Eric The Blue

D.J. Tice defends the Electoral College

Practitioners of science assume that disputants on all sides of a question are moved by the same goal of finding out the truth about nature.  As a consequence, they feel obliged, in their writings, to address the strongest argument that can be marshaled against the view they are espousing.  In an ideal world, this practice would apply universally, including to questions of politics and public policy. 

So what is the strongest case that can be made in favor of the Electoral College? 

I honestly don't know of a good argument.  The result of our most recent election, wherein Trump prevailed by a comfortable margin in the Electoral College despite losing the national vote by more than 2 million ballots (about 1.5% of all ballots cast), has put defenders of the Electoral College on the defensive, and it's hard for me to detect in their squirmings anything like a cogent argument.  Here is a representative specimen from the hand of D.J. Tice, an editorial writer at the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper.  Some observations.

(1) That Tice is not constrained by the earnest conventions of science may be detected in his slippery linguistic formulations.  For example: 

[I]t's unfortunate that the main problem with the Electoral College has struck again.  For the second time in 16 years--the fifth time in U.S. history--the Electoral College outcome and the popular vote were in conflict.

It seems the rhetorical task here is to minimize the "main problem" by indicating its rare incidence, a goal that is aided by skating over the fact that presidential elections are quadrennial events.  Thus "fifth time in U.S. history" means about 1-in-every-11, and "for the second time in 16 years" means 2 out of the last 5.

(2) Tice's "unfortunate" doesn't begin to describe it.  The outcome is "unfortunate" because it's undemocratic, which is worse than mere misfortune.  The concept of "fortune" suggests remedies are beyond our reach, which isn't true.

(3) On the possibility of remedies, Tice writes:

I am still convinced the Electoral College does America more good than harm. More precisely, I am still not convinced that alternative systems would surely be better, free from difficulties and distortions. Imaginary systems always are perfect; real ones never are.

This has to it the sound of hard-headed good sense but is actually the functional equivalent of: "I'm against dropping the Electoral College and if I could think of a reason I'd be sure to divulge it."

(4) Since Tice doesn't, let's describe, however briefly, the undemocratic essence of the Electoral College.  After the election, one of my FB friends linked to an article about the Electoral College at some right-wing site and commented that small states, "like the Dakotas," should have a few more electoral votes (and large ones a few less), so that they wouldn't be ignored in presidential campaigns.  Annoyed by the way in which his similarly benighted FB buddies were chiming in, I pointed out that the Dakotas have between them 6 electoral votes and a population of about 1.6 million, which comes to about 267,000 people per electoral vote.  California has a population of about 39.1 million.  If it got 1 electoral vote per 267,000 population, it would have 146 electoral votes.  But it only has 55.  With disparities like this, it's inevitable that the outcome that matters will sometimes diverge from the choice made by the country's voters.

The Electoral College is a gob of spit in the face of the democratic principle about "one citizen, one vote."

(5) It's actually worse than that.  So steeply does the Electoral College discount so many ballots that the people who cast them might as well not have voted at all.  There are still a few million uncounted ballots, but who cares?  The people who cast them live in Utah and Washington and California, not Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin.  Another way to put it: since the outcome is determined by electoral votes, the value of a ballot is discounted to essentially zero if it is cast for a candidate who loses within the boundaries of the state in which it's cast. 

(6) And it's actually worse than that, since it's pretty much known which state outcomes will determine the national victor before the voting begins.  If you are a Republican from Maryland, or a Democrat from Alabama, you have no voice at all, and you know it on Election Eve as surely as you know it on the day after.  The campaigns validate this conclusion by ignoring you.

(7) Let's return to what Tice says instead of what he ignores. Another of his arguments is a what-if:

[T]he Electoral College tends to produce decisive outcomes.  A pure popular vote contest might often lead to a disputed result.

I don't think Tice believes this "argument" himself--note the profusion, in so small a space, of the weasel words "tends," "might," and "often." Anyway, why should only he be allowed to play what-if?  Rank the following in order from most to least "decisive":

(a) In a national popular vote election, the count shows one candidate ahead of the other by 5,000 votes.  (This seems to be Tice's "nightmare scenario.")

