interviews
After the Polls Close
by John Fortier
October 19, 2020
This interview with John Fortier, Director of Bipartisan Policy Center’s Democracy Project, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Why do we have an Electoral College?
Our election system is really much more of a states’ issue than people realize. We vote differently in different states, and the Electoral College really is the mechanism by which we vote through the states.
Who makes up the Electoral College? Who are our electors?
Sometimes people think of the Electoral College as a point system — if you win a state, you get some amount of points — but, really, when you vote, you are electing a slate of electors.
Slates of electors — one Republican, one Democrat — are nominated or elected by the parties in each state. On election day, the public votes for one of those slates.
The vote on November 3rd typically results in an Electoral College majority. There is a second election in December amongst electors, but it is not widely discussed or covered, mostly, because it doesn’t matter. Electors are loyal to their parties and typically vote as expected. The new Congress then votes to validate the Electoral College votes on January 6th, and by January 20th we reach inauguration. Usually, there are not any great hiccups in the process.
Does that change if it is a close election?
Even in a close election, we don’t think too much about the Electoral College. However, there are a few things that have happened in the past that could happen again.
First, there can be “faithless electors” — electors who vote against the popular vote of their state. Electors, for the most part, have the ability to act freely, and some people worry that they could tip a very close election if a few electors were to change their votes at the last minute — they could move the total for a candidate from 270 to 268, for example. However, in the past, faithless votes tend to be protest votes that do not really amount to anything.
Recently, a number of states have passed strict laws that bind their electors to the popular vote of their state. Previously, laws asked that electors be bound and, in some cases, imposed small fines on faithless electors, but there were no severe constraints. In the 15 States that now have this power, electors will be replaced if they vote the wrong way.
I wasn't sure if that was going to pass constitutional muster, but The Supreme Court upheld it this summer. The Supreme Court actually, in their footnote, hinted at the idea that the only case where this would cause additional hiccups is in the scenario that a candidate unexpectedly drops out, dies, or, for one reason or another, is not on the ticket. Which, of course, is something that has been in the conversation over the last couple of weeks with the president having Covid.
Another thing that can happen is the bargaining amongst the electors. In the 1968 election, George Wallace, a third-party candidate, won states and won electoral votes. Amongst the Nixon and the Humphrey electors, there was some discussion about coming together to exclude the Wallace electors. They didn’t want the election thrown into the House of Representatives, which is what happens if the Electoral College is tied.
But these are sort of odd situations, and these aren't the issues that keep me up at night.
What would you consider to be the more pressing concerns with the Electoral College during this election cycle?
I think the more realistic scenario that we could see is something like what started to happen in 2000 or what happened in 1876. In both cases, because the state race was so tight, there was a real question as to which slate of electors, the Republican slate or the Democratic slate, should be appointed.
In Florida 2000, if Al Gore were to pull ahead in the recount, would a second slate of electors need to be appointed? Eventually the Supreme Court stepped in and halted the recount in Florida, and the Republican slate of electors was appointed. But, imagine a scenario where the dispute is not resolved.
There are cases where two slates of electors may be appointed, and there is no set way to resolve that conflict.
Eventually, the dispute will end up in Congress’ hands, but it is not clear in The Constitution how Congress is supposed to decide. After 1876, when multiple slates of electors were actually sent in, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act to try to address how to approach that sort of scenario, but, I would say, it still is ambiguous.
It is also important to note that though we do have popular elections in every state, popular elections are not guaranteed by The Constitution.
Early on in our democracy, many state legislatures would directly appoint state electors. If you had a Republican legislature, you would appoint a Republican slate of electors. While this faded out after the Civil War, an argument — a controversial argument — was made by the Florida legislature in 2000. The Republican legislature felt that Democratic attorney generals were unfairly favoring the recount for Gore, so they wanted to step in and send the slate of electors to Washington themselves.
If I wanted to think of disaster scenarios — this is the sort of case that would be the disaster scenario. This is where there is the least amount of clarity in the election mechanisms after November 3rd. This is where parties could really seriously disagree, and this is where we have no third arbitrator to decide between the two of them. The parties would have to work it out on their own.
Are there deadlines that are important to know in the electoral process?
The president’s term ends on January 20th at noon.
Despite conversations about postponing the election, it would be incredibly hard to do. The deadline is in The Constitution.
If the election is not resolved by the inauguration, if it is still with the House of Representatives, then perhaps we have to go to the line of succession. But January the 20th at noon is when a new president has to take office.
