So, using your logic, a very wealthy candidate could “buy” the handful of counties around the LA and SF area and win the election, even though the other 80% of counties across the country voted otherwise? Not fair either.
And why not?
Consider: A football team of 20 players decide to vote for who’s going to be captain of the team. They go onto the field to talk about the vote. 16 of the guys (80%) huddle around one of the end zones and decides to vote for Joey, because he scores great booze and they owe him one. The other four guys wander around the field and decide to vote for Pete, because he’s the quarterback.
After ten minutes, the coach asks the players to vote for the captain. Joey wins, 16 to 4. Where’s the “unfairness” in that?
The folks who like to make these sort of speculous arguments (such as the infamous “Red counties for Bush” map) always forget a fundamental fact about elections – real estate can’t vote.
Where does he claim that LA and SF are the only areas that would matter? They don’t make up anywhere near the majority of electoral votes.
To buy into the premise of the OP, you have to believe that liberals control the media. If this is true, than why are radio talk shows so overwhelmingly conservative and why does Scarborough Country play on MSNBC and not Donahue?
The networks pride themselves on accuracy and would much rather be late with a projection than incorrect. What happened in Florida was that a lot of people were telling the exit pollers that they voted for Gore, where they in fact either voted for Buchanan or invalidated their ballots by trying to put in a punch for president and vice president or just couldn’t push the needle in hard enough to dislodge the infamous chads. So with the exit poll data in place and the actual ballot returns seemingly matching the exit polls, the networks felt confident in their prediction. Whether or not they should do this before polls close is another debate, but they have the right to call the race at 2 pm if they want.
As to whether or not voters in the lines were discouraged by the news reports is debatable. There were certainly enough state and local races to be decided even if the presidential race is over that everyone still should cast his or her ballot. To follow the discouraged voter logic, no Republican would ever cast a ballot in DC since the Democrats can safely count on the DC electors each and every election. I think we can call DC for the Democrats for the 2004, 2008, and 2012 elections right now. Does that mean that Republicans would abandon their place in the DC voting lines if the shocking news of a Democratic victory in the District is reported? I doubt it.
From this gem: “In fact, if just the metropolitan areas and surrounding counties of San Francisco and Los Angeles were removed from the total, George W. Bush would have won the popular vote. I wonder what percentage of localities across the nation are willing allow the political climate that reigns in San Francisco and Los Angeles to reign nationwide. I suspect, not many.”
Representation democracy is a bitch ain’t it, Razorsharp. The vote of a black, female urban citizen counts exactly the same as a white CEO. The vote of a white male voter in suburban St Louis Co, Missouri [like me] counts the same as the white, male rural voter in Worth County.
I guess a “liberal” ballot should only be counted as .9 of a vote. :rolleyes:
BTW, I am not a Californian, but doesn’t Orange Co counterbalance the “liberalness” of the other LA area counties.
Who said they were the only areas? I was merely following the lead of Razprsharp and using the example brought up and then attacked by other posters.
rjung - so to follow your logic… If a candidate won every vote in the cities of NewYork and LA only (which for arguments sake egualled 50.1% of the nationwide votes) and the other candidate won the entire rest of the country - the one that won the two cities should be president? I would strongly disagree with that.
In other words, if Bush had gotten more votes, he would have won the popular vote. Anybody else smell tautology? And if George W. Bush were a bird, he could fly. For that matter, if I had a million dollars, I’d be a millionaire. So what?
By the way, even if the premature announcement that Gore won did cost Bush votes, I’d be really curious to see some solid evidence that there was some sort of “liberal media” conspiracy involved. The major networks have their reputations at stake, and generally value accuracy (well maybe not Fox;)). I’d be hard-pressed to believe they all tossed that to the wind simply in the hopes that it would give their favored candidate a slight advantage. I think it’s far more likely that in their zeal to get the news out, they simply called it too soon. And as BobLibDem pointed out, the flawed exit poll data caused them to be wrong.
Yet you support having a system where 50.1% of 11 states can determine who is president and the rest of the country can go to hell!
there is 270 votes, you only need 270 to win, i guess we should all just bow down before 50.1% of these states then, since they control everything by your system. All hail 50.1% of 11!
Yep. A vote’s a vote, regardless of who cast it, or where it was cast.
Because, putting aside the issue of geography, your hypothetical situation boils down to one candidate gets the support of more voters than the other candidate. Which is what representational democracy is all about.
whuckfistle, where do you get the idea that a person who lives in a city is less deserving of a voice and a vote than a person who doesn’t? Why do you disagree at all, much less strongly?
blowero, perhaps the exit polls they depended on were actually right