(b) In an Electoral College election, the count in three relatively large states is within 1,000 votes.  The other electoral votes are divided in such a way that if candidate A wins the largest disputed state, then she's president; whereas, if candidate B wins the largest outstanding state, he also needs to win one of the other two. 

(c) No candidate wins a majority of electoral votes.  Under the Twelfth Amendment, the House of Representatives then chooses the president, with each state's delegation receiving one vote.  Even though a majority of individual representatives vote for candidate A (who won the popular vote by 2 million), candidate B becomes president after receiving a majority of the votes within 26 state delegations. 

It seems to me clear that (a) is preferable to (b) and that (c) is the real "nightmare scenario"--even though I can imagine even worse.

(8) In the spirit of science, let's allow Tice to speak for himself over the course of a few paragraphs (I've linked to his whole article above, too):

The Electoral College, by giving states, as distinct polities, a role in choosing presidents, forces politicians to concern themselves with appealing to a broad coalition of concerns across America.

Under a pure popular vote system, running up one’s vote totals in small but loyal regions and narrow demographic groups would be a smart politician’s single-minded objective. There would be little strategic sense in broadening one’s message to pursue a wider appeal.

But when a candidate has to win separate contests inside the borders of numerous states to prevail, he or she is forced to break out of the partisan stronghold and seek support in the opposition’s backyard.

I wonder whether Tice thinks that what he describes here is what Donald Trump did.  If not, his analysis is divorced from reality, right?

It seems obvious to me that Trump did not seek broad support and that his campaign was targeted narrowly at white working class voters who, happily for him, are pretty heavily concentrated across a swatch of "swing states" running along the Great Lakes, from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin.  These "distinct polities," as Tice calls them, are not really distinct. Trump was able to eke out narrow victories in several of them with a single demographic strategy, because the boundaries between them are artificial. 

Suppose California were divided in two by an east-west line drawn somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Clinton would then have won an additional two electoral votes, and, in the world according to Tice, she would have earned them, because she would have appealed to another "distinct polity."  Is it necessary to explain patiently why this is stupid?

(9) It would be a point in Tice's favor if Trump had sought the support of racial minorities.  Then he would have been trolling for votes in his opponent's "backyard," which is what Tice indicates the Electoral College forces candidates to do.  But Trump did not do that.  He did the opposite of that.  By deliberately alienating racial minorities, he assured that he would lose California and Illinois and New York by yawning margins.  But he also signaled to the group he was targeting that he was their guy, and he pulled through in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  It's a discouraging strategy--and, thanks to the Electoral College, a highly plausible one.  Clinton won hundreds of thousands of what might accurately be called superfluous votes--ballots with a mark by her name that she didn't need to win the electoral votes of the state in which they were cast.  In what turned out to be the crucial states, Trump got just what he needed.

(10) I wish it weren't true that Tice's most soaring words should be read with this racial angle in mind.  He writes:

From the beginning, this has been a vast, varied nation, embracing residents of crowded cities and of lonely frontiers under a single government. Differences in interests, customs and beliefs have only multiplied. Allowing people to enjoy some rights, autonomy and equality through groups and communities — especially as citizens of the separate states that gave the national government birth — is an important way America’s system has safeguarded freedom in all its forms.

The institution of chattel slavery was by far the most prominent difference in interest existing at the time the separate states gave birth to the national government.  Plantation owners feared they would be outvoted by the more populated northern states, so they extracted compromises that we still live with today.  Why does every state, no matter how large or small, have two senators?  To protect the interests of slave owners.  Why does the Constitution describe such a convoluted method of choosing the chief executive?  It wasn't to advance the cause of merchants in Philadelphia!  These two atrocities are mutually reinforcing in the respect that the distribution of electoral votes is based on the size of a state's congressional delegation, including senators.  In the beginning, this meant that, compared to Pennsylvania, South Carolina was over-represented in the Senate and in the Electoral College; today, it explains the wildly disparate "pull" of a voter in one of the Dakotas compared to a voter in California. 

Though it might have developed otherwise, a peculiarly depressing aspect of the Electoral College is the way in which it is still achieving the same dirty work for which it was originally intended. 

