Gotta love it !! :^D
Posted on 08/28/2004 11:34:36 PM PDT by Former Military Chick
When Republican delegates nominate their presidential candidate this week, they will be doing it in a city where residents who support George Bush have, for all practical purposes, already been disenfranchised. Barring a tsunami of a sweep, heavily Democratic New York will send its electoral votes to John Kerry and both parties have already written New York off as a surefire blue state. The Electoral College makes Republicans in New York, and Democrats in Utah, superfluous. It also makes members of the majority party in those states feel less than crucial. It's hard to tell New York City children that every vote is equally important - it's winner take all here, and whether Senator Kerry beats the president by one New York vote or one million, he will still walk away with all 31 of the state's electoral votes.
The Electoral College got a brief spate of attention in 2000, when George Bush became president even though he lost the popular vote to Al Gore by more than 500,000 votes. Many people realized then for the first time that we have a system in which the president is chosen not by the voters themselves, but by 538 electors. It's a ridiculous setup, which thwarts the will of the majority, distorts presidential campaigning and has the potential to produce a true constitutional crisis. There should be a bipartisan movement for direct election of the president.
The main problem with the Electoral College is that it builds into every election the possibility, which has been a reality three times since the Civil War, that the president will be a candidate who lost the popular vote. This shocks people in other nations who have been taught to look upon the United States as the world's oldest democracy. The Electoral College also heavily favors small states. The fact that every one gets three automatic electors - one for each senator and a House member - means states that by population might be entitled to only one or two electoral votes wind up with three, four or five.
The majority does not rule and every vote is not equal - those are reasons enough for scrapping the system. But there are other consequences as well. This election has been making clear how the Electoral College distorts presidential campaigns. A few swing states take on oversized importance, leading the candidates to focus their attention, money and promises on a small slice of the electorate. We are hearing far more this year about the issue of storing hazardous waste at Yucca Mountain, an important one for Nevada's 2.2 million residents, than about securing ports against terrorism, a vital concern for 19.2 million New Yorkers. The political concerns of Cuban-Americans, who are concentrated in the swing state of Florida, are of enormous interest to the candidates. The interests of people from Puerto Rico scarcely come up at all, since they are mainly settled in areas already conceded as Kerry territory. The emphasis on swing states removes the incentive for a large part of the population to follow the campaign, or even to vote.
Those are the problems we have already experienced. The arcane rules governing the Electoral College have the potential to create havoc if things go wrong. Electors are not required to vote for the candidates they are pledged to, and if the vote is close in the Electoral College, a losing candidate might well be able to persuade a small number of electors to switch sides. Because there are an even number of electors - one for every senator and House member of the states, and three for the District of Columbia - the Electoral College vote can end in a tie. There are several plausible situations in which a 269-269 tie could occur this year. In the case of a tie, the election goes to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote - one for Wyoming's 500,000 residents and one for California's 35.5 million.
The Electoral College's supporters argue that it plays an important role in balancing relations among the states, and protecting the interests of small states. A few years ago, this page was moved by these concerns to support the Electoral College. But we were wrong. The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate, which more than looks out for their interests. And there is no interest higher than making every vote count.
Making Votes Count: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/makingvotescount.
Thankyou for these terrific posts, PC! I heartily agree that "Math Against Tyranny" deserves its own thread!
When you start out with a false premise, every thing else that follows is just crap.
So it´s all getting worse since the early ´90s?? Better get rid of this crap soon. ;-)
However, it would help to prevent that popular vote and majority of the Electorate College go to different candidates.
So is China, although a communist Republic. Rome the original Republic, was a Patrician Republic. Republic by itself is a pretty meaningless term. I could probably name a dozen different forms of republican government in under a minute. We are a: Constitutionally Federated Democratic Republic. To say we're a democracy is just as accurate (or inaccurate) as saying we're a republic. Our democracy is built upon a Republican foundation, and our Republic is built upon the democratic process. Both are integral to our system of government.
Pure Democracy is the same as anarchy.
In a word, no. Pure democracy is certainly a form of government to be avoided, but it has absolutely no functional, procedural or structural similarities with anarchy.
Our system is working extremely well, has for more than 2 centuries and allows the greatest amount of fairness.
Agreed. Flawed as it may be, our system is the best I've ever seen.
Then I have a solution for you. Move to Nebraska where that's practiced.
Not every state. Just 38 of them.
One thing that needs to be understood is that we live in a republic, not a democracy. The rights of all people need to be considered, not just rights of the majority. The Electorial college is aimed towards preventing the larger states from abusing the smaller ones.
Thank you and Paleo Conservative both. It's from an E-mail I sent to some NYC friends, when the NYC council voted not to support the Patriots Act, or something similar stupidity.
BUSH AND ANYBODY IN 2004
Same in Arkansas. The only thing they support is the corrupt communist/socialist RAT agenda. And the really bad part is that we have an excellent conservative Republican candidate for the US Senate who won the Republican primary with nearly 70% of the vote (few thought he'd even make much of a showing), but he doesn't have the millions to compete with Blanche Lincoln and the national Republican party, to my knowledge, hasn't lifted a finger to do anything to support him. They've pretty much determined that he isn't worth their time. Instead, Republican party money donated in Arkansas gets siphoned off to fund races outside of Arkansas and RAT corruption here remains in tact. It's enough to make you puke.
Translated from liberalese, it means "count every vote (real or imagined) cast by any voter, legitimate or illegitimate, that is cast (or that might have been cast) by or for a democRAT." Surely you didn't think it meant "count every Republican vote", did you?
By the logic of the NYT we should have a world government with one person one vote. What would that be like?
I figured that if neither got a majority in a popular vote election, a runoff would ensue. That's just an assumption on my part though.
Gotta love it !! :^D
The electoral college has worked for over 200 years. Don't mess with it.
It's not a change to the electoral college that is needed. What is needed, is that the people of this country need to understand how it works and why it was set up this way.
Typical Socialist position. Let the urban areas dominate the voting. If rural folk were Democrats, the Socialists would try to abolish the popular vote.
This whole thread reminds me of the saying:
"The United States has the worst form of government there is, except for all others."
BUSH AND ANYBODY IN 2004
Joseph Stalin once said: "It's not who votes, but who counts the votes",
Read this post #73.
America is NOT a democracy..
Democracy is the road to socialism. Karl Marx
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. V.I. Lenin
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