Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 November 18

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November 18

90s sunglasses

What was the name for the 1990s type of sunglasses worn particularly by Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 or Sketch Turner from Comix Zone? They seemed to be popular back in the day, but now are almost non-existent. My search suggests Matsuda shades, but I'm not sure whether all of them were Matsuda. Brandmeister^talk 09:34, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Glacier glasses. Alansplodge (talk) 09:49, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

When did medieval Florence get control of a sea port?

It's unclear from the Republic of Florence article if the city controlled any coastline before buying Pisa from the Visconti in 1402. Was it landlocked before then, and if so which neighbours did it get along well enough with to be able to trade? 129.67.118.135 (talk) 14:45, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

That may have been their first sea port. History of Florence notes that their growth stemmed from two things: as a banking center (their Florin became the major gold coin of Europe in the 13th century) and their strategic location on the main inland trade route between Rome and the cities to the northwest, such as Venice, based on the old Roman Via Cassia. The subjugation of Pisa likely led to their first direct control of a sea port. --Jayron32 18:45, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

FWIW I was wondering if the Arno, on which Florence was situated, gave it a seaport; looking this up I found this dubious reference [1] which says that Machiavelli in 1502 had some kind of scheme to divert the Arno away from Pisa to make it navigable and give Florence a seaport. If that's true, I guess I was barking up the wrong tree. Wnt (talk) 23:22, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

How did the members of the U.S. Electoral College, who actually choose the president, come to be the last apolitical office holders in America?

I have been reading things [2] that say that the members of the Electoral College (United States) are not really required to cast their vote the way they are told in most states, and even when they are, it is merely a matter of a fine. Yet people expect that the electors will by and large go out and do as they are told every time. I don't understand... the process by which political districts are drawn up is entirely politicized (gerrymandering), the process of registering voters and how long people wait for the ballots is skewed by voter suppression, even the Supreme Court is perceived to essentially be made up of Democrats vs. Republicans, the EPA is being taken over by Republicans from Democrats and the 'science' they believe in is totally unrelated to the science the other believed in ... everywhere I look, partisanship has completely dominated what people decide, even when they are supposed to be just performing a neutral function. Yet the electors who in an indirect democracy are supposed to actually make the choice of who is president -- they simply follow orders without question. Who butters their bread so they get rewarded by doing whatever the voters say, rather than what the party in power in their state wants? I don't understand how nonpartisanship could have lingered on in this one arena - it's like finding a live dinosaur in Central Park. Wnt (talk) 20:10, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt: No, it's not like that. They don't "follow orders" — at least, not in a non-partisan way. They have pledged ahead of time to vote for a particular person (or sometimes for their party's nominee). If that person hadn't won their state, they wouldn't be electors. --Trovatore (talk) 09:24, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Should the voters NOT vote according to expectations, it would clearly create a constitutional crisis in the U.S. Remember, there are two things to consider: the "little c" constitution, which is the processes, procedures, and structures that determine how a sovereign state is run, and the Big C Constitution, which is a document that lays out those procedures. While the U.S. has a "Big C" Constitution which provides the nation with its basic structure, there are many constitutional principals which are not written in that document, but at the same time, are vital to the way the country works. This has been true since the founding, it's not a new concept. Things like judicial review and implied powers and right to privacy are core constitutional (little c) principles in the U.S. though they are entirely unmentioned in the Big C Constitution. When a process, procedure, or structure vital to the smooth operation of a country has become so entrenched and traditional such that it's violation would be cause major upheaval, it is a constitutional principle even if it isn't written down anywhere. While there have been individual cases of faithless electors in the past, and their votes are likely legal, the U.S. has never had an election turn on the votes of such electors. Should, per chance, 38 or so members the Electoral College switch votes to select Clinton, it may not be written in the Big C Constitution that they can't do so, but it would be a clear violation of expected procedure to produce chaos and turmoil; i.e. a constitutional crisis. --Jayron32 20:19, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

See Electoral College (United States)#Nomination. If the Republican candidate wins the state's popular vote, the people who get to be electors are the ones who were chosen in advance by the state's Republican party. Loraof (talk) 20:22, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

That is true, and in many states, these electors are pledged to vote for the winner of the popular vote in that state. However, as noted at faithless elector, the electors, when the actually cast their official ballots, may vote for whomever they want, and from the point of view of the Constitution, their votes stand as official and may not be undone. To quote the Supreme Court on the matter (as noted in that article) that there is " an assumed constitutional freedom of the elector under the Constitution, Art. II, § 1, to vote as he may choose in the electoral college," and that "no one faithful to our history can deny that the plan originally contemplated what is implicit in its text – that electors would be free agents, to exercise an independent and nonpartisan judgment as to the men best qualified for the Nation's highest offices." The court has upheld the right of states to require pledges; it has never ruled on the ability of states to punish faithless electors after they have cast a vote in opposition to their own pledge, but it is clear that a faithless elector's vote is legal and binding irrespective of any pledges made before, or punishment for violating said pledge afterwards. It would create a massive constitutional crisis if enough faithless electors changed votes to swing an election against the original result, but the Supreme Court has, in prior rulings, made it pretty clear that it is the actual vote of the electors when they cast their ballot that matters, not who they were supposed to vote for. --Jayron32 20:28, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Actually, I have never heard of anyone being "pledged to vote for the winner of the popular vote in that state". They are pledged to vote for a particular person, or perhaps for their party's nominee, but not for the winner of the popular vote. Then the fact that that person is appointed as an elector means that the person he/she pledged to vote for is the winner of the popular vote, but that's not the same thing.

