As a follow up to my last blog post, I promised to cover a little more information on the Electoral College.  Just to sum up what we learned in our last post, the Electoral College is a process, not a place. The founding fathers established it in the Constitution as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.

 Each candidate running for President in your state has his or her own group of electors. The electors are generally chosen by the candidate’s political party, but state laws vary on how the electors are selected and what their responsibilities are.

 On January 6^th, each state’s electoral votes are counted in a joint session of Congress.  Once the votes have all been counted, the Vice President who is the President of the Senate announces the results and then declares who has been elected to the office of the Presidency and Vice Presidency.  You have to feel sorry a little bit when the incumbent team loses and then the Vice President has to announce that his competition has beat him.  Although, I will admit that when Joe Biden has to name Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as the new President and Vice President, I will be taking a little perverse pleasure.

The process for selecting Electors varies throughout the United States. Generally, the political parties nominate Electors at their State party conventions or by a vote of the party’s central committee in each State. Each candidate will have their own unique slate of potential Electors as a result of this part of the selection process.

Electors are usually chosen because they’ve shown dedication to their political party.  They can be elected officials, or people who have a relationship with the candidate.

Until recently, many Americans probably didn’t know there was an electoral college or didn’t know what their purpose was.  Truthfully, most Americans probably assumed that he who got the most votes wins.  And in point of fact, in recent history, that much turned out to be true.  In the 200+ years of our country, there has only been a handful of times when the Electoral College really had much of an impact on a Presidential election. Ordinarily, there is a winner of the popular vote who also wins the Electoral College.  But not every time…..

In 1800, when neither Thomas Jefferson nor Aaron Burr received a majority of votes cast by the Electoral College, the U.S. House of Representatives elected Jefferson by one vote, ending the impasse. Both Jefferson and Burr were running on the Democratic-Republican

In 1824, John Quincy Adams was similarly elected President in the House of Representatives, although Andrew Jackson had received the majority of the popular vote. This election, incidentally, was the first time in American history that the popular vote was actually recorded.

As in the historic election of 1800, because neither Adams nor Jackson received a majority of the Electoral College vote, the election was decided again by the popularly elected House of Representatives, which chose Adams. But history and fortune smiled on Andrew Jackson four years later, in 1828, when Old Hickory beat Adams and was elected President, this time winning both the Electoral College and the popular votes.

Thereafter, there would be only three other occasions in which Presidents and Vice Presidents were elected by a majority of the Electoral College votes, despite losing the popular vote by slim margins. These were the presidential elections of 1876, 1888 and 2000, in which Republican candidates Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush were elected President, respectively.

As evidenced in the 2000 election, very close elections may require tedious recounts, which even in this age of computerized voting remain a painstaking process. Popular, direct elections require recounting individual, direct votes (including absentee and provisional ballots) rather than the defined slate of state electoral votes, creating more opportunities for clerical errors or outright ballot fraud.

So, now that I’ve told you absolutely everything there is to know about the Electoral College, have any of your opinions be changed in one direction or the other?  I for one feel the Electoral College needs to be left intact, exactly the way it was intended by the founding fathers, whether the outcome of the election is in the favor of my candidate or not.  This truly is the soundest way I have seen to ensure that all states voices are heard.

I remember the very first time I heard the term “electoral college.”  I was 9 years old and in Mrs. Stanton’s 4^th grade class.  It was never truly explained to us, but I remember thinking why does this college decide who is the President instead of us.  I don’t think that most people’s understanding of the Electoral College has become much clearer.  Many think that it’s an antiquated system that needs to be done away with and that we should stick to the popular vote system only.  Others believe that given that most of the “blue states” are on the east and west coast and most of the “red states” are in the middle, that the candidates would never focus on the voters who are in their opposing states and would thereby disenfranchise them.

I doubt that the Electoral College has ever seen more controversy than in 2000 after the Bush/Gore election, when the final count of electoral votes was decided by the Supreme Court.  So, here we are again, smack dab in the middle of another squeaker of an election and I’m thinking that the Electoral College is once again going to be put under the microscope.  So, in an effort to help all of us understand exactly who and what the Electoral College is, I decided to do a little research.

The Founding Fathers feared the direct popular election option. There were no organized national political parties yet, no structure by which to choose and limit the number of candidates. In addition, travel and communication was slow and difficult at that time. A very good candidate could be popular regionally, but remain unknown to the rest of the country. A large number of regionally popular candidates would thus divide the vote and not indicate the wishes of the nation as a whole.