Some notes on the transition

(1) Yesterday, Trump met with Mitt Romney, who, according to the Trump transition team, is under consideration for Secretary of State.  Here is Romney on Trump last March 3:

Let me turn to national security and the safety of our homes and loved ones. Trump’s bombast is already alarming our allies and fueling the enmity of our enemies. Insulting all Muslims will keep many of them from fully engaging with us in the urgent fight against ISIS. And for what purpose? Muslim terrorists would only have to lie about their religion to enter the country.

What he said on “60 Minutes” about Syria and ISIS has to go down as the most ridiculous and dangerous idea of the campaign season: Let ISIS take out Assad, he said, and then we can pick up the remnants. Think about that: Let the most dangerous terror organization the world has ever known take over a country? This is recklessness in the extreme.

Donald Trump tells us that he is very, very smart. I’m afraid that when it comes to foreign policy he is very, very not smart.

I am far from the first to conclude that Donald Trump lacks the temperament of be president. After all, this is an individual who mocked a disabled reporter, who attributed a reporter’s questions to her menstrual cycle, who mocked a brilliant rival who happened to be a woman due to her appearance, who bragged about his marital affairs, and who laces his public speeches with vulgarity.

Donald Trump says he admires Vladimir Putin, while has called George W. Bush a liar. That is a twisted example of evil trumping good.

There is dark irony in his boasts of his sexual exploits during the Vietnam War while John McCain, whom he has mocked, was imprisoned and tortured.

Dishonesty is Trump’s hallmark: He claimed that he had spoken clearly and boldly against going into Iraq. Wrong, he spoke in favor of invading Iraq. He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11. Wrong, he saw no such thing. He imagined it. His is not the temperament of a stable, thoughtful leader. His imagination must not be married to real power.

[Snip]

Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.

His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.

Secretary of State?  Uh, maybe not.

(2) Trump replied to the above salvo by remembering how, eight years ago, Romney had made an airplane trip for the express purpose of standing beside Trump while receiving his endorsement for president.  "He was on his knees," Trump recalled, the undertone of having been fellated no doubt intended.  So maybe Romney is "on his knees" again.  Who really knows?  Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, was plainly at the end of his patience with Trump, and since the election he's been "on his knees," too. 

(3) Ben Carson, explaining that he lacks the requisite qualifications, has reportedly withdrawn from consideration for Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Does Trump have big plans for that department?  Carson was about as under qualified for the presidency as Trump but he gave no sign of being aware of that himself.

(4) Jeff Sessions for attorney general?  Boy!

(5) It looks as if Trump plans on being the first Twitter president.  Almost his first remark as the president-elect was a tweet complaining about people exercising their First Amendment rights: "Just had a very open and successful presidential election.  Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting.  Very unfair!"

It's so unfair that not everyone agrees with me!  A few hours later, he tweeted: "Love the fact that the small group of protesters last night have passion for our great country.  We will all come together and  be proud!" 

(6) It isn't only protesters that Trump may have changed his mind about. Formerly, he said the lawsuit against Trump "University" was a mere nuisance that he'd never settle since it'd be "easy" to win at trial; day before yesterday, he agreed to pay $25 million to settle.  Call me cynical, but I think it was worth $25 million to him not to have the evidence in the case widely disseminated. 

Trump's own explanation is that he was going to be too busy as president to defend himself in court.  But he could always have delegated his presidential duties to whoever composes his corrective tweets.

(7) I wonder whether the audit of his federal tax return will drag on for at least four more years.

(8) Trump has said he will turn over operating control of his business empire to his adult children--Eric, Donald, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner.  All four are on the transition team's "executive committee."  

(9) Back to things Trump may have changed his mind about: Obamacare.  Since the election, he has said he likes the provision that allows children to be covered on their parents' plan up to age 26, and also the one requiring insurance companies to enroll new customers without regard to any preexisting medical conditions.  This led to the Borowitz headline, "Trump confirms that he just googled Obamacare."  If he keeps working the Google, he may eventually learn that these provisions he likes depend upon the individual mandate.  Otherwise, it'd be like if you could wait until after the accident to purchase an auto policy.

