in the weeks ahead or has happened by the time you hear this podcast, it is clear we are on the verge of a major constitutional crisis the likes of which we have never seen in our entire history.

The current system is inherently unfair. Many have argued that it was designed to give inordinate power to smaller states in an attempt to preserve slavery as an institution.

The bottom line is, that the Constitution does NOT guarantee your ability to vote for president and could be taken away from you at the whim of either party. At the drop of a hat, your state could decide to go back to the system where the state legislature appoints electors possibly even after the election had taken place. Such an action would be perfectly constitutional. Historically it was done before and it could be done again.

I’ve not heard any candidates from either party for any major office such as president, vice president, or Congress call for the repeal of the current Electoral College system. No matter what your political affiliation is, if you value your vote, you should speak up and demand that the Constitution be amended to allow for the direct election of the president.

That is a lengthy and difficult process. In the interim, you should be calling for your state to allocate its electors on a district-by-district basis. There is a historical precedent for that and it is within the state’s power to do so. Changing to a district-by-district allocation of electoral votes would mean that in a predominantly Democrat urban district in Indiana where I live in an otherwise Republican state, my vote would count. And that in a rural district of a mostly Democrat state, it is more likely that Republican votes would count. Allocating electoral votes based on districts is not as fair as a direct election but it is at least a step in the right direction. It’s a step that Maine and Nebraska have already taken.

By the way, while reading the Constitution, I found other interesting provisions of which I was unaware. Perhaps in a future episode, we will review some of those.

One final thought about the Constitution. Let’s consider the words of the preamble:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It’s popular to complain about the government as if it were some separate entity. But the first three words of the preamble say at all. “We the people”. We are the government. We elect our representatives and we must hold them accountable to do what’s right for the country. If we don’t like it, vote them out. If we don’t like the Constitution, amend it. So consider the phrase “In order to form a more perfect union.” We have always recognized that our form of government is imperfect. However, a representative democracy is still the best form of government. While it might be nice to have a powerful leader group of leaders who had absolute authority to “fix everything” that would put us at their mercy. Democracy is the only form of government that can guarantee your rights because YOU are the government. No one rules you. That is unless you let them. You have to be politically aware, think critically, think for yourself, respect others, and join together to solve our problems. If the government doesn’t work. It’s our fault because the government is constituted by we the people.

After all of my political rants, I like to quote political comedian Dennis Miller as he used to include his weekly HBO program.

“Hey, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.”

You have a very Merry Christmas and a blessed and safe new year.

When I return after a break, I have one more political rant about social media and then we return to our regularly scheduled podcasts where I reminisce about my college days. I finally got deeper into computer programming classes and developed new friendships that have lasted for decades.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe everyone