There are two other dates that might matter. They're both in law, not in The Constitution, so theoretically they could be moved. There is the meeting of the electors, which is on December 14th this year. There is also the “safe harbor” deadline which is 6 days before the meeting of the electors, which is set by law to try and aid in the counting by ensuring no interference from Congress if the counting is complete by the set deadline. This date was highlighted by The Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, and was one of the reasons they stopped the recount.
Recently, it seems there have been a lot of claims that the electoral process is undemocratic, and a push to move us towards a national popular vote. Do you think the Electoral College is still a democratic system?
The Electoral College has never been particularly popular in the modern era. Many people think that we should have a national popular vote — it is a more natural line of thought. And if we were to start from scratch now, maybe we would instill a national popular vote.
But is the Electoral College system undemocratic? I guess that I am not fully convinced of that.
We are a country of states. And though a few times there has been a difference between who wins the Electoral College and who wins the popular vote, it still is very unlikely to happen.
The proposal for a national vote, as it stands, is a halfway house, because it is really hard to amend The Constitution. States can appoint electors directly based on whatever criterion they want, and so the idea would be to appoint electors based on national popular, rather than the states' vote. But, there are some issues with that. What happens if the election is really close? You can’t really recount a national election, you can only recount the states. You would also have to make sure that all the states are uniform in their elections. And maybe that's a good thing, maybe people would like that. But maybe when we get down to the nitty-gritty and people will say, "Well, we really liked the way we vote in Alaska, it's good for us, or we like the way we vote in Oregon."
It is hard for a party to be on the losing end of this system twice within 16 years, and perhaps once more again, but I think there are reasons to be cautious about changing the system.
interviews
The Symptoms of Our Food System
by Nathan Sayre
May 6, 2020
This interview with Nathan Sayre, a professor and geology chair at UC Berkeley, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
How do food systems propel or participate in diseases?
The connection between food systems and pandemics is indirect, but it's critical. The emergence of novel viruses is strongly determined by how food is produced, because how humans interact with wildlife and livestock shapes the conditions in which deadly types of pathogens can emerge.
The emergence of several very deadly germs of the past, such as smallpox, was the result of mutations that were made possible by high concentrations of people and livestock living in close proximity. Often, wildlife play important roles as the source pool or as an intermediary host for germs that “jump” to livestock and then to humans. The frequency, intensity and location of animals and people matter as well, and these variables are affected by human activities such as deforestation. In West Africa, for example, forest clearing appears to have intensified contact between humans and wildlife in ways that may have increased the likelihood of outbreaks such as Ebola, whether through the so-called bushmeat trade or some other pathway. More generally, the fact that there are people who either need to consume wildlife, or consider wildlife a delicacy, or gather food in places that put them in contact with wildlife (e.g., bat urine on fruit that humans collect) are conditions of a food system.
We think that the novel coronavirus emerged from bats. Though the exact pathway of transmission from bats to humans remains uncertain, it appears to intersect with a wet market: a place where humans interacted closely with live and freshly-killed animals, both domesticated and wild.
We may feel like people who consume wildlife are in an entirely different food system from the one that we are accustomed to, but we are connected, if only through the global movement of people and goods.
Roughly two-thirds of all the antibiotics consumed in the US are administered to livestock--not to cure illnesses but because the drugs make the animals grow faster, which enhances profitability. Nothing could be more effective in spurring bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics!
Do you feel like this is a moment in which big agriculture will find ways to further consolidate its power, or do you think we’ll see systemic change come out of this?
Given how extraordinarily concentrated the food system is already, it is hard to imagine how it could get more concentrated. We are talking about groups of three to five corporations with a combined 60, 70, 80 percent of market share (or more) depending on the product. Most are huge conglomerates with unbelievable market power already. They will undoubtedly attempt to grow further and grab whatever market advantages they can find--they always do--but I don't know that this crisis uniquely privileges them any more than crises tend to privilege those who are already in positions of advantage anyway.
However, the contradictions and inequities in the food system have been amplified and made more conspicuous by the pandemic, bringing them into view for many people who might barely notice them under business as usual. This presents an opportunity for change.
What are some of the inequities?
I would say the biggest concerns labor, and the conditions under which our food is produced, harvested, processed, distributed, served. One of the great contradictions of our current system is that the people who are most directly involved with the production of our food, are among the least secure in their access to that food: they’re paid to handle it everyday but they can’t afford to buy it themselves. Those who grow food, harvest it, handle it and prepare it, make some of the lowest wages in our economy, and they experience poverty at some of the highest rates in our society. This is also true for restaurants. The people who cook, the people who serve, and the people who clean up are paid brutally low wages. On top of that, they’ve been among the most likely to lose their jobs in this crisis.