(10) Regarding Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart news who will serve as Trump's "Chief Strategist and Counselor": nothing I've heard about him would cause me to suspect his ex-wife was lying when, in pleadings filed in their marriage dissolution case, she wrote that he didn't want to send their kids to a slick private school because it had "too many Jews."  When she pointed out that another school they were looking at had Jewish students, he asked about the percentage.  It's safe to assume neither had any African-Americans.  I mean, the schools were being discussed. 

(11) While all this was happening, more ballots were counted, and Clinton's lead over Trump has now grown to more than 1.5 million votes. 

Books of the Bible: II Corinthians

Paul's "second" letter to the Corinthians is almost wholly incoherent.  Now that I understand why, the issue reminds me of something that happened when I worked on my college's newspaper.  We'd written an editorial that we were proud of.  It was for the third or fourth issue, and all its predecessors had been milquetoast--conventional opinions supported by cliches of thought.  This one was different.  It had three paragraphs.  The first described the conventional wisdom concerning some campus issue, the second and longest explained what was wrong with the widely accepted view, and the third was a terse and possibly surprising conclusion that nevertheless followed necessarily from the argument of paragraph 2.  The space allotted for the editorial was too long for this jewel of brevity, so we filled the column by making two cuts to the galley copy and laying it down with breaks between the paragraphs.  So obsessively was this spacing work achieved that no one noticed that the second and third paragraphs switched places.  And that's the way the page looked when delivered to the printer--the ringing conclusion as the middle paragraph, followed by a "conclusion" that was actually the logic behind the real conclusion.  The editorial filled the space perfectly and made no sense at all.

People suffering from the delusion that our student journalism was some kind of inspired text, if there had been any such people, might have read the editorial over and over again before finally hitting upon the solution to the puzzle of its incoherence: the paragraphs are printed in the wrong order.  And so it is that scholarly attention to 2 Corinthians has focused on the highly problematic text, which is beset by a bottomless barrel of trouble that blots out meaning.  An imaginary general reader with almost preternatural perceptive powers could theoretically notice that there are layers of difficulty.  One reads word by word and sentence by sentence, so the first thing you might notice is that the line of thought and logic often does not proceed in any comprehensible way between small compositional units (as would be the case, also, when you came to the paragraph transitions in the college editorial described above).  Though frustrated by the difficulty of extracting any definite meaning, you might still be conscious of a certain ambient tone, which, in the first nine chapters of 2 Corinthians, may be described as friendly, grateful, warm, sometimes perhaps relieved.  Then you come to chapter 10 and without warning it's suddenly the opposite of all that.  Anger.  Acrimony.  Sarcasm.  You seem to be in the middle of an ugly dispute of indefinite origin.  Nothing that had come before prepared the way for this.  The only point of consistency is the steady impossibility of grasping any logical connection, line-by-line.  So there is incoherence at the micro and macro levels.

The explanation for this is that it's a complete misnomer to conceive of 2 Corinthians as a "second" letter to the church at Corinth.  Rather, it's a collection of fragments of many different Pauline compositions set down in confusing order and sometimes interrupted by yet other fragments that weren't even written by Paul.  Unlike the student editorial, this biblical text is too much of a muddle to admit of a single elegant solution, but the theory that it's a mishmash of fragments is almost universally acknowledged.  The scholarly disagreement is over how many fragments there are, and whether it's possible to fit them together in some plausible fashion, or whether the potentially interlocking parts require other texts that have been lost altogether.

You can just imagine what this means for the experience of an ordinary reader.  Lost at sea.  It's also true, I think, that the only way to make sense of 2 Corinthians is incompatible with fundamentalist notions concerning how the Bible is an inerrant, infallible transcript of the mind of God.

Since the scholarly consensus will be resisted by fighting fundamentalists, let's just note one detail of the scholars' brief that I think is recommended by its explanatory power.  At 2:4 Paul alludes to a certain "painful letter" he has already written and delivered to the Corinthians: "For I wrote you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you."  The only other known letter is 1 Corinthians and it does not at all fit this description.  But there is extant something that does fit the description--chapters 10, 11, and 12 of 2 Corinthians.  That is, the verse from chapter 2 of 2 Corinthians quoted above is from a letter that refers to an earlier letter, a fragment of which is printed out of sequence as chapters 10, 11 and 12 of the very "letter" known as 2 Corinthians.  This ingenious conjecture, or insight, associated most closely with the work of Gunther Bornkamm, provides a satisfying solution to several difficulties, including: 

Why does 2 Corinthians 2:4 give such a seemingly false account of the prevailing sentiment of I Corinthians?  (It doesn't.  It's describing a different letter.) 

