Five Fact Friday – Special Election Edition – November 6, 2020

Five Fact Friday – Special Election Edition – November 6, 2020
November 6, 2020 Site Admin Five Fact Friday 0 Comments

This week’s links:
What I’m Reading: https://cnb.cx/3mZ9Np7
What I’m Watching: https://bit.ly/3mPyrs7
What’s New In Tech: https://bit.ly/3264wDR
What’s New In Legal: https://bit.ly/38br8qx
What’s New In Retirement: https://bit.ly/2HWgIjw

Bonus Link: https://bit.ly/32kutje

Five Fact Friday is a bi-weekly newsletter produced by Medina Law Group & Palante Wealth Advisors containing 5 interesting or fun links. For more information, visit medinalawgroup.com, palantewealth.com or call 609-818-0068.

Full transcript below:

Who invented the Electoral College? Well, we have the answer to that and many other special links that are focused exclusively on the election. It’s a special edition. I’m Victor Medina. And this is Five Fact Friday.

Hey everybody! As of the recording of this video. Let’s do it again. Hey everybody. Welcome back to Five Fact Friday. As of the recording of this video, the Presidential Election is not yet settled. Now, there are a number of things that we do know. For example, in New Jersey, we passed the recreational marijuana use question that was on the ballot, as well as increasing the veteran’s deduction for property taxes to include people that are not just veterans of wars and times of conflict. But there are also things that we don’t know yet. And so we’re gonna follow up on what the results of the election might mean for you, specifically with respect to a webinar that we are gonna be hosting very shortly that’s gonna focus on the impact of the election to you and your retirement. Now, this is something that we are doing for our clients, but we’re gonna open it up, since it is a special digital live presentation that really doesn’t have any space restrictions to anybody that wants to join. And so if you’re interested in learning what we think the effect of the election might be on you and your retirement and the next few years about what you’re going to be doing, then I encourage you to register for the webinar in the link that’s included in the email.

Now, I’ve included a number of links in the email that are all related to the election. For example, we just review and explore what the cyber command is going to be doing during this time. And we look at the numbers of the turnout, you know, the highest number of people that have voted in history. The winner of this presidential election will have received more votes than anyone else in history. But I also wanted to just take this time and tell a quick story about who created or how the Electoral College was created.

You know, when they were framing the Constitution, one of the things that they had to decide was how they were going to elect their president. Now recall that the founders were very concerned about the power of the monarchy. The whole idea about the separation from England is they didn’t want one individual to be commanding everything that was in there. But they realized also that they needed a singular leader in the form of a president. So there were three ideas that were sort of thrown around, at the time that they were framing the Constitution.

The first idea was to have Congress be the person that chose the president. Now, the reason why that was rejected is that the founders were concerned that the Congress would elect somebody who was weak and that would therefore not balance the powers if they elected somebody that was not a strong leader. And there would reside all of the power in the Congress. And the whole idea was to have three equal branches of government.

The next idea that was thrown around was to have the states end up electing a president. And the idea there was rejected because they didn’t want the states to find somebody that was weak, because they wanted the federal government to have all of the requisite power that it was going to have. And so they rejected that idea. The final one was the popular vote, and the popular vote was rejected because, well, actually for two reasons.

The first reason was that the founders believed that the common person was not going to be educated enough to select somebody of great character. The information wasn’t gonna spread widely enough. And then they would be subject to a lot of influence, specifically they were concerned about influence, from foreign governments. And the other reason was that slave owners felt that the more people that they held, in terms of the population, they would have power imbalance; which is sort of how we arrived at slaves being three-fifths of a person when the Constitution was founded. All terrible ideas of course now today. But at that time, they were trying to figure out how to fairly elect a president. Now they couldn’t do it at the time that they were framing the rest of the Constitution.

So they postponed the question to a committee that, by the way, was formed as the Committee on Unanswered Questions. So it was a whole committee to things that they couldn’t answer when they were drafting and framing the Constitution at its initial inception. They finally arrived at the Electoral College as being a blend of the ability for the states to be properly represented by their population, as well as having people who were named electors be the people that were informed enough to elect a president, somebody again and they keep referencing, of great character, and to have that information. So here we arrived at Electoral College and it’s nearly a few hundred years later and it’s still the method by which we elect a president. And as you probably well know, there are 538 electors and you have to get to 270 of them pledged by the states in their popular votes. Most of them, Nebraska and Maine, do it by congressional district and that’s how we elect our president.

So the Electoral College was a compromise that was essentially arrived at, by people who were trying to balance the difference between getting informed individuals to elect a president of good character with enough strength to balance the powers in the equal branches of government. Now, you may think whatever you want from that, whether or not it’s still the right way to do it, and whether or not all of their concerns were still valid here in the year 2020, but that’s how we arrived at the method of the Electoral College, when it was originally founded.

Now, all this information was taken by a link that’s also included in this email, and so if you’d like to check it out for yourself, we’ve included the link here. Now, if you’re concerned about how this election is going to affect your retirement in the years to come, I’m gonna encourage you to register for the special webinar that we’re gonna be hosting. The link to that is in the email. In fact, if you wanna share it with your friends, there’s absolutely no limits to the number of people that can register for this special digital live presentation and we encourage you to spread the information widely. We’d love to share as much as we can with as many people.

That’s it for Five Fact Friday. Hopefully you are at peace and at rest with what’s going on with the election. I know that I’m not taking it, the word’s not too seriously. I’m taking it seriously, but I’m not letting it dominate my life and I don’t think it should dominate your life either. So this has been Five Fact Friday. We’ll catch you in a couple of weeks where we will talk about what the effect of the election is and get back to our regular schedule of all of those fun links that we normally include on our Five Fact Friday. Catch you next time. Bye Bye.