Kerry Polling Lead: Electoral College Nightmare

The LA Times has a great interactive electoral college map. Assuming Kerry wins Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware, Hawaii, and Pennsylvania (in addition to the safe states)-- Kerry needs only 6 more votes. That's either Ohio or Florida. \

wow! great find shawn.

I posted a thread about an electoral tie over at MacNN.

I was playing around with the electoral votes here, and if Kerry simply picks up New Hampshire and WVA, both of which seem highly likely as of right now, it would tie. [edit - Shawn has linked one too]

But it's even worse than you suggest, Nick, because a tie wouldn't necessarily give Bush the election. What happens is that each state delegation votes - not each representative.

[Although there are more Republican states, the problem is that several states have tied congressional delegations, so even that vote could very easily not result in a majority. There aren't 26 states with either a majority Republican or Democratic delegation right now. :/] [edit: I'm wrong about this paragraph. Enough states are controlled by Republicans that Bush would easily win if it went to the House.]

The other question is whether you use the current congress or the congress that gets voted in along with the presidential race. The Senate votes for the vice-pres, so if the Dems take the Senate, the next administration could be Bush-Edwards. It's just seriously fucked up.

I say, who cares? The previous election was decided outside of the normal and legal methods. That's not right. As long as the election isn't marred by fraud I'll be content.

well, if it happens AGAIN, i say the system needs to be revisited. rethought. reSOMETHINGed...

make people vote and offer a "they're all dumbasses" selection just to make some people happy. i mean, hell, you're not allowed to skip your taxes. let's make you not allowed to skip out on picking the leader of the free-friggin'-world already. i personally think (not backed up by any data other than my own semi-informed opinion, which, of course, means diddly...) that the system caves in when voter turnout isn't high. i mean, for god's sake, right now, you have the leader picked by the majority of the the electoral abstraction of the populace, out of which a whopping 30-35% (if we're lucky) happens to turn out to the polls.

and would it kill them to work in some sort of friggin' runoff election in states where the difference is less than 1-2%????

meanwhile, we're trumpeting the fact that we've got 90% voter registration in afghanistan, and i'll bet you far more than a third of them will vote. makes you wonder what they heck we're doing wrong.

personally, i blame reality t.v.

What do you mean? State law ruled in the election.

The Supreme Court overruled the State with a ridiculous opinion.

"There's not enough time to do it right, so we'll do it incorrectly instead."

How many recounts of every chad and dimple have been undertaken to come to the same conclusion? Bush won Florida.

You would think that you would believe the left leaning sources that have undertaken this task.

Florida... recount... must... resist... argh... [/kirk]

Thank God for the outcome in Florida! I don't want to think about the shape we would be in now if Gore was the President during these times. Scarry.

nice to see it's so black & white of an issue. most other RATIONAL people noticed two important things during all those recounts:

first, with every recount, the number kept changing
second, with every recount, the difference got smaller

in my book, either you don't stop recounting until you get the same number TWICE, or you hold a special runoff. easy. simple. fair. not draw a line in the sand when the difference has dropped to what, below a hundred?

p.s. before someone jumps down my throat about it, okay, it might not be EASY. hell, i've never tried to organize the labor and everything for an election. but it would have to haave been easier and taken less time than all those umpteen recounts.

Well the only good that would come out of such a turn of events would be the tremendous pressure to get rid of the electoral college. As it is now California, Hawaii, Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Indiana, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, DC, Vermont, and Maine are pretty much ignored. That's half the country. It's absurd that people in West Virginia and Missouri are fawned over and slathered in pork by the candidates while states like Texas and New York with five times the number of Americans are ignored.

Part of me says you're right, but then part of me realizes that this phenomenon is what gives our country some balance. I wouldn't want the 10 most populous states running the country.

The problem with the recounts, and the decision from the Supreme Court, was that unless you are going to recount everything, you cannot selectively recount certain counties where you hope you might gain an advantage. Additionally, in every county in America, there are strict rules regarding what counts as a vote and what does not. The counties in Florida were flagrantly ignoring those rules.

"Voter intent" is not a legal concept. It was made up by people who were attempting to infuse their own bias into a potential vote. A vote is a vote, and anything that does not qualify as a vote, is not a vote no matter how close it comes.