Why do chapters 10 through 12 of 2 Corinthians differ in tone so dramatically from the first nine chapters?  (Because chapters 10 through 12 are a fragment, or possibly a reconstructed remnant, of an altogether different letter--the one that is referred to at 2:4.) 

The concluding paragraph to the headnote to 2 Corinthians in my Oxford Annotated Bible states:

Because so much of 2 Corinthians is a  response to the words and feelings of others, which are not recorded in the letter, it is difficult sometimes to follow the apostle's argument.  Its pages preserve much, however, that illuminates Paul's own life, ministry, and the concern which he felt for the churches he had established.

The first sentence seems to me an understatement and perhaps a way to admit the obvious difficulties without diving into textual problems.  (Most readers of the Bible are loath to allow that its text is frequently a mess.) The second sentence is also at least rooted in truth and deserves mention.  I noted how in 1 Corinthians Paul appears to glower at every Corinthian enthusiasm.  What they regarded as "spiritual gifts" he regarded as a falling away from his crucified Christ.  Whatever the details of the hot controversy at the center of the last three chapters of 2 Corinthians, it seems clear that there were at Corinth rival apostles who, on account of their visions and revelations and mighty works, claimed for themselves an authority they thought Paul lacked.  He reacted not with serenity but vitriol.  He seems in some respects a prickly and unpleasant person, not at all serene in his convictions and too quick to take offense.  Or we might say, by way of defense or mitigation, that he was insulted by people claiming to have from Christ special powers, since to him the crucifixion was a rebuke to strength and all worldly advantage.  Though it's hard to  make much sense of 2 Corinthians, it's not hard to believe that the man who wrote most of it also wrote Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galations, &c.

Election notes

When we sit up in bed, we look out the bedroom door down a short hallway and out an east-facing window, which, when I awoke on Wednesday morning, was letting in the first pink light of day.  Since the workings of the natural world persisted, I thought maybe I'd been hallucinating, but no, turning on the radio it was still President-elect Trump.  A few observations.

(1) All the hand-wringing on the news shows over the question of how the polls could have been so wrong: at least arguably, exaggerated.  From a sufficient altitude, you could say that the polls showed a tight race, with Clinton a little ahead--and, in a better arrangement, that would have been roughly correct, since, as I write this, her margin in the national popular vote, which in other countries is known simply as "the vote," has climbed northward to 400,000.  On election eve, Nate Silver's 538 blog put the likelihood of a Trump victory at 30%, about the same chance as a batting champion getting a hit in a particular at-bat.  The prognosticators at The Upshot blog were less bullish on Trump: in their estimate, his chance of winning was only about the same as that of an NFL kicker missing a 35-yard field goal.  Fans of the local franchise know that can happen.

(2) If you carefully redistributed the ballots of 120,000 California Democrats across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Clinton would have won 274 electoral votes.  There's obviously something wrong with a system in which 120,000 ballots, meaningless because they were cast in one state, would have been decisive if cast somewhere else.  Another way to put it: on average, a vote for Trump counted more than a vote for Clinton.  It's amazing to me that people are okay with that.

(3) In the scenario described in (2) above, what is called The Narrative would have been all about how Trumpism had been rejected, however narrowly.  It's super crazy what a difference is made by essentially no difference at all.  Instead of having to reburnish his business brand in relative obscurity (and defend himself in court), Trump will be the president.  We're alarmed by that, naturally.  Should have been more alarmed before.

(4) I watched Clinton's concession speech Wednesday morning.  It's not what I would have said, and I'm sure not all of it was what was in her heart, but it was an above-average specimen of the genre and, of course, exactly what Trump had announced he wouldn't do.  (In the scenario described in (2) above, it's scary to consider what Trump would be saying.)  A journalist on the scene at the New York Stock Exchange reported that many of the traders on the floor booed and jeered and called "Lock her up" while she was doing what had to be done.  Deplorable.  One of them was interviewed and pointed proudly to how the Dow was up, which he attributed to a rally by drug stocks over the imminent repeal of Obamacare.

