Caltrops - Balance of Power





	[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"]I happen to be a pollwoker here in Maryland but because primary elections are different in every state they don't all happen at once. With the 2016 general election being 11½ months away and no incumbent running, it's more-or-less a free-for-all. So I'd like to take a look forward at the state of the Presidential election. Maryland's Governor is also elected for a four-year term, but it's during the off-cycle two years later. So it's more-or-less Federal elections and possibly some minor local ones like school boards and council members. So what I will focus on is the Presidency. I had to look them up but the first two events are the Iowa caucuses on February 1, and the New Hampshire primary on February 9. I don't really "get" the Iowa caucuses, which appear to be more of an even more "meta" election than the typical primary. If I understand it, people go to the Iowa caucuses to hear speeches and decide to vote for the people who vote for the delegates to the convention. And guess what? I looked it up to see how close I was and I discovered I was spot-on right. Iowa has 99 counties, so they have 99 caucuses ("caucus" is a fancy word for "talk") and these caucuses select the delegates to the state convention, who then select the delegates to the national convention. This is the sort of thing that makes the Electoral College seem simple. (For those interested, I did a video about how the Electoral College would work for the 2008 election (it's still relevant 8 years later), and those interested can find it <a href=-"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2czVlY4HFs">here</a>). So going on to the New Hampshire primary on February 9, which by law, <em>must</em> be first. State law has the primary election ostensibly in March but "allows" the New Hampshire Secretary of State to move the election forward to ensure it's before any similar event. Caucuses are not considered similar to a primary election so Iowa is allowed to hold theirs first. So technically it isn't required but a Secretary of State who allowed New Hampshire to be second would, I'm sure, find <em>themselves</em> out of office shortly thereafter, presuming they lived long enough to run for non-re-election. They take voting very seriously around those parts. New Hampshire will hold its election using the standard American rule that the election is held on the first Tuesday <em>after</em> the first Monday in that month. Now,you might ask why we have this strange rule. Well when the Founding Fathers started this country, they didn't want elections held on the first of the month; in those days, generally tho only people who were allowed to vote were landowning white males, i.e. rich men, who would have monthly accounts to close, so they might not be able to take two hours or more off on the first of the month to ride on horseback up and back to the distant polling place. Now, they didn't want the election to be on Monday, because after a typical weekend of hard binge drinking you'd probably be too hungover to vote properly so you'd need a day to sober up. So this historical - or is it hysterical? - rule is the reason the U.S. Constitution requires the Federal government to hold, and why most states hold, their elections on the first Tuesday after the first Monday. So who is going to be running? The only one I know has declared is Vermont Independent U.S. Senator (and Socialist) Bernie Sanders. Was one of the few to publicly oppose invading Iraq. Can be considered essentially a Democratic Party candidate, he votes with them most of the time in the Senate. For those of you not from the United States, the Democrats can be considered the equivalent to the Liberal Party, and the Republicans as Conservative, except American pol8tics is <i>much</i> farther to the right than anything Europe - or even Canada - sees, and the Democrats are more of a "slightly left of center" party than a typical "Liberal" party you'd see elsewhere. Who are the ones who will be running? Donald Trump as a Republican and Hillary Clinton as a Democrat. There may be others I'm not aware of; I'm sure there will be comments. Mrs. Clinton has a lot of baggage both from her husband's days as President and her own misadventures as U.S. Secretary of State under Barack Obama. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a joke so ridiculous he makes it trivially easy to be a rich source of gags and ridicule. As Bill Maher once said, there are only two things in nature that look like an orange orangutan and the other one is Dpnald Trump's hairpiece. His love of way-out-wacko fringe conspiracy theories makes him a charter member of the "gold plated" tinfoil hat club. [/quote]