How Electoral College, not popular votes, picks US president....Read Full Article>>
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (R) shakes hands with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024.
Although the United States prides itself on being the world’s preeminent democracy, where each person can have their say about who should be president, the Constitution calls for states to choose “electors” who do the actual electing.
This is known as the Electoral College.
This includes the first presidential election in 1789, won by George Washington; there have been 59 U.S. elections.
How i spent 10 years in jail without trial for bank robbery i heard about in court – Adeshina
In all but five, two in this century, the president has won both the popular votes and the Electoral College votes.
In 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore garnered 543,895 more votes nationwide than Republican George W. Bush.
But in a contentious race that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, the judges decided to end a recount in Florida, giving the state’s then 25 electoral votes to Bush.
This took Bush past the magic number of 270 electoral votes and ensured him the presidency.
In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a much bigger margin, receiving 2.9 million more votes nationwide.
But Trump became president because he garnered 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227.
If the number of electoral votes is tied, then the election is decided by the newly elected House of Representatives.
– How the electoral votes work –
Each state is allotted electors equal to their number of representatives in Congress.
This means there are 538 electors in total: 435 representatives and 100 senators, plus three for the District of Columbia.
If a candidate wins 270 electors or more, therefore, he or she wins the presidency.
In 48 states, the candidate with the most votes, however slim the margin, wins all the state’s electoral votes.
Maine and Nebraska do things differently and allocate electoral votes by individual congressional districts.
Some critics regard the Electoral College as an anachronism and would replace it with a national popular vote.
They say that the Electoral College makes a mockery of the “one person, one vote” system the country extols.
Furthermore, it causes candidates to concentrate their campaigns primarily on a handful of swing states where the vote could go either way, turning the majority of voters elsewhere in the country into bystanders.
But proponents say the reverse would happen if the president were elected by the popular votes.
Then candidates would concentrate their campaigning in the big states—California, Texas, and New York—and voters in smaller states would be the onlookers.
But what really do the two major candidates in the U.S. presidential election represent?
Kamala Harris is the first woman, first black person, and first person of South Asian descent to be vice president of the United States.
After four years in the second highest office, she now wants to make history again by holding the top job.
She received President Joe Biden’s blessing when he stepped back from being the Democratic candidate just three months ago, triggering her whirlwind campaign.
Harris was born on Oct. 20, 1964, in Oakland, California. She often touts her middle-class upbringing to voters: her father Donald migrated from Jamaica to study economics; her mother Shyamala, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist, came from India.
They married in 1963 and separated when Harris was 5 years old.
Harris, 60, has largely played down her gender and race. But she has said that India is an important part of her life.
When she and her younger sister Maya were children, their mother travelled with them to India almost every other year to see relatives there—and to instill in them a love of Indian food.
Shyamala died of colon cancer in 2009. Harris rarely speaks of her father, who went on to become a professor at Stanford University. She once told an interviewer that they are not close.
Harris became the first black district attorney of San Francisco in 2002, and later she served for six years as California’s attorney general.
When she moved to the U.S. Senate in 2017, she used her experience as a prosecutor to make her mark at high-profile hearings by grilling witnesses, from Trump officials to Supreme Court nominees.
Harris met her partner Doug Emhoff, an entertainment lawyer, relatively late in life.
A friend set up a blind date for the two of them in California, where they were living at the time in 2013.
They married the following year.
Emhoff has two adult children from his first marriage: Cole and Ella.
As the first husband of a vice president, Emhoff is also the first “Second Gentleman” of the United States.
Should Harris win and become the first woman to ever hold the presidency, he would be the very first “First Gentleman.”
Donald Trump’s rise to the U.S. presidency, which he held from 2017-2021, upset many assumptions and taboos, but perhaps just as surprising is that he has brushed off two impeachments, a criminal conviction, and several other threats to contend again for the White House.
