So no recounts, ever? I don’t think anyone would go for that. It invites successful fraud.
I don’t think candidates should have to win by more than a certain percentage for the election to be valid. Why not just, you know, let the guy who gets the most votes win?
All you’re doing is pushing the point at which there would be doubt about the election results over .5 percent. Doesn’t solve anything.
I agree it’s counterintuitive. Recounts don’t uncover fraud though, if anything they enable it. Seems like recounts always “find” ballots that weren’t counted before. I remember hearing once that a box of ballots were found in a precinct workers’ trunk.
if it’s clear who got the most votes, that makes sense. However ,our recent experience with recounts has revealed that we can never really know who actually won. The recounts raise more questions than answers, and even when the count itself is clear there’s precinct worker error and voter error skewing the results. Pat Buchanan getting 10,000 votes in Palm Beach county in 2000 is a good example. When it’s that close we just have to admit that we don’t know who really got more votes.
And if it’s REALLY close, like a few votes, then you sure as heck won’t know. Two recounts probably yields two different winners. Try it yourself by counting a jar of beans. Guarantee you won’t get the same result twice in a row.
Just in case someone gets confused about what this is about, it’s not necessarily about recounts in general. Just the nightmare of a national recount. We just wouldn’t be able to make that work.
Put me down for a “it’s so drawn out that they’ll be touting 2016 candidates before this election.”
True, but how much of a real problem is this? We tend to say we don’t like long campaigns, but we also don’t like bad reality shows. If people want to campaign, let them knock themselves out. Those of us who are political junkies will enjoy it, those who aren’t, just tune them out. The majority of the electorate won’t really tune in until the conventions.
October 3 – University of Denver
October 16 – Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY (“town hall” format with audience questions)
October 22 – Lynn University, Boca Raton, FL
In some people’s views, apparently not. :rolleyes:
FWEEEEETTT!!! Look at the calendar! We have not even had the 2014 midterms yet! The political environment for the next presidential election is not yet formed and not yet predictable! No discussion of presidential politics until November 2015! Please! And even that’s too soon!!! :mad:
Why in the hell would that spring to mind?
Presidential candidates have handlers, secretaries and staffers that do 90% of everything for them, you could put some alzheimers raddled face up … wait, we did that already. :rolleyes:
All a long run up does is waste money and show how good the candidate’s ‘machine’ is.
Limit the time and money like Britain does [or did] and call it a day. If you can cram all teh real hard core salient information on a guy into an hour documentary on TV, and 100 days [1 day in a state and one day of travel and sleep between speeches in the state’s capital city] of campaigning you are doing it wrong.
Day 1 out comes a ‘newspaper’ with the candidates and a copy of their platforms [all the parties] and they go down the list of state’s capitals and they get to have an hour in some auditorium to give a speech and answer questions, then they hit the road to the next state. Hell, with TV and radio and the internet, they don’t even have to travel, they can all go to Washington DC to some comfy hotel and be filmed doing their speech, have a computer set up to take questions and feed the answers out and bob’s your political handler. Save a fuckload of money.
It wouldn’t matter if you formally limited the length of the campaign; look at the current situation, where we’re more than a year away from the supposed beginning of the two-year campaign season, and various Senators and other politicians are already all-but-officially campaigning for President.
This is an important distinction though; a huge chunk of the campaigning is actually campaigning for the party nomination via the state primary elections, not so much directly campaigning for the presidential election.
So yeah, if a bunch of party hacks were to get together and decide who the Republican and Democratic candidates were, without the results of the state primaries, it would be a LOT shorter of a process- basically from the DNC/RNCs to the election in November; that’s what- 3 months at most, assuming the party conventions are in August or September?
But we have state primaries, and they’re spread out all over the calendar, from January of the election year (Iowa Caucus) through August, and those primaries are wholly an in-state thing, since they’re aimed at identifying the state choice for the national conventions.
That being said, the sort of proto-candidacy business like Ted Cruz is doing now is annoying. I’m sure the idea is to get their name in the news as much as possible, but I’m tired of hearing about it.