The problem is that this wasn't the way the LAW was written. It was quite clear. Gore challenged for more recounts, and won several times. The FSC literally and unilaterally changed the deadline for certification. The FSC ordered new hand counts and failed to set a standard for those counts...it left it up to the individual canvassing boards.



One can't just keep counting until one gets the result he wants. Gore was never once ahead, even in four recounts.

The FL recount was unfair because (as SEVEN justices of the SC agreed) it treated votes differently. In other words, someone's vote from Miami-Dade County had a greater chance of being counted than someone's vote from Broward county. This clearly violates Equal Protection. Add to this the problem of ballot fatigue, tampering, etc, and the problem gets worse.

There is simply no argument that Gore won Florida. In counts conducted by major news organizations after the fact, Bush would have won...even without the ten thousand people or so that didn't vote for Bush after the state was called.

The whole election should have been over after the machine recount. Or, if we had a recount, it should have included the whole STATE with one one clear and uniform standard. That's all I'm saying.

Um and some of us also noticed that the counties that had this problem were in democratic controlled counties.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/flo...ries/main.html

"Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted -- a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election -- by a 225-vote margin statewide."

So only if the most liberal interpretation of the law was applied statewide, would gore have won.

Here is a breakdown of supervisors of elections in those counties:

Palm Beach County: Theresa LePore - Former (D) now listed as "Non-Partisan"
Broward County: Previous - Miriam Oliphant - (D)
Current - Brenda C. Snipes - (D)
Miami-Dade County: Previous - David C. Leahy (D)
Current - Constance Kaplan - ?
Volusia County: Deanie Lowe - ?

You can go to each county's site and see what the ballots look like.

Here is miami-dade's confusing new ballot:
http://www.miamidade.gov/info/community/elections.htm#

I wouldn't be confused, would you? Do you know anyone that you have ever met that would, besides those who can't function in the real world?

It's scary anyway.

As a Canadian, I'll take this opportunity to interject my views on the American election.
(Since Michael Moore and other leftists saw no problem in interfering in ours.)

Bunge is correct. Canada has a first-past-the-post, winner take all electoral system and the alienation this causes is a big reason the country is so unstable.

Westerners feel their votes don't count, Atlantic Canadians feel taken for granted and Quebec, well...Quebec's a tightrope on the best of days, and has stayed in with guarantees of seats in the Commons and Supreme Court.

America seems to be divided 50/50 these days, and a big part of that split is between the large, urban centres on the coasts and the "God's country" in the middle.

You should be thankful for the Electoral College. Without it, America would face pressures to rip apart at the seams.

Off topic:

Been thinking about this.

Why not just let it rip?

Standard of living is higher in individual European states then it is anywhere in the US (eg Scandinavia). Tell some Americans that this proves the US system isn't the last word in making people happy, and they say "Yes but Norway has a population of X and the US has a population of Y."

To which the only answer has to be, well if that's the case, then the US federal system isn't the best way to ensure a high standard of living / lower crime / social cohesion etc. Split up, and maybe Nevada will be as nice a place to live as Norway. Dunno.

Why should a vote count differently dependending on where you live?

It's not perfect but it seems better to me. It's not like they focus on all 50 now. They focus on about 15 and they would focus on about 15 if it were one man one vote nationally. Moderate political states with sizeable populations like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida would still be power brokers. Moderate states with medium populations like New Mexico, West Virginia, Missouri, etc would lose out at the expense of larger states that are predictable in presidential elections like New York, California, and Texas. That's fine by me. Idaho is gonna be ignored either way but it seems far better to me that we pay attention to the 30 million Californians than to the 3 million (or whatever it is) people living in West Virginia. Both systems are imperfect but at least the system with no electoral college gives equal weight to everyone's vote and it creates a system where some people are ignored but fewer people are ignored than under the current system.

And the vote of someone in Wyoming is valued more than the vote of someone in say Oregon. That's just stupid. After all, the whole premise of democracy depends on the notion of serving people by doing what the majority or largest number want within certain limitations.

But this COMPLETLY ignores the reason for doing the way we do. The purpose was to limit the power of any one group. Large states a limited in their ability to decide national politics by this process as you yourself have shown. Cali, NY, and Texas are pigonholed as dem or repub states and receive little campaigning. Middle population states have a large say in the outcome of the election. Small states can lend their voice significantly to the outcome. The current system was not meant to be fair. It was meant to limit power--the power of large states to dominate federal policies.

