GIVEN THAT 49.9 PERCENT OF U.S. VOTERS chose Trump, it comes as no surprise that “brain rot” has been named the Oxford Word of the Year. Here, in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, are tidbits about both of these matters, the election result and also the Word of the Year.
Image from Oxford University Press.
A Landslide? Not Exactly. As of 4:05 PST December 3, three weeks past election day, Google displayed (an evolving) count of 77,193,105 votes for Donald Trump (49.9 percent) and 74,898,009 votes for Kamala Harris (48.4 percent).
Image from google.com.
Green Party Jill Stein received 781,840 votes; Independent (??) Robert Kennedy 754,562. Neither of these mattered a hill of beans in terms of the official winner determined by the Electoral College, a landslide for Trump, 312-226.
The Electoral College. Image from cnn.com.
The Electoral College. According to our National Archives, “The Electoral College is a process, not a place. The Founding Fathers established it in the Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.”
That is, should one trust the elected members of the Congress or the populace? Apparently neither.
Signing of the Constitution of the United States, Howard Chandler Christy, 1940. Image from Wikipedia (and also seen on the back of a $2 bill).
At the time, of course, “qualified citizens” were determined by each state, typically white males owning property of a certain dollar value. It wasn’t until 1828 that the majority of land ownership requirements were eliminated from state laws. North Carolina was the last to do so in 1856.
Again, as noted by The National Archives, “The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Voting Rights (1870)… granted African American men the right to vote.” And don’t hold your breath. Any women didn’t get the vote until 1920. And the National Archives continues, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965, extended in 1970, 1975, and 1982, abolished all remaining deterrents to exercising the right to vote and authorized federal supervision of voter registration where necessary. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the act involving federal oversight of voting rules in nine states.”
And, of course, politicians have been screwing around with the voting franchise ever since.
Protecting a Misinformed Populace? Enough of whether democracy requires a direct vote of the populace or the oddity of our some winner-takes-all/some proportionality-matters Electoral College. What about brain rot?
No, I haven’t forgotten this phenomenon, in my view so prevalent among 49.9 percent of the populace. Tomorrow in Part 2 we’ll delve into Oxford University Press and its six contestants for Word of the Year. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024