1st amendment says they can campaign whenever they want. You can limit the money, but it’s not like they are spending money now anyway, and we’re still talking about them. So unless we’re talking about putting Dopers and journalists in jail for unauthorized election discussions out of season, we started the campaign six months ago.
Did you hear me discussing Dukakis [or whomever is running for whatever right now]? We are discussing the political process which is not illegal in Britain [though in some other countries tends to be …] Do you know who I favor for the next president or my local representative [not that I actually tell anybody, including mrAru.]? Did I want Dewey or Truman? If I had my way, anybody could stump for president and vice president -there would be a federal department of elections and no more electoral college. You would send your letter of intent to get your name on the machines 6 months prior to November with a copy of your platform, and send them copies of your newpaper ad, magazine ad, tv commercial which would get fed to the media, pick up your schedule of appearances [1 per state] and get your photo ID and then all you would do is show up at the scheduled state speech/q&a session and the final mass debate and that is it. They are not responsible for the advertisint - everybody gets 1 ad placed once in each publication in the US and 1 prime time commercial at a specific time at some point in the 6 month lead up, and 1 platform booklet [it has the 1 page platform for every candidate] sent to each census adult in the US.
And you can discuss anybody you like, it is putting up advertisements and buying television or radio time or newspaper or magazine ‘articles’ that are pretty blatant advertisements that would be illegal. People discussing stuff face to face over dinner or on a message board like this is entirely different.
No, it doesn’t. It says nothing about campaigning at all.
One reason people invest time and energy into becoming president is because they have so much power. If you take most of these powers away, you will see that campaigns become much shorter.
Campaign spending in a Presidential election now works out to $20 per voter or more. That’s averaged across all voters, not just the relatively few undecided ones.
The U.S.A. is increasingly emulating Thailand’s democracy in many ways; maybe another idea should be borrowed from the Kingdom: Instead of wasting money on TV ads, etc. give it directly to individual voters in return for their promise. (Thailand does have ways to deal with broken promises.) I think millions of Americans would be happy to take the extra $20, why waste the funds in non-productive enterprise?
Yes, yes, I can hear the objection: This would turn control over to rich vested interests. *** Wake up and smell the coffee, Americans. Rich vested interests already are in control.***
Uh, yeah. The President of an anarchy has little power. But even the GOP, which has turned its lunatics into philosophers, doesn’t want U.S. to be an anarchy.
The presidential election cycle is now continuous. I blame it on the media. They start touting potential candidates for the next election the day after the previous one. Every time someone makes a speech it’s interpreted as a run at the presidency. Every move is analyzed as to whether it will help or hurt someone’s chances.
There’s just one word for all of this: ENOUGH!
There’s a certain irony to a bunch of people gathering in a Elections discussion forum complaining about how they’re sick and tired of all the elections talk. The real reason that Presidential Elections get discussed years ahead of time is that people, specifically people like us, enjoy talking and thinking about them, even years ahead of time.
The election process is smoke and mirrors, the top government positions in america are auctioned off to the highest bidder. The future holders of those positions are chosen by the owners of the position long before any campaign begins. Money controls the government which controls the people
Which is why the founders created a limited government.
Politics is always most problematic in countries where control of the government has such high stakes. We’ve been hearing about “the most important election of our time” for oh, 9 out of the last ten elections. Whereas prior to FDR, elections were short, unexciting, and low stakes, with only a couple of exceptions(Lincoln and Jackson’s elections).
The 24/7 media is part of the reason we have politics 24/7/365, but the other reason is that the government is making incredibly consequential decisions on facets of our lives that only a few years ago they were not making. Such as what kind of insurance is acceptable. Strange, I had thought that was a decision I could make for myself. Guess I’m just not as smart as the brain trust up there in DC.
adaher, if that were the problem, then every democracy with expansive government powers and a 24/7 news cycle – that is to say, practically all of them – would spend as long as the U.S. does electing its top leaders. But, they don’t.
Three and a half years out of four is more like it.
At least there’d be some hope for change. 
Aloha