We are telling these people they have to work, because we have to have food, even if it puts them at high risk of contracting COVID. But then how can we expect them to continue to work for low wages and no benefits? Of course, this is not something that we do individually. It is collective, market mediated behavior, but it is incumbent on us to demand that food system workers receive better pay and working conditions. And the easiest, most effective way to do that is through public policies--that is, the political process.
How can we be cautious of the health and safety of the people providing us food?
If public policy can embrace mandatory paid sick leave for people who work with food in factories, restaurants and hotels, that would be a huge gain. Organizers and activists have been fighting for this for years and years, and it has been staunchly resisted by the National Restaurant Association, among others. This could be an opportunity for a very basic, logical reform.
Restaurants are really vulnerable and interesting. David Chang tweeted “Restaurants are too small to fail”, early in this ciris. Many restaurants are small businesses with payroll coming out of last night's patrons. The industry is crumbling on all levels. Workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and small businesses are struggling to stay afloat. What policies are you looking for to affect change all the way through?
Who will recover from this, and how, depends a great deal on how banks and government programs are put together to help cope with the situation. I’m not an expert in this area, but the signs don't look very good so far, I must say. Once things begin to return to normal, presumably people will start going back to the restaurants. Hopefully the people who have built their lives around running good, small local restaurants, will be able to open back up and return to better times. But their ability to do that will likely depend on the kinds of access to credit that they have through the current crisis. The economy needs to go into hibernation, you might say, without having stored up reserves to survive the winter; credit is what small businesses need to survive. At this point, it's hard to feel like the powers that be in Washington are as worried about small business owners as they are about big corporate donors and lobbyists, but that almost goes without saying.
What else have you found yourself thinking about right now?
I teach my students that our food system is profoundly capitalist. What does this mean and how did we get here? We have allowed our food system to be shaped to its core by the imperative to make profit. This has resulted in tremendous technological innovation and productivity, but also tremendous surplus. Our food system is plagued by overproduction – which sounds weird to most people, because the dominant discourse around food is that we don't have enough food, that we have to produce in the way we do now because of scarcity. But if you look at the history of our food system, especially as it has evolved in the last hundred years, the biggest problem over and over again has been that there's been too much food.
Put those two together: the profit motivated, capital accumulating character of the system and the overproduction that plagues this system. What do you get? You get cheap food, suffering farmers, and smaller players struggling to stay afloat in a system dominated by bigger and bigger entities. The fact that we need to eat, and the fact that what and how we eat matters to us in all kinds of affective and cultural ways, are subordinated to the need of these firms to make profits. In other words, the use value of food – its quality for sustenance and nutrition – has become secondary to its exchange value – its quantity in processes of capital accumulation.
This crisis is forcing all of us to recognize and appreciate the use values in our lives, while the exchange values begin to look secondary or even meaningless. The things that really matter right now are quite basic. Do you have access to food? Do you have decent shelter? Are your loved ones safe? Are you healthy? Money obviously matters for all these things – are the inequities along these basic lines are shocking – but only as a means, and no longer as an end in itself.
It doesn't care how it treats the land. It doesn't care how it treats workers. It doesn't care whether the food it produces is healthy. It cares about competing for market share and profits, return on investment, and “growth” – not the growth of plants and animals and people but growth of capital.
We have all kinds of health related problems that are symptoms of these facts. The obesity “epidemic” is a symptom of the food system – and by the way I don’t think we’ll keep calling it an epidemic now that we understand what a real epidemic is about. Obesity is not a symptom of people being lazy and sitting on the couch. Sociologically, obesity correlates with poverty, race, and geographical-environmental marginalization. Its astonishing growth over the past half-century is the result of a food system that uses people's bodies to absorb the surpluses of our food system, even if it makes them sick or eventually kills them.
That's a brutal way to describe that.
Maybe so, but the real brutality is in living it, right? Maybe now we'll think more critically about our food system. Maybe we will realize that the production of food for the sake of nutrition should not be entirely subordinated to the production of food for the sake of profits.
Right. And can we think of profit as something that is exponentially growing in any business? And at what cost?
On one hand everyone needs food and everyone needs food every day. That means that there's a sort of guaranteed demand for food. It’s a captive market, you might say. But demand for food is also inelastic, in economists’ jargon: You only need so much and once you have what you need, you don’t really want much more. So it’s hard to get you to eat five or ten times more.
On one hand, this makes it hard to refuse to participate in the food system. On the other hand, it's hard to make infinitely expanding profits from it. This makes food fundamentally unlike other commodities. I think there is definitely a contradiction between quality and quantity.