 Essentially, in an effort to compromise between those who wanted congress to decide the Presidency and those who wanted the states to decide, the Electoral College was devised.  Obviously, following a parliamentary system of choosing the President would not work in a free society.  There would be no separation of powers and we’d have the Legislative branch in bed with the Executive branch.   The founders didn’t want differing factions in the country to gain too much power and thereby decide the elections, so each state was given their own set of electoral votes based on population.  This way, a union faction, for instance wouldn’t get too much power, or a minority faction or a big business faction wouldn’t be able to have all the power in deciding the elections and there would have to be some compromise among the varying groups.  These days, some would argue, and probably rightfully so, that big business decides the elections and that we as citizens have very little to say in the matter.  However, that’s a discussion for another time. 

 So, each state is given a number of electoral votes depending on the size of their population.  Each state has at least 3 electoral votes; 1 for each member of the House of Representatives and one for each member of Congress from their home state.  So, states like South Dakota that have a lot of land mass, but not a large population would be given three electoral votes.  However, a state like California which has a very large population but not as much land mass, would receive 55 electoral votes.  Now, just to complicate matters even more, constitutionally, the electors don’t have to vote for who wins the popular vote in their state.   Apparently, the founding fathers didn’t trust the masses to make up their own minds.  However, through the years, an unwritten agreement has been made that the electors would in fact cast their votes for the candidate who won the popular vote in their states.  Some states have enacted laws that prohibit electors from casting votes for the losing candidate, to ensure that only the candidate with the most popular votes receives the electoral votes.

 Currently, there are a total of 538 electoral votes available.  The first candidate to get to 270 votes wins the presidency.  But, not so fast!  What happens if nobody gets to 270, or if there’s a tie?  Well, according to the 12^th amendment, the house will vote on the Presidency. However, the senate votes on the Vice Presidency, so we could possibly see a Romney Presidency and a Biden Vice Presidency, but never fear, the chances of that happening are so slim, it’s not really worth considering. 

So, once the election results are all finalized in the November election, the Electoral College meets in December to cast their votes for the winning candidate of the election.  Why so late?  Originally, it was because it took so long to count the hand cast ballots and to travel to wherever they were meeting in order to cast their votes.   Now, it’s just done out of tradition and formality.

 For those of us who are historically challenged, like I am, you may think that the 2000 election was the first time the Electoral College caused the winner of the popular vote to lose, but the winner of the Electoral College votes to win. Not so.  We’ll talk about that in my next post.

 I’m anxious to hear your opinions on the Electoral College.  Do you think we should keep it or is it an antiquated system that needs to be disposed of? Leave your comments and let us know what you’re thinking.

 Follow me on twitter: @Lisabucaro

Coming from a long line of military men, I have a special place in my heart for our men and women in the service.  My own father was so eager to get involved in the war efforts during World War II that he lied about his age when he was only 15 and joined the merchant marines, just so he could serve his country.  While on a liberty ship in the North Atlantic, their boat was sunk by a German battle ship, called the Sharnhorst and he spent 10 days on a life boat with other survivors.  On day 10, he was so delirious from lack of food and water , that he had to be knocked out by another ship mate to keep him from jumping off the boat to “go meet his dad for a beer.”  Luckily, that was the day they were rescued, otherwise, yours truly wouldn’t be here to write this story today.  Eventually, he joined the regular army and served in the Korean War. For that, he is a true hero. All of my uncles, my oldest brother, most of my nephews have all served in the military.  All heroes in my heart!

I think it’s fair to say, that nobody who serves on a battlefield leaves it without some scars, those we can see and those we can’t.  I remember on the 50^th anniversary of D-Day, my father complaining of nightmares about the war.  50 years later, the events of that experience still haunted him.  He still lived with the emotional scars of the horrors that he witnessed.

How do we ever thank a soldier for all the sacrifices they make so that we can continue to say what we want, worship the God that we choose, vote for the political candidate that we support, go to bed feeling relatively safe that our shores will not be invaded by some foreign government wishing to do us harm and steal all those freedoms from us?    What proper way is there to thank someone who literally gives up life and limb for you?  What kind of person is willing to do that?  These people are fighting for an ideal.  They are fighting for a way of life.  The greatest way of life.  The American way of life!

Those who return, come home with battle scars visible and invisible.  They may be missing limbs, or their eye sight, or they bear deeper scars, emotional scars from all the atrocities they have witnessed.  Sadly, while the government does what they can through the Veterans Administration, they have their limitations.  Once the VA has done all they can do, who stands in the gap for our service people? That’s why programs like “The Wounded Warrior Project” is such a Godsend.