This is an interesting example of the sense–denotation distinction, as per Gottlob Frege. --Trovatore (talk) 09:54, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Right, but the OP's title asked about the electors being apolitical office holders, which they are not. Loraof (talk) 20:33, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

True, they are explicitly NOT apolitical. Electors are explicitly members of political parties, and the slate of electors (often invisible to the voters themselves) are put forward by the party before the election. --Jayron32 20:37, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

There are actually at least two states that have statutes instructing the person responsible for reporting elector votes (e.g. the Secretary of State) to refuse to accept ballots that are not cast in accordance with an elector's pledge. (Nebraska is one state and I think the other is Montana.) The statutes direct that an elector who attempts to submit a faithless ballot should be immediately dismissed and replaced with an alternate. I think there would be serious doubts about whether such a scheme is constitutional, but so far no faithless ballots have been cast in either state that has enacted such a law. Dragons flight (talk) 20:57, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

It's clear I should have thought this through more. Yes, they're different slates of political appointees, I should have remembered that much. Yet in an election like this one where Republican and Trump are not necessarily synonymous, there would still seem to be room for politics - how well is their loyalty checked -- and by whom?? Do they have political aspirations of their own, that they would not want to be branded as traitors for breaking with their candidate? Wnt (talk) 23:14, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

I don't know how it works in other states, but by my reading of the California election code, the electors for each party in that state are made official after the party primaries, so the actual candidate would have the opportunity to have an impact there, and presumably prevent something like a party's electors voting against their own candidate because he was an outsider. Someguy1221 (talk) 06:57, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

It's perhaps worth remembering that while it's possible in a very tight college for 1 or 2 electors to make a difference, in this case the chance there will be enough to make any iota is difference is close to none. Trump's majority in the college is too high. And even thought some members of the Republican party may have disliked Trump or even supported Clinton at a time, there's little chance anymany of them want the mess of the electoral college choosing someone else whether Clinton or even some insider Republican. Especially after the feared collapse in the House and Senate failed to materialise for now. Nil Einne (talk) 14:26, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Questions about faithless electors seem to turn up every four years or so. Here's one from 2008, raising much the same question as the above.[3] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:19, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

I've been told that the electors are basically party hacks from their respective parties, who have been around forever and who the party muckymucks think can be relied on. That said, supposedly a couple of WA Democratic electors who were Sanders delegates have said (before the election) they would refuse to vote for Clinton even if it meant flipping the result to Trump. I don't know if they backed off from that, though in any case it's moot now. 50.0.136.56 (talk) 08:59, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Right, that surprised me too, because I had thought that a candidate's electors were chosen from among the personal loyalists of that candidate. But apparently in Washington, or at least for Washington Democrats, they are chosen at the state party convention, which may be before the national party's candidate is known. That's apparently how Robert Satiacum, Jr. slipped through to become a Clinton elector, when he apparently had no intention of ever voting for Clinton.

That, I have to say, seems like a flaw. I don't know why each candidate's organization can't choose a slate of electors for that candidate specifically, rather than for the state party, and have the party convention rubber-stamp them for each candidate still in the running. It would be OK to have some overlap among the slates, provided the overlapping individuals were OK with voting for the candidate of all the slates they were represented in. --Trovatore (talk) 09:36, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Each state party generally sets its own rules on how to select electors to represent that state's party. In many cases the electors are chosen (or at least confirmed) at the meeting of the political party in that state. In many states, especially caucus states, the delegates to the state's political party meeting are chosen in rough proportion to the distribution of votes among the primary candidates in that state. So, for example, in Washington state, where Sanders won nearly 3/4 of the primary vote, one can reasonably expect that roughly 3/4 of the delegates at the Washington State Democratic Party Convention prefer Sanders. These delegates, who heavily favor Sanders, are then responsible for choosing (or at least confirming) a selection of electors for the Democratic Party of Washington State. Though there is no rule requiring it, in many states the chosen electors are selected from among the attendees of the Party's Convention. In other words, you may have a group of mostly Sanders supporters choosing electors from amongst a group of mostly Sanders supporters. There is still supposed to be an expectation that they will put the interest of the party first, but it is not hard to see how problems might arise. As faithless electors are a rare problem, and one which historically has never affected the outcome of an election, I don't think much attention has been paid to restructuring the process in a way that would produce greater loyalty. Dragons flight (talk) 10:59, 19 November 2016 (UTC)