An interesting Scientific American article on voting technology here
Au contraire. Nothing’s changed legally, and you can bet the media will be cranking out predictions just as soon as they can. What they’ve generally agreed to is to hold off reporting exit poll results from a particular state until all of the polls close in that state. But when the polls start closing at 7 p.m. in the eastern states, you’ll start seeing the networks projecting certain states as having gone to one candidate or the other within seconds.
There’s some fascinating reading at http://energycommerce.house.gov/107/hearings/02142001Hearing216/hearing.htm#Witness%20List%20&%20Prepared%20Testimony ; this is the page for the United States House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee’s hearing on the coverage of the 2000 election by the networks, held in February 2001. There are statements by the news heads of Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the Associated Press, and the Voter News Service (the polling service, owned by the television networks and the AP and other media, that had been responsible for exit polling and predictions for all of its members for years, and that was disbanded after the 2000 debacle and its subsequent botching of polling for the 2002 congressional races), as well as by representatives from various think tanks and the Columbia University School of Journalism who had studied the mistakes made by the networks.
Thanks for the answers on voting in different time zones.
I’m sure you know that we just have the one time zone in the UK (except my wife, who has her own).
When we have an election here, I think I’m right in saying that the media are not allowed to make comments on any aspect of the election until polling is finished (usually 10pm in General Elections) . Then the rush starts, and all the different organisations try to guesstimate the result.
I think the salient fact that many foreigners, and perhaps many Americans, miss is that the election of the president is a function of the states, not the federal government. The United States is, in many ways, really a collection of fifty states, not one state. Laws vary widely from state to state. Certainly, the gist of the laws are largely the same (murder is illegal in all states, for example), but there are significant differences. Laws regarding speeding (in vehicles) vary widely. The penalties for infractions can vary widely. California has a referendum system where voters can pass laws at the ballot box. Texas and other states have no such system. In Texas, referenda have to pass muster with the legislature, first. The Texas governor has very little real power (a fact many US voters might have missed in the last presidential election) where other state governors have broad powers. Civil laws vary widely as well. Many companies will incorporate in a state that has laws favorable to its industry. Many lending companies (i.e. credit cards) incorporate in Delaware because the laws are favorable there. In Lousiana, the entire governmental structure is based on Napoleonic law. This makes their political and legal environments markedly different from the rest of the country.
My point is that laws regarding elections will vary from state to state. Even though the president is a national official, the states actually elect him/her. I beleive there was a time when the electors were selected by the state legislatures, rather than by polling the population. The Founding Fathers did not believe that a popular election of the president was in the best interests of the nation. They wanted the chief executive to be selected by legislatures, the Electoral College, and ultimately the Congress. I think they would be profoundly disappointed by the way things have turned out. The Founding Fathers also expected that no candidate would ever have an electoral majority because there would be too many candidates. They failed to anticipate that only two parties would dominate most political debate.
Since elections are actually a function of the states, then local and state elections do appear on the November ballot. In my county, we’ll be voting on precinct constables, justices of the peace, and, most notably, sherrif. The sherrif’s race is hotly contested in our county and many will vote simply because they are for or against a particular sherrif candidate.
The scheduling of elections is important, as well. Recently, the Texas legistlature passed a law to limit medical liability lawsuits to $200,000. Implementation of this law required an amendment to the state constitution. Many supporters of this law feared that the amendment would fail in an election, so they pushed for the election to be held on a Saturday in September. This was an active attempt by the legislature to suppress voter turnout. Very few people voted and the law amendment passed. Had Texas waited until the November General Election, voter turnout would have been much higher and the amendment may have failed. Why pay for only one election, when you can double your costs and pay for two?
Yes; Florida occupies 2 time zones, and the networks called the state when most of polls had closed, even though polls in the panhandle (the most conservative part of the state) were still open. The suggestion was that people in Pensacola would have been driving to the polls after work, heard the call on the radio and just gone home.
This has been a great quality thread!
Just to add a note about an electoral college tie, which has thus far happened only in 1800:
You win the EC with 270 EV or higher, at least a one vote majority. In the highly unlikely event of an electoral college tie (269 EV each; this map shows a possible scenario), the House of Representatives has a vote to break the tie. The Republicans currently control bothe houses of Congress, thus Bush really needs at least 269 EV this year whereas Kerry needs at least 270. No state (nor DC) has less than 3 EV, but you can see how this sort of scenario is possible, especially as (I know, I know… this will only confuse the Brits more…) Maine and Nebraska have different EV calculation systems than the rest of the country.
That should serve to muddy the waters even further for the foreign Dopers, I should think… 
I think this is a point that some of us have tried to make, perhaps not very clearly.
Indeed, it is said that the lieutenant governor of Texas, who presides over the state senate, is more powerful than the governor.
Indeed, most large corporations of any kind are incorporated in Delaware to take advantage of Delaware corporation law. It’s not just lending companies.
Indeed, Louisiana is the only state that has not adopted the Uniform Commercial Code in one form or another.
This might be a debatable point.
Apparently they failed to understand the implications of a winner-take-all (first-past-the-post) system. Was there any such scholarship at the time, I wonder? How would the founding fathers have felt about proportional representation?
IANAL or Constitutional Scholar.
The Constitution merely specifies that the people allowed to vote for the most numerous house of the state legislature are eligible to vote for their representative in the House of Representatives - that is, the rep in the lower house of the bicameral federal legislature. Article I, Section 2. It also specifies a “Republican form of government” will be provided by the states. Article IV, Section 4.
Other guarantees of voting rights are negative - that is, you can’t deny the right to vote based on this, that or the other thing. The 14th Amendment prohibits denying the vote to any man 21 or over except if he had participated in a “rebellion or other crime,” on pain of having the basis of representation in the House reduced by a proportional amount. The 19th (women’s suffrage), 24th (no poll tax) and 26th (reduces the age to 18) Amendments all contain negative language - “may not be denied on <this basis>” or words to that effect.