His come-from-behind win against Hillary Clinton in 2016, by claiming outsider status and promising to bring a businessman’s acumen for dealmaking to the White House, shocked the U.S. political system and fundamentally changed the Republican party.
In 2024, four years after losing to Joe Biden, he still casts himself as the man to shake up U.S. politics by taking on the corrupt elites.
All the while he has kept his brash campaign style, prone to riffing on theories well outside the mainstream, and rarely shying away from an opportunity to personally insult or belittle his opponents.
If Trump wins, the 78-year-old would be the oldest person in U.S. history elected president.
Born June 14, 1946, he was the fourth of five children of Frederick Trump, a real estate magnate who bequeathed a small New York empire to his family.
At age 13, Trump’s parents sent him to a military academy.
The future president went on to study at Fordham University and then the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business.
After graduating from Wharton, he joined his father’s business and, in 1974, became its president and renamed it the Trump Organisation.
Investments in hotels, casinos, golf courses, luxury apartments, and beauty pageants followed.
As the star of the TV reality show “The Apprentice,” he relished delivering bad news to failed contenders, telling them curtly, “You are fired.”
Trump dipped into politics from time to time but seemed galvanised under the administration of Barack Obama and morphed into a right-wing populist.
He loudly peddled the lie that Obama was not born in the United States.
Trump’s critics, which include several high-profile members of his first administration, have cast him as chaotic, divisive, and a threat to democracy.
General John Kelly, his former chief of staff, recently likened him to a “fascist.”
His rhetoric has been crude and dark at rallies, veering from crass insults to false claims and menacing warnings, like his suggestion this month he could use the military to handle what he called “the enemy from within.”
Like in 2016, his 2024 campaign has put an anti-immigration stance front and centre.
In 2016, he said some Mexican immigrants were rapists and murderers; this year he baselessly accused Haitian immigrants of eating pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio.
A line repeated by his vice presidential pick, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance. (NANFeatures)
Trump has won the election. What happens to his legal cases?....Read Full Article>>
Donald Trump looking to the right of the camera. He wears a navy suit jacket, white shirt and red tie.
Trump is the first person with a felony conviction to serve as president
Donald Trump will be the first president to take office while several criminal cases against him are still pending.
His ascent to the highest office in the US while facing dozens of criminal charges has plunged the country into uncharted territory.
Many of his legal problems will now go away when he steps foot in the White House, as he will be able to dismiss some of the cases as a sitting president.
Here’s a look at what could happen with each of the four legal challenges he faces.
New York hush-money conviction
Follow live election day updates as Donald Trump wins
Donald Trump has already been convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the state of New York.
In May, a jury of New Yorkers found him guilty of the counts in relation to a hush-money payment made to an adult film star.
New York Judge Juan Merchan pushed back Trump’s sentencing from September to 26 November, after the election.
Judge Merchan could still go forward with the sentencing as planned despite Trump’s win, said former Brooklyn prosecutor Julie Rendelman.
Legal experts say it is unlikely that Trump would be sentenced to time behind bars as an older first-time offender.
But if he were, his lawyers would appeal the sentence immediately, arguing that jail time would prevent him from conducing his official duties and that he should remain free pending the appeal, Ms Rendelman said.
“The appellate process in that scenario could go on for years,” she said.
January 6 case
Special counsel Jack Smith filed criminal charges against Trump last year over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
Trump has pleaded not guilty.
The case has been in legal limbo since the Supreme Court ruled this summer that Trump was partially immune from criminal prosecution over official acts committed while in office.
Smith has since refiled his case, arguing Trump’s attempts to overturn the election were not related to his official duties.
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Since Trump has won, his criminal problems from the case now “go away”, according to former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani.
“It’s well established that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted, so the election fraud case in DC District Court will be dismissed,” he said.
Mr Rahmani said that if Smith refuses to dismiss the case, Trump can simply get rid of him, as he has pledged to do already.
“I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said during a radio interview in October.
Classified documents case
Smith is also leading a case against Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left the White House, charges Trump denies.
