Bush over Kerry in electoral votes?

10 Comments

• Why did Gore lose his home state of Tennessee? If he had won his home state, none of the Florida vote recounts would have mattered.
  
  
  
  BTW, I am not complaining about your statement. I think your question is VERY relevant and an important one for us to ask.
  
  
  
  Wally
  

• And I think there already was a somewhat of a revolt in 2000, Bush is the only US president who had protesters on his inauguration ;)
  
  
  
  Btw I have to laugh when I hear arguments for the electoral college - people complain that LA and NY would have too much of a say in electing the president. I don't understand what's wrong with that, since a lot of people live in those two areas, why shouldn't they have a lot of voice? If there would be 30 million people living in Alabama then they would have a lot of say as well.
  

• There will be no revolt. Everyone will keep watching Survivor and American Idol. They will keep working to pay off their never ending debt. Oh people will b!tch and moan but we have become too complacent to revolt against the system.
  

• I have to jump in here and say a few things. First off, it has been a long understood and unwritten rule that we don’t post political stuff on the main feed. Not to gripe, but the goal is to build community around .NET; politics can alienate.
  
  
  
  But since we’re on the subject...
  
  
  
  I want to address the Electoral College issue but I first have to correct something. It is often said by people in this country that the Supreme Court stopped the ballot counting in Florida. This is off target a bit. The granular details of the findings and the arguments made before the court are much bigger than any single blog entry or comment but to clear it up let me stab at it for a second.
  
  
  
  Gore: This is too close; we need to recount a couple of these counties near Miami, the old people got confused.
  
  
  
  Bush: No we don’t, I win.
  
  
  
  Gore: Your Honor, I think we need to recount some of these ballots in the Miami-Dade and West Palm Beach areas.
  
  
  
  Bush: Objection your honor, Why just there?
  
  
  
  Judge: Yeah, that would be unfair to just count those down there.
  
  
  
  Gore: Well I’ll appeal
  
  
  
  Gore: Hi Supreme Court, I want to recount 3 counties but this other Judge said it would be unfair, what say you?
  
  
  
  Supremes in Florida: We think you should recount those
  
  
  
  Bush: Whoa there buddy, It is wrong to just count those three counties. I’ll appeal.
  
  
  
  Bush: Hi there Big Supreme Court, this Gore fella wants to recount just the votes in places where he knows he’ll win, I think that is unfair but I am going to argue that there is a loophole for me so it don’t matter. Ya see, Florida law says the election has to be certified by a certain date and we gonna miss that deadline. My brother is the guvna down there and he tells me they are getting together soon to certify the results so this whole ballyhoo not gonna matta.
  
  
  
  Big Supreme Court: Yeah, you’re right, the US Constitution says that the state lawmakers decide how this works and we don’t know where the Florida supremes get off trying to change this. But come back later and we’ll talk about the other stuff.
  
  
  
  In the meantime: Florida legistlature certifies the election…Constitutionally it is all over. But we keep looking for dimpled chads and stuff…
  
  
  
  Then….
  
  Big Supreme Court: First of all, the law in Florida, on the books is what matters. Second, you guys are screwed up down there and need to figure out how to count these things right the first time. But that hits on a point that bothers us, you have different vote counting standards in different places. How would that be a fair judge? And speaking of judges, we cant figure out who have the authority to oversee this whole thing. Finally, since you wanna get selective about it and just count in a few places which have different standards and no central arbiter, the results you come up with cannot pass the test of being fair to everybody, we call that the Equal Protection clause. To put it bluntly, the constitution says that the state legislature decides, and they already decided so you are wasting your time.
  
  
  
  Bush: Yeeehaahhh big Daddy, Washington here I come.
  
  
  
  Gore: Damnit! Should have won my home state!
  
  
  
  
  
  I know that was a bit elementary but the bottom line is that if Gore had simply asked to recount all the counties there would not have been this whole circus. (maybe it would have been bigger!)
  
  
  
  Now, back to the Electoral College thing.
  
  
  
  The most often heard argument is the best one I think, and that is the concentration issue. If we went to popular only then there would be attention focused on the large coastal populations. Some say so what, if a majority of Americans live there, that is all that matters. This short sighted view holds no curiosity as to why our founders created a bicameral legislative body that was partially apportioned based on state population and an electoral system derived from that body.
  