The language of the 14th Amendment, cited above, seems to sanction or authorize denying the vote based on participation in crimes in that it provides for the punishment of denying the vote on other bases but specifically excepts denying suffrage on that one.
Since one needs 270 EVs, a tie is not necessary; it’s also possible to have an election thrown into the House of Representatives if there are more than 2 candidates and neither of the top two gets 270. Thomas Jefferson was elected by the House of Reps after an incredibly large number of tries.
Not really relevant. The Constitution does not specify any particular way for deciding who the electors of a state are; that’s entirely up to the individual states. It so happens that nowadays, most states use a first-past-the-post system based on the popular vote in that state, but but at the dawn of the country, it was more typical for the state legislators to choose the electors.
In addition to the 1800 election, one other President was chosen by the House, in 1824, when Andrew Jackson had the popular-vote plurality but not a majority of the Electors. The son of a previous president, with fewer popular votes than he, was chosen by the Electoral College as the result of a back-room deal. (Now, what was that quote about “Those who will not learn from history…”?)
The list of coincidences between the Adamses and the Bushes could run quite a bit longer: see Fathers and sons, or, History repeating itself?
Many posters have noted that the voting age nationwide is 18, due to the 26th amendment. It is worth noting that the amendment merely required that 18-year olds be permitted to vote, not that 18 be the minimum age for voters.
Any state may choose to permit younger voters, and some are considering this. There is even a proposal in California where “people ages 14-15 would have one-quarter of a vote, and the votes of 16- and 17-years-olds would count as one-half a vote.” This seems fair enough to me, but is probably unconstitutional as it doesn’t conform to the principle of one man, one vote.
If I recall my political science courses correctly, the founding fathers ffelt that the United States was so big and communications was so poor that it was unlikely there would be a “national” candidate. Electors from each state would vote for a candidate known in that state, and the House of Representatives would sort it all out a few months later.
In fact, that scenario only happened once (1824) but several political movements did have strong regional roots (the anti-slavery Republicans in the North, the Populist movement in the Midwest, the “state’s rights Democrats” in the South).
Just to clarify one thing about news media reporting on election night. There is no law that requires the news media to wait until any specific time to report election results or project a winner. Such restrictions would generally an unconsitutional restriction on the rights of a free press.
However, studies of the 1964 Presidential election showed that the early projections of Lyndon Johnson’s ovrwhelming victory did have an effect on local elections in western states. Since then the major news organizations have tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to compete to be the first with their predictions, while attempting not to “spoil the election” for western voters.
I think you recall correctly, and this is further demonstrated by the requirement in Article II, Section 1 that of the two votes electors cast, at least one must be from another state.
Hence then-Texan Dick Cheney’s flight up to Wyoming in 2000 to register to vote and reestablish his residency there. Otherwise, the Texas electors could not have voted both for him and W.
One factor non-Americans may not appreciate is that it’s difficult for the networks to guess the final results early. California, which is on the west coast and votes late, is the largest state by a considerable margin (California has 55 electoral votes, with Oregon and Washington having an additonal 18 votes, out of a total of 541). These three Pacific coast states also tend to be fairly balanced politically. It would be unusual for anyone to be so far ahead that a late hour swing of 73 votes couldn’t affect the final outcome.
Here’s a question for the Americans:
If you read this thread does it not occur to you that your system is ridiculously complex? I understand that it comes about for a variety of historical factors - but surely if you were starting again you wouldn’t do it like this.
Also is there no dissonance in America that in the instances where the US has set up elections abroad (eg Afghanistan and soon Iraq) those elections bear no resemblence to your own domestic process?
Is there any movement to change things? Or is there a " it ain’t broke so don’t fix it" feeling?
I, for one, have always believed that the electoral college system is scandalously undemocratic. I also believe that the Constitution has calcified ideas about the “separateness” of the states that don’t have any basis in modern reality – we really are one country, not 50 separate ones, and I believe we ought to change our political system to reflect that.
However, it’s nearly impossible to have proposals for reform taken seriously. For example, after the 2000 election when Hillary Clinton suggested that perhaps it was time to take a second look at the electoral college system, she was basically ridiculed – sour grapes and “what makes her think she knows better than the founding fathers”?
Really, the modern attitude towards the founding fathers is something that they themselves would have found ridiculous.
This is a point I don’t think anyone stressed. The key word here is “pledged.” As far as I know, there is no requirement in most states for the Electors to vote for who they’re “supposed” to vote for. They can vote for Mickey Mouse for president and Donald Duck for VP if they wanted to, regardless of what their state’s population wanted.
“Fixing it” would require constitutional amendments at the federal and state levels. I don’t think there is enough dissatisfaction with the current system to generate the political support for fundamental change.
Everywhere I’ve lived in the USA, except for odd cases like Washington, D.C., the elections are run and organized by county and city governments. One county may use punch-cards, another uses mechanical voting machines, another uses electronic voting machines, etc. In most cases, it works “well enough” and it avoids having the entire country subject to the vulnerabilities of a single system.
The American political system tends to devolve things to the lowest level. This can be seen in the way that the police and schools are organized. It may not be uniform and efficient, but it provides for local control, for better or worse.
In presidential elections, the electoral college limits the damage that can be caused by fraud or corruption to the state level. If there is massive fraud in Butte, Montana, it can only change the result in Montana. It doesn’t affect the selection of electors in other states. If the president was selected by national popular vote, a disputed election would make Florida in 2000 look like the good old days. Every disputed ballot in every state would be important. Lawyers would roam the land like swarms of locusts.