Rage against the machine
By 
Following up on yesterday’s post regarding the popular vote:
(1) The LA Times reports this morning that more than 4.3 million California ballots are yet to be counted. If the current 62/33 split between Clinton and Trump holds, that’s another 1.3 million net votes for Clinton. She already has a 350K lead in the official national count, so a final margin somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million seems likely.
(2) In my younger and more vulnerable years I remember quite distinctly that the possibility of a candidate winning the EC while losing the popular vote was talked about as if it were a potential political problem of the first order, perhaps even rising to the level of a constitutional crisis. So why is this outcome now considered just one of those things/those are the rules/wisdom of the framers or whatever, besides the always applicable principle that IOKIYAR?
Keep in mind that prior to 2000 something like this hadn’t happened since the 19th century, at a time when the large majority of the US adult population was disenfranchised anyway. Then we got Bush v. Gore, in which the candidate who won the popular vote had the EC stolen from him by the Rule of Law, as manifested by the Federalist Society’s Strict Constructionist Supreme Court (Seriously fuck all these people. Since I’m supposed to be a prissy law professor I’m not supposed to swear in public, but I’m going to make an exception for at least the next four years, along with exceptions to other rules, like don’t drink before 10 AM. Just kidding/not kidding).
One of the under-rated invidious effects of the 2000 election is that it was so supremely fucked up in so many ways that people sort of rolled with the “losing” candidate winning the popular vote, or at least it didn’t get nearly the attention it would have if not for all the other shenanigans.
Anyway, if not for Antonin Scalia’s band of merry pranksters this present catastrophe, in which the losing candidate is going to get well north of a million more votes than the winner, would probably resonate more with the public as being the travesty of basic democratic values that it in fact represents.