A couple problems with 'abolishing the electoral college' for Dems.
First, you'd need to amend the Constitution and that's not going happen in such an evenly divided political environment.
Secondly, it may not change the presidential election the way you think it would. Right now the presidential campaigns only focus on a few swing States, however if it became a national campaign then that would dramatically and the campaigns would target all 50 states, which in turn would change the turnout.
Further, there's a dynamic in deeply blue States that discourages Republican turn out -- my vote for president in California basically doesn't count under the electoral college and as a result a lot of GOP supporters don't vote in deep blue States like California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, etc. However, if their votes counted the same as anyone in the nation, they'd likely go out to vote. Also, abolishing the EC would affect local ballot propositions because many of those are placed on the ballot with the express purpose of driving turnout to get an electoral college win. In short, just because Hilary won a plurality of votes nationwide doesn't mean she would win a majority or plurality if the electoral college were abolished. We don't know what that result would be because the campaigns didn't run a nationwide campaign -- they ran a bunch of local state campaigns because of the EC. Hell, Hilary didn't even step foot in Wisconsin since April.
THE PRESIDENT: If I had the perfect answer to that, then I’d run for President. (Laughter.) Look, this takes us a little bit far afield, but I do think that it’s relevant to the scientific community, it’s relevant to our democracy, citizenship. We’re going to have to rebuild, within this Wild, Wild West of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to.
I use the analogy in politics -- it used to be there were three television stations and Walter Cronkite is on there and not everybody agreed, and there were always outliers who thought that it was all propaganda, and we didn’t really land on the Moon, and Elvis is still alive, and so forth. (Laughter.) But, generally, that was in the papers that you bought at the supermarket right as you were checking out. And generally, people trusted a basic body of information.
It wasn’t always as democratic as it should have been. And Zoe is exactly right that -- for example, on something like climate change, we’ve actually been doing some interesting initiatives where we’re essentially deputizing citizens with hand-held technologies to start recording information that then gets pooled -- they’re becoming scientists without getting the PhD. And we can do that in a lot of other fields as well.
But there has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.
And that’s hard to do, but I think it’s going to be necessary, it’s going to be possible. I think the answer is obviously not censorship, but it’s creating places where people can say, this is reliable and I’m still able to argue about -- safely -- about facts and what we should do about it while still -- not just making stuff up.
However there are only about 35 people in the world over the age of 112. I'd say that having an identity card is a little short of absolute proof that this guy is 145.
Between 2008 and 2011, there were over 4,000 people who applied for jobs using SSNs for people who were born before the 20th century.
We wouldn't want another Juan Valdez dark matter spill! Just say No! to sober robots!
So, will the drug dogs now "hit" on the cocaine molecules on the ferromagnetic strip on the card? WTF??? We have Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the major party candidates, and now this shit?
Giant Meteor 2016! Just end it already.
The major difference between bonds and bond traders is that the bonds will eventually mature.