Dan Zirker is a Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato, with a specialty in democracy, including Canadian politics, US politics, US Foreign Policy, African politics, and Ethnopolitics in Africa

His address at our October 2020 meeting was on the forth-coming USA Presidential election on 3 November. His introduction included the key elements of democracy as civility, coalition, compromise and mutual respect. His talk continued on the US Constitution, the Senate and Congress, the Electoral College and Donald Trump as a populist.

Professor Zirker kindly provided these links for those who were not able to attend the October meeting and for those who would like to continue reading on the topic.

• Here is a link to the Constitution of the USA, originally drafted in 1787:
https://constitutioncenter.org/media/files/constitution.pdf .

• For those of us who wish to read more on the topic, Edmund S. Corwin’s analysis of the US Constitution): The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation.
One can get a 2006 downloadable eBook version of this text for free from Project Gutenberg, or a much enlarged 2011 Kindle  version from Amazon for US$ 1.67, probably less than NZ$ 2.50 in exchange. It links Supreme Court cases to the expanding reach of the US Constitution, originally drafted in the summer of 1787. The complexity of the interpretations of the US Constitution based on Supreme Court decisions is intensifying every year.

• An open online source of poll numbers and background articles regarding the election is Nate Silver’s website, FiveThirtyEight.
538 is the number of electors in the ‘Electoral College’. Silver combines dozens of polls in his predictions (he also looks at sports on his website), and has a number of articles explaining elements of the upcoming election, including swing states’ current data, etc.
Click on https://fivethirtyeight.com/