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
As Long as You are Ashamed of Your Debt
by Melissa Byrne
September 18, 2020
This interview with Melissa Byrne, a political and community organizer, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Melissa | I have been doing work around free college and canceling student debt for about ten years now. I don't get paid for it unless I am working on a campaign. It has been a labor of taking something that impacted me on a personal level and channeling that energy into a big issue. As much as it hurt me as a person, I knew that I wasn't alone. There are 46 million Americans that have student loan debt, and our pain wasn't being taken seriously.
I grew up in a single-parent, working-class family. When I started college, I was just told to sign on the dotted line. I couldn't comprehend the degree to which I was signing my life away with all that debt.
A lot of my peers didn't have debt, so I felt a shame attached to it. Even very progressive people would ask me, in a very judgemental tone, "you have how much debt?" But I just didn't have a free choice. This was my only option. This is just what it was.
frank | Yeah. There is a lot of undue shame attached to debt.
Definitely. I had a shift in the way I thought about my debt about 10 years ago. I was working on a campaign, and I had to go with my boss to an early morning meeting where a famous advocate was speaking. There were about 20 of us sitting around a big table. The guest speaker asked people to raise their hand if they had student loan debt. I was the youngest person there, and the only one to raise my hand. And then he asks, "Well, how much debt do you have?" "I'm not telling," I said.
He asked again and I said half the amount, because, let's be real, shame is really hard to overcome. But I left that meeting with this realization that it is not my fault that I have student loan debt. This wasn’t a personal failing, this was a societal failing. And I left feeling like, oh, I'm going to solve this issue. And the person that put me on the spot was Reverend Jesse Jackson.
What are you seeking politically?
I want student loan debt to be cancelled, and I want to move towards working on making college free going forward. It's two problems at once. We need to cancel the $1.7 trillion outstanding in student loan debt, and we have to make sure that there's a path forward so that students are not harmed by student loan debt again.
Ideally, as a country, people should be able to obtain whatever skills they need to be able to do the work that brings them joy and care for their family. Higher education should not be an intergenerational wealth transfer. Poor people and working-class people should not be taxed for their ambition.
It's really bad, but it doesn't have to be this way. We have this burden because Reagan pulled funding out of higher education. We are here because education, a lot of the time, has been used to preserve wealth and power. People with privilege don't want a free market for their kids to compete with, they want to preserve access.
When we say higher education, it doesn't just mean getting a fancy liberal arts degree, it means making sure that community colleges and four-year colleges are set up for good partnerships with building trades. You go in, you get an associate’s degree, and you have a pathway into the carpenter's union or IBW.
You advocate for widespread debt cancellation for everybody rather than a targeted approach. Why?
I think one thing to remember is that nobody who is wealthy takes out debt for school - their wealthy parents pay for it. Consider somebody who had to take out about $300,000 for dental school. Sure they might be making $200,000 a year as a dentist, but $300,000 of debt at a 5% interest rate can hinder them -- it means they can't dedicate one day a week to providing free care. I've talked to dentists in this exact situation. They want to expand their services to the most vulnerable, but when they have $2,000 a month in student loan payments, they need the money coming in.
When you start drawing lines on who's worthy of debt forgiveness, you then get enemies of any change whatsoever. I advocate for canceling all student loan debt because it's both an ideological commitment to the idea that the loan itself is wrong, as well as taking away all the pain points in actually winning this policy battle.
What is the pushback that you hear the most? Do Democrats and Republicans have similar aversions to debt forgiveness?
You have this one strain of people, if you look at the work of Sandy Baum, for example, who are aghast at this idea that a rich person could potentially benefit. They miss the whole point. We don’t say that rich kids can't go to your public high school.
And right now, the federal government subsidizes private colleges in all of these different ways. Harvard receives around $60,000 per year per student in local, state, and federal subsidies. That means the billionaire's kid at Harvard is getting more federal support for their education than someone who goes to UMass, which receives around $12,000 a year in subsidies.
As someone who worked on both Bernie campaigns, why do you think it's important now that people shift over their support to Vice President Biden?
For one thing, it was really great seeing Bernie move from only supporting interest rate reduction in 2016 to full cancellation in 2020. Even in that short four year time period, we were able to really move the marker on this topic.
As of right now with Vice President Biden, he's supporting a couple of different forms of student loan forgiveness. He uses the phrase forgiveness, I use the word cancellation, but it gets us to the same point. I'm trying not to argue over words and focus on the bigger outcomes. We need him to win, so we can do the coalition work and the organizing work we need to do to get it all the way done.
Do you think you can get there with Biden if he is elected?
He is already 80% there. We are starting from a good place. We don't have to convince him of the concept, now it's just negotiating over details.
Are there any state or hyperlocal policies that we should be paying attention to?
New York state has the Excelsior scholars and, of course, because it's Cuomo, it was done in such a convoluted way. But it has proved the concept that people want free college, of course, they do. New Mexico is experimenting with a free college program. New Jersey is doing free community college and has started to look towards some parts of free college.
There hasn't been as much on the cancellation side. Right now, all federal loans paused. They are set to end on January 1st with a cliff. They were originally set to end on September 30th, but I think the Trump administration realized it would be really bad to have people make their first loan payments in the month before the election. I expect borrowers to be fucked if he wins reelection and payments to resume on January 1st.
Do you think, culturally, there is an outsized emphasis placed on higher education as a necessary means of succeeding?
I think the danger is that that can be used as an excuse to not match people to the college that's right for them. Everybody should be able to go into the higher education program that's right for them, without stigma and without being coerced into predatory for-profit programs.
A big part of higher education is the network you get out of it - it's the friends, it's the community, it's the exposure to ideas outside of where you are from. As a society, we need to get back to a place where we value education. We need to understand that it's part of what allows you to be mobile and to live life to the fullest.
But I also don't think higher education should ever be something that is seen as a marker of you being better than somebody else because you have a degree. But that is also a problem with capitalism in general. So those are bigger structural problems that we have to solve as well.