Donating to @AlyseGalvin and @WilliamsForMT might be the most important political donations you give this year. And if you can’t donate, phone and text bank. I’ll explain the insanity of contingent elections below. https://twitter.com/jakesherman/status/1310304749359714304

Before we get started I want to stress that our constitution is deeply stupid and antiquated and some of these ideas never should’ve passed the smell test to begin with. Yet here we are.

If no candidate receives a majority of the vote in the electoral college, the top 3 electoral college vote getters then go to a “contingent election” where the House decides the election. Weird, but simple, right? Lol no

Instead of each House member getting 1 vote, each state DELEGATION gets one vote. Vermont has 1 congressman. That’s worth just as much as the entire 53 congressmen from California voting. Each delegation votes, and then the winner of that vote gets the vote from the state.

While Democrats control the House, they don’t control the House delegations. They are tied in 2 (PA and MI, I have no idea what will happen in MN at the moment) and have 22 others. Republicans have 26, some like WI purely due to gerrymanders.

So let’s say, for argument’s sake, litigation clears up the MN-02 situation, we hold MN-07, and win PA-10 or PA-01 and MI-03 or MI-06. That would put us at 24 delegations. But AL and MT are close races, and flipping both of those seats gives us the entire state delegation

A win by @Michelle4Kansas would also split the KS delegation into a tie and take away GOP control. The only other states with a chance for us to win the majority of the delegation are far far reaches. Flipping these three seats could literally decide the election in a tie.

This is obviously a stupid, ill-conceived way to deal with an election. In 1824, the “popular vote” winner (Jackson, and evening if you call it winning the popular vote) ended up losing the contingent election to John Quincy Adams. So.

Anyways let’s not let it get to a tie but all of this underscores how antiquated our constitution is and how we desperately need real electoral reform to create representative government.