Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig addresses the legal ways to hack our democracy and how to protect our freedom.
By: Mikaila Bluew
Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig exposed amendable weaknesses that threaten the security of the electoral system in a Delta College presidential speaker series event.
An estimated crowd of 50-70 students and community members flooded the lecture theater at Delta College on Oct. 22 to learn about the legal loopholes in overturning the presidential election.
Lessig took to the stage with a visual presentation that paired with his speech and began with a flashback to prior presidential elections. Starting with the race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, Lessig shed light on where this issue first began.
“Here is the certificate the Democratic electors signed,” said Lessig. “That certificate expressly stated, ‘Those Democratic electors having been duly and legally appointed’ when in fact they had not been duly or legally appointed, (so) they were the first fake electors in the 20th century.”
Following these statements, attendees were taken back to the 1876 election between Sam Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes to expose the present pattern of fake electors.
Lessig went on to express how these fake electors within states adopting the “Hawaii method” were skewing the results of past and present elections.
The electors holding seats on the electoral college meet and vote on the same day in a system that Lessig points out no longer fits with our country’s rapid communication systems. During the time of its conception, he points out the electoral college was a clever solution to ensure the election was not reliant on congress or the states.
“It might be obscure to you here, because you live in a swing state,” said Lessig. “But the decision to allocate electors to the winner of the popular vote means for the vast majority of states that the election is decided long before anybody casts a vote.”
This is described as the “every election problem” where all presidential candidates’ time and money is spent solely in the swing states.
One feasible plan of action Lessig takes includes a one-person, one-vote system, highlighting the importance of pushing young voters to participate in politics at the same rate as those 65 and older.
In a one-on-one interview he shared more in-depth thoughts about why young voters need to be more involved.
“If younger people don’t show up and start defining the political base to force the politicians to address these issues, they just won’t,” he said.
Lessig explained an astonishing statistic that 72% of individuals 65 and older voted while only 35% of people under the age of 40 regularly casted their votes.
“Because of course that explains why you care about dealing with old people’s issues and not dealing with the issues that matter to most Americans,” Lessig said.
Lessig concluded by showcasing how the media has a fairly new and ever-present place in our elections.
“Everybody has a story they hear,” he said. “They fit within their own bubble and the bubble reconfirms what they already believe. We either like the president, or we don’t like the president–we should see why this is the new normal.”
Lessig walked through the shift of when the big three broadcast companies were the main source of information, to the cable takeover, and to our current niche system of media. He discusses how neutrality does not pay in the current economy.
“It just turns out that the best strategy, the most profitable strategy to drive engagement, is the politics of hate,” said Lessig. “We engage war.”
In his closing statements Lessig prompts Americans to slow down in our reaction to rage and fact-check the information being fed to the public.
“We, as citizens, are smart enough to take our agency and act on our own and not as the AI puppet masters will drive us to behave,” he stated.
These closing statements left organizers and attendees with a plethora of information about how to address the security of the democracy.
“I think this message was so timely with this upcoming election,” said Political Science Professor and Co-chair of the President’s Speaker Series Kim Klein. “He certainly gave us some things to think about, but he also ended it with some concrete things that we can do to address some of this misinformation and polarization that we have in our politics today.”
With the election quickly approaching, American citizens have a call to action to adjust the archaic, non-functioning systems that have and will continue to fail the democratic process.