Yes!  That's what's wrong with America!  The drug companies haven't been making enough money!

(Good grief.)

 

The electoral college: still sucking after all these years

With the FBI Director having cast his early ballot, the presidential race is tightening, and the magi of cable tv are busy deconstructing the candidates' respective itineraries for the remaining days of the campaign.  I've forgotten where Hillary and her opponent (aptly described by Samantha Bee as "a crotch-fondling slab of rancid meatloaf") are going, but you don't have to read Politico to know where they're not going.  They're not going to the Land of Lincoln, fifth most populated state in the country.  They're not going to the third biggest, either--that would be New York--or to Texas, second in both area and population.  And, of course, they're not going to California, the largest of all, not by just a little or only with respect to population:  if the Golden State were a country, it would easily be among the world's top ten in GDP.

Yes, it's time for my quadrennial screed against the electoral  college.

If the presidential candidate for whom the most Americans vote would be guaranteed the presidency, then the voters of Chicago might get a campaign visit, and those who live in Manchester, New Hampshire, might get a reprieve.  But it's not really the disproportionate attention that upsets me.  What really upsets me is that the source of the disproportionate attention is disproportionate influence.  The candidates know exactly what they are doing.  They are making their pitch to the voters who will determine the outcome of the election, and ignoring the ones who won't.  This is not some swashbuckling overstatement meant to grab attention before executing a transition to the caveats.  It's the naked truth.  Go to Nate Silver's site and check out the "voter power index." 

If you live in a state that is pretty evenly divided--a "battleground," a "swing state"--then you got the power.  But if you live in Illinois or New York or Texas or California, or Idaho or Wyoming or Rhode Island or Vermont, or Maryland or Tennessee or Washington or Mississippi, you don't.  I suppose that if you are a Democrat living in the Bay Area you should take the time to vote for Hillary.  It's doing your part to help her win 55 electoral votes.  But if you are a Californian who prefers rancid meatloaf, there really is no reason to vote.  Your ballot can "make a difference" only in California.  If you stay home, your guy will win zero electoral votes in the state.   But, if you take the trouble to vote, you will "help" him to win . . . zero electoral votes in the state.  To have a voice, you have to be able to contribute money.  How great is that?  Whereas, if the winner were determined by national popular vote, your ballot would boost your candidate's total from n to (n + 1).  You'd be there in the determining tally. 

Tell me I'm wrong about this.  You can't, because I'm right. The stuff said by defenders of the electoral college is uniformly without merit.  You hear, for example, that it's "rare" for the winner of the electoral college to lose the national popular vote.  Let's just put to one side for the moment that in Silver's model there is currently better than a ten percent chance of Clinton winning the popular vote while losing in the electoral college.  What kind of a lame-brained argument is this business about "rare"?  It's as if a medical researcher decided not to avail himself of a cure for ALS, since the disease is "rare."

There is a remedy at hand for a glaring fault.  Seize it.

Some of the relatively unknown provisions of the electoral college descend into mere farce.  Suppose, for example, that no one wins 270 electoral votes.  One of the poll aggregator sites recently showed states with 269 electoral votes at least leaning Clinton's way.  If she won those, but the bad meatloaf prevailed in all the "toss-ups," there'd be an electoral college tie. (The above quite plausible electoral map depicts a 269 to 269 tie.) It's also possible that the clean-cut Mormon guy (redundant, I know) wins Utah's six electoral votes, which would raise considerably the likelihood that no candidate gets to 270.

In this event, the president would be chosen by the House of Representatives.  According to the Twelfth Amendment, each state's delegation gets one vote.  So California's 53 representatives would vote, about 40 of them for Clinton, while Wyoming's one congressman would vote for the meatloaf, and the tally that counts would stand at a 1 to 1 tie.  Under this scenario, Clinton loses for sure, since, thanks to gerrymandered congressional districts, states she carried, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia, have a majority of Republican representatives who would vote for the meatloaf.  The choice voters in these states made for president would thus have been cancelled by partisan mapmakers.

The Director of the FBI has been harshly and justly criticized by Democrats and Republicans, but it's easier to defend him than to explain why the electoral college should not have been abolished a long time ago.