At no point in time was our system designed to give the majority power. Quite the contrary. Our system was designed to make government slow, inefficient, and of limited federal power.

This was not the purpose of the electoral college. Remember that when the nation was founded, the public didn't elect the president, these electors did. The electors went out and found out about the candidates and made up their minds and voted. That was the purpose of the electoral college. They were just going to use Congress, but then they decided it would be a bad idea to make one branch so dependent on the other that way, so they came up with this "shadow congress" of electors to do the presidential voting.

But now the electoral college is an anachronism. Today, the electors have no independent say, and we have gone to the popular vote, while retaining the electoral college. It just makes no sense. It's purpose isn't to protect small states or limit power, it was just cobbled together over time, and now we're left with both the undemocratic electoral college and the democratic popular vote. Maybe we should go back to the original method - we vote on the electors who then vote for the president. I actually wouldn't mind that at all.

And anyway, the current winner-takes-all electoral college in no way helps small states. If you're in a state with 3 electoral votes, as I am, you are completely and utterly ignored. Only people in swing states, the purple states, are important. And that has nothing to do with where the state is, or if it's middle America or coastal or whatever. It just depends on how close the state is. That's ridiculous.

eliminate the electoral college,add up the votes and who has the most wins isnt that democracy?

That's one form of democracy. We use a representative form of democracy though. You don't vote for every law that comes down the pipe do you? Nope representatives do.

perhaps it why things are such a mess with special interest running everything.

But a vote in Wyoming isnt valued more because there are multiple influences in the political system. Big states like California get their influence elsewhere when they basically overpower the Delawares and the Rhode Islands. Ultimately this gives us some balance because it does give a voice to the people that would normally not be heard.

What is the situation right now is that the largest battleground states decides.

How many people who voted Democratic in 2000 will change their vote to Republican in 2004? I say slim to none.

Similarly, how many people who voted Republican in 2000 will change their vote to Democratic in 2004? That's the question.

And the 2000 elections was as close as close gets.

Interesting thought about terrorism, but it leads me to believe that another attack would sway those people against Bush since his policies wouldn't be working. Previously I've thought another attack would boost Bush, but perhaps not.

It's what I've been saying all along. He's had his chance to warmonger for support. Any more and it would be very unpopular. That's probably why we get all those alerts. It's the only thing he can do in that area.

I witnessed something ugly today . . . a new Republican tactic that is insidious and dirty and probably very effective:

I went with my daughter up to a small zoo in Chippewa Falls, just outside of Eau Claire Wisconsin. Bush is going to visit Chpewa Falls tomorrow.
I took my daughter to a nice mom-and-pop style Ice-Cream parlor, which we go to whenever we go to that small zoo. It was packed.
In comes five middle-aged big white dudes who are clearly well off, they swagger around and pretend to be locals . . . they take up two booths and commence to shout to each other one RNC Talking Point cliche after another, mixed with Anti-Democrat slurs and stupendously stupid cliche sound bites . . . they did this non-stop for about an hour , making sure that people had to overhear their displeasure with the evil Liberals and love for the last four years of Bush's triumphant leadership consequences . . . they could still be doing it for all I know, I left . . .

It is a sickening thing to witness: they clearly were NOT merely local people who happened to also be Republicans . . . I wish I knew who they were so I could have called their bluff!!

Things like this make me think that the Republicans will win: dirty little insidious strategies where they insinuate their lobotomized sound-bite messages to ordinary people through every channel possible, whether it be yelling heads on the radio, TV, newspapers etc or through dirty trick strategies like this or through funded church operations.

And of course none of their statements were insightful and all of them sounded like they were mere shouts toned down to talking level . . .

" . . . ; and already the knowing brutes are aware
that we are not at home
in our interpreted world"
--Rilke

Obviously this tactic failed. At least with you

No offense, Nick, but sarcasm isn't really your long suit....

The good thing about all these little insidious tactics is that they have been to the well too many times and are being recognized for what they are. The last 4 years have left a bad taste in the mouth of people who haven't been doing so well under republican rule. Given their tendancy to cater to the rich that's most of the voting public.

I realize that AI is populated by mostly prgressive, open minded people so it's not really a fair example of the general public. However I've even seen a change here in the last year. People who used to support Bush aren't anymore.



You see I don't think they're going to win this time around. I think most people have had enough.

OOPS!