Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

Congratulations to the President-elect, and to the government workers and volunteers at all levels who tirelessly worked around the clock to ensure our elections were free and fair.

I think these next few weeks is a time for reflection, so that all of us can work hard to create the future we want. Wishing everyone well and to breathe in and out regularly, it's been a stressful year.

The end of this video[0] explains some of the historic context:

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUS9mM8Xbbw

Yes, the basic human societal unit is the tribe, as evidenced by Dunbar’s number. Within tribes, interconnected extended families used to facilitate the social cohesion. In the US, both the small-scale society and the extended family have been harmed by atomizing and dispersing people for mostly economic reasons.

The Constitution of the United States is a document written to preserve co-equal sovereignty of a bunch of states that wanted to be closer to nations than provinces, while avoiding the then-very-apparent risk of centralized absolute governing authority.

The framers of the Constitution didn't get everything right, but it's very useful to keep that perspective in mind when trying to understand the form of the US government.

If you take the perspective of states as sovereign, with federation between them, then the Electoral College starts to make a lot more sense. The goal was to preserve the power of a state in the federal government, as much as to represent the collection of people from all states - both concepts were critical. The idea is that people from the nation deserve representation and that each state (and the people from that state as a sub-population) deserve representation.

If federation of states is a core concept of the subdivision of governing responsibility, then it makes sense to build a system that ensures each state has meaningful weight in the governance of that federation.

None of this is an argument for or against the Electoral College, nor should it be interpreted as arguing for the correctness/effectiveness/righteousness/morality of the institution. It is simply an attempt to share perspective to help understand why the system is the way it is.

As originally defined, the House of Representatives was the only piece of the federal government intended to directly represent the people of the nation. Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures. The Senate was intended to represent the states, not the people directly.

The Electoral College was an intermediary to represent both the states and the people - as a compromise, it has many failings that seem obvious today. There is no federal mandate as to how a state's electors choose to cast their votes. Each state is responsible for regulating its own voting - this includes how people vote and how electors are chosen and how those electors vote. It is mere happenstance that the majority of states have a winner-takes-all allotment strategy for their electors. Maine and Nebraska notably assign their electors proportionally.

It is also interesting to note that the tie-breaking mechanism for an Electoral College tie devolves to the House, not with one vote per representative, but with one vote per state. This is another example of the concept that states are a concept deserving of representation.

Yes. Probably the worst thing about this election for me is that it seems to demonstrate conclusively that 2016 was no aberration, no temporary mass hysteria, no failed experiment in electing a political outsider to “drain the swamp”. This distorted world view of us-vs-them tribalism seems to have totally consumed our political system. Objective reality is dismissed by the majority of the population—most blatantly on the right, but also, increasingly, on the left. Even more shocking to me, highly regarded election data scientists have twice now somehow been blinded to this, releasing poll after poll that fail to capture what is actually happening in the minds of the electorate.

Carl Sagan, in his 1995 book ‘The Demon-Haunted World’, wrote:

> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The moment he prophesied now appears to be upon us. I don’t know how we can restore this country to one where people mostly act in good faith and try to base decisions in science and fact. I see so many incredibly compassionate people supporting the most despicable politicians. Right-wingers on Twitter repeating false talking points that the left are trying to destroy the country while tweeting about how proud they are of local youth offering free lawn care to disabled and senior citizens. Left-wingers openly insulting rural and conservative people as the scum of the earth while relentlessly supporting policies intended to improve those same peoples’ lives. How does this happen? What do we have to do—as individuals, as nations, as humans—to get it to stop?