I need a reminder of what hexbear is about. I recall something… off.

There’s a reason it sounds like that.

I find LLMs very useful for setting up tech stuff. “How do I xyz in docker?” It does a great job of boiling together several disjointed How Tos that don’t quite get me there into one actually usable one. I use it when googling and following articles isn’t getting me anywhere, and it’s often saved so much time.

kinda. It depends a bit on how we handle some of the stuff. Firstly, despite saying he wants to make Canada a state, he could make it a territory that gets 0 votes, which is straight up bullshit but exactly how it works. If he does make it a state, there’s still a lot of uncertainty.

Every state has gets 1 vote per representative. Senate has a fixed 100 members (2 per state). House currently has 435 members, divided by state population. If Canada is brought in as a single state, it would beat out California in size, but not by all that much. If we simply increased the house to accommodate the new state, Canada would have a bit over 52 electoral votes. If we add Canada’s 52-ish electoral votes to Kamala’s count, she still doesn’t have the electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Similarly, adding Canada’s 52-ish votes to Hillary’s count means she still loses. Literally giving Canada’s votes to the Dem candidate does not affect the last few elections results in a meaningful way. In fact, it would change almost none of the elections we’ve had in the last, like, ever.

However, that assumes they simply give Canada new reps, rather than redistributing the current ones. If they did a redistribution, electoral votes would be taken from the largest states. Any states with 3 electoral votes can’t have that reduced at all, and those with like 4-8 are unlikely to get the count reduced. Redistributing will affect California the most, followed by Texas, Florida, New York and so on. It’s… harder to analyze how that shift would shake out, but I wager still not particularly favorable shifts for blue states in general, meaning dems can’t actually expect an increase of 50-ish in that case, which means even less of a chance of flipping any results.

However, perhaps Canada gets split into a bunch of individual states rather than all one. If we assume each province-state gets 2 senate members and they collectively get 50 house members, you end up with 70 electoral votes (ignoring territories). If those all swing blue, Trump still wins 2016 and 2024. Both of those become far closer (2016 becomes 302 to 306 and 2024 becomes 296 to 312), presumably uncomfortably close.

And that’s assuming they all vote solid (D), actually get voting rights, voting is still free and fair, and voter suppression hasn’t become even more outlandish by then.

Anyways, our electoral vote system blows real bad.

This is going to be the weirdest part of any history book. People reading and trying to understand why the US suddenly turned on and invaded their close ally of Canada in a failed annexation attempt immediately after watching Russia struggle a similar (though less surprising) annexation of Ukraine, which the US helped fight against.