He is accused of storing sensitive documents in his Mar-a-Lago home and obstructing Justice Department efforts to retrieve the files.
The judge assigned to the case, Trump-appointee Aileen Cannon, dismissed the charges in July, arguing Smith was improperly appointed by the Justice Department to lead the case.
Smith has appealed the ruling.
But with Trump set to take office, the classified documents case now faces the same fate as the election case, Mr Rahmani said.
“The DOJ will abandon its Eleventh Circuit appeal of the dismissal of the classified documents case,” he said.
Georgia election case
Trump is also facing criminal charges in Georgia over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the state.
That case has faced a number of hurdles, including efforts to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis over her relationship with an attorney she hired to work on the case.
An appeals court is in the process of weighing whether Willis should be allowed to stay on the case.
But now that Trump is the next president, the case could face even more delays, or possibly dismissal.
The case is expected to be paused during Trump’s time in office, according to legal experts.
Trump’s attorney Steve Sadow said as much when asked by the judge if Trump could still stand trial if elected.
“The answer to that is I believe that under the supremacy clause and his duties as president of the United States, this trial would not take place at all until after he left his term in office,” he said.
US Election: Atiku reveals lessons for Nigeria as Trump returns to White House....Read Full Article>>
The former vice president of Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar has revealed lessons Nigeria ought to learn from the just concluded US election.
DAILY POST reports that former President, Donald Trump of the Republican party is currently the US President-elect after defeating his opponent in the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris.
Reacting, Atiku, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP presidential candidate in 2023 said in a statement that Nigeria has lessons to learn ahead of future elections.
According to him, “the lesson for us in Nigeria is the integrity of the process that ensures a credible outcome”.
He said it is the expectation of every Nigerian that the Trump administration would “stand resolute in ensuring free and fair elections in Nigeria and other places in the world”.
Atiku also extended his “warm congratulations to the people of the United States, whose unwavering faith in the power of democracy and the sanctity of the ballot has once again shown the world the true might of the people’s voice”.
Politics
BREAKING: Obaseki converting political appointees to civil servants, 6 days to hand over- APC
Edo State Governor-elect, Senator Monday Okpebholo has raised the alarm over alleged conversion of political appointees to full time civil servants by the outgoing governor, Godwin Obaseki, six days to the end of his tenure.....Read Full Article>>
DAILY POST reports that Prince Kassim Afegbua, member, All Progressives Congress, APC, transition committee made the allegation in a statement made available to newsmen on Wednesday in Benin City.
Afegbua alleged that the political appointees that are being converted to full time civil servants are Senior Special Assistants and Special Assistants.
He said 186 of such appointees were appointed by the governor in September 2024, thereby bloating the numbers of aides around him.
He also alleged that the outgoing governor has just commenced the process of absorbing another 152 aides to compound the problem.
The APC transition committee member, said interview is presently ongoing as part of the governor’s effort to overburden the incoming administration with huge recurrent expenditure, when he (Obaseki) was aware that the state is already bugged down by a huge debt burden.
“It has come to our notice that Governor Obaseki is presently converting his Senior Special Assistants (SSA) and Special Assistants (SA) into full time civil service staff.
“Governor Obaseki, for eight years refused to recruit civil servants to fill up vacant positions and energize the civil service.
“He also refused to set up the Civil Service Commission until two weeks ago, in the twilight of his failed administration.
“We are alerting the public to be aware of Governor Obaseki’s deliberate engagement to stifle the resources of the state and pass on huge salaries and overhead to the incoming administration.
“This is not only a wicked act but a huge disservice to the incoming administration of Senator Monday Okpebholo.
“We have repeatedly stated the position of the incoming administration that anybody who is wrongly recruited or surreptitiously absorbed into the Civil Service, with backdated appointment letters would be relieved of his or her responsibility,” the statement said.
Afegbua opined that recruitment into Civil Service must not only follow due process, there has to be a need for such persons who are so recruited.
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