Due to greater advancements in battlefield care and enhanced body protection, we are seeing more and more service men and women survive catastrophic injuries to return home to restore their lives.  The Wounded Warrior Project offers returning service members hope that they so desperately need that their life will return to some kind of normal, a new kind of normal .  This amazing charitable organization, began when a group of veterans felt moved to help wounded soldiers as they returned from Afghanistan and Iraq.  They provide a host of services that include (but aren’t limited to) Combat Stress Recovery, Physical Health and Wellness, Family Support,  Transition Training, and their Warriors to Work program.

I urge everyone to donate to this worthy cause.  You can be assured that the majority of your donation will go to help the soldiers.  A full 82% of all moneys received go to funding programs that directly benefit our soldiers, with only 4% for administrative costs and the rest toward fundraising efforts.  Can anyone say that sacrificing a few dollars is a hardship when you compare it to all that has been sacrificed for us?

To learn more about the Wounded Warrior Project, please go to their web site:  www.woundedwarriorproject.org

Follow me on twitter:  @LisaBucaro

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I’m actually feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. It has become so clear that Obama and Biden decided to throw her under the proverbial bus and put all the blame for the disaster that happened in Benghazi squarely on her shoulders. I’m not saying that she doesn’t bear a huge part of the blame, but as Obama has demonstrated over the last four years, he is never responsible for anything. Not only does the buck not stop there, he’s never seen the buck, nobody has shown him the buck and he doesn’t even know what the buck is.

In what can only be described as a shocking decision, Clinton seems to have fallen on her sword and allowed herself to become the shill in the Whitehouse’s shell game over the entire Benghazi debacle. I’m completely befuddled as to why she would make this move at this time. It has never been a secret that she still holds Presidential aspirations. She could have almost been guaranteed the nomination in 2016. But in one statement made yesterday while on a state department visit to Peru she has all but destroyed any hope she had of ever getting elected to any public office again.

What could she possibly have been thinking? Why would she throw away a very successful political career for Barack Obama, a man she clearly does not like? And just what took her so long to take responsibility? Here we are a full month later and she now decides to suddenly take responsibility? I see nothing laudable in this decision and it only serves to make my spidey senses tingle even more. The lengths that people have gone to protect this man are frightening.

Clearly, decisions were made in an attempt to take the heat off of Obama in advance of his second debate against Mitt Romney. After several weeks of bad news and poor debate performances by both the President and the Vice President, this would seemingly take some of the heat off, but does it? Can the American people really respect a President who continually chooses to pass the buck? He has no clue what the American people respect. He has been worshipped for so long, he can’t conceive of a world where he is not the king. He continues to demonstrate that he has no respect for the American people. This was abundantly clear when just about everyone in his administration spent weeks pushing this ridiculous narrative that our consulate was attacked after an uprising in response to a video that nobody saw that had been on Youtube for months and months.

Regardless of who takes the blame for Benghazi, ultimately, these are people that Obama put in place to help him run the country. He made all the personnel choices and try as he might to blame everyone else for the mess we find ourselves in, the buck does in fact stop with him. The American voter will no longer allow him to pass the buck to Hillary, or an obscure film maker or anyone else.

Irrespective of the outcome of this election, it’s a safe bet that Hillary has all but destroyed any chance she had of a Presidential run in 2016 or any other year.

As we’re nearing election day, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on what our politicians promised us during the last election cycle and what they’ve actually delivered.  Sadly, the president who brought so much hope for a renewed America has been the biggest failure in a President that I have seen in my lifetime.

 He promised us unity and a “post-racial” America, but never have I seen the race card played so much by any politician of any color than by this president and his supporters. 

 He promised us healthcare reform, but what we have ended up with is a monstrosity of a healthcare law that was passed without the approval of the electorate and with little knowledge of its contents by representatives who did little to represent their constituency.

 He promised it would not create new taxes on an already over-taxed nation and then argued before the Supreme Court that it was legal because it was a tax. 

 What Obamacare has in fact accomplished is to further weaken an already struggling economy, by creating uncertainty in the market place in the jobs market.  This program has increased costs to employers and employees alike.  Many small businesses have already been forced to lay off workers and in some cases close their doors in response to sky-rocketing costs of this new law.  Premiums for many have doubled and even tripled, leaving many unable to afford the insurance that we are now forced to carry.

 The country cannot afford Obamacare and we cannot afford four more years of the ever increasing socialist agenda being foist upon us.  We need leaders in Washington who will boldly oppose this type of entitlement agenda and vote to repeal Obamacare.

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