  
  
  Elections are about issues and if the elections were focused on New York and Los Angeles we would pay far less attention to potato farmers in Idaho, Steel workers in Pennsylvania and ranchers in Nebraska. These three groups are absolutely vital to our national well being. Elections would become about white collar issues and big city problems thus alienating a massive body of the country. A popular mayor from New York could spend all his time campaigning in Los Angeles, depend on this inherent NY popularity and win without visiting anywhere else. Now obviously these are extreme views of the situation but with matters such as this we cannot be so short sighted as to look only at our generation.
  
  
  
  We actually have a unique situation in this country today where there are very tight divides from every perspective. If we went popular, Bush could campaign and win the states he would normally chase in an electoral system and Kerry the same and our outcome would be virtually the same as the electoral one. One could imagine however that situations over time could change this.
  
  
  
  It would require amending the constitution which will probably not happen considering such a decision would be politically charged. Furthermore, could you imagine a nationwide recount? You think Florida was crazy? You would need too if we went popular.
  
  
  
  After having said all that, at this point in my life I wish we would amend the constitution to allow for popular elections of the President and to allow for national referendums on key issues.
  
  
  
  FYI - Jerry is propagating a lie from F911 where Moore makes you believe that no other president had protestors at the inauguration; this is however false. In the modern era there have been protests at every single inaugural.
  
  

• Keith, according to the 2000 Census data at http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-_box_head_nbr=GCT-PH1-R&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U&-format=US-10S 225,981,679 out of 281,421,906 people in the US lived in metropolitan areas. That's over 80% of the population. Yet you (and others like you) keep saying that those people should not be important in elections, and that the few farmers in Idaho should be the ones deciding the future for the rest of us. That the issues of 80% of the population are lot less important than the issues of the very few. I still don't get that logic... Oh and how is 20% a massive part of the country is completely beyond me, especially if you compare it to 80%, whose issues should not be considered, according to you.
  

• Jerry, the electroral system is a method, as Keith pointed out, of keeping the 20%'s vote equal weight to the 80%'s vote by distributing the voting according to location and not by population.
  
  
  
  I'm in the 80% but I dont think my vote should be more important than folks in the 20%.
  

• Wow, Jerry you really didn't read what I said. Nowhere did I say that Idaho farmers should decide the election, nowhere did I even espouse such a thing. Never did I claim the votes of people in metropolitan areas are less important than those in rural ones. Again, please check yourself on the intellectual slopiness here. How you derived those things you said out of my response is beyond, obviously you commented before you finished reading it because in the end I said I was in favor of popular elections.
  
  
  
  Gee whiz fella, please read it all first.
  

• Jefferson himself said a revolution would need to happen every 20-25 years or so to keep our governing body relevant. The electorial college is antiquated certainly... it may have worked well for a fledgling republic with only 13 states and a relatively small populace. Perhaps the answer is that neither the EC nor the popular vote is adaquate. However, with vast voter apathy, and corporations being more in control of our daily lives, we may well ask ourselves if we still live in a democracy at all. Democracy... it's not for everyone.
  

• Bottom line: the Electoral College is not about the rights of the individual voting American, it's about the rights of the States in relation to the federal government. People who don't understand that this issue was THE critical issue in the formation of this country don't have a clue what type of constitutional chaos will happen in trying to convene another constitutional convention for the purpose of restructuring the election process.
  
  
  
  Next: those who chant "Count every vote!" may not really want every vote counted!!!
  
  
  
  Aside from the issue of whether the 2000 Florida election issues were properly decided by the US Supreme Court, the simple fact is that we just do not know who received the most popular votes. Here's why:
  
  
  
  In most states, the absentee, write-in, military, and overseas (most of whom are spouses of military members) votes aren't even counted if the margin of victory exceeds the number of those outstanding votes. It's pretty much a given that the military and overseas votes tend to be Republican.
  
  
  
  So, there is a real possibility that Bush received enough votes to actually have won the popular vote.
  
  
  
  But, we will never know...
  

• This is hot off the press today and validates my point, particularly if 30% of the military who requested ballots did not get them in time to vote:
  
  
  
  Presidential Elections - AP
  
  AP
  
  More Time Sought to Count GI Ballots
  
  
  
  Wed Aug 4,12:04 AM ET
  
  
  
  
  
  By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer
  
  
  
  WASHINGTON - Thousands of votes from U.S. troops overseas could go uncounted again in November without emergency legislation extending deadlines for the ballots, a Chicago election official warned President Bush (news - web sites) in a letter Tuesday.
  
  
  
  Nearly 30 percent of military voters who requested ballots in 2000 didn't get them in time to vote. Theresa M. Petrone, a Democratic member of Chicago's three-person Board of Election Commissioners, told Bush the problem could be solved if he proposed emergency legislation giving election officials up to 14 days after Election Day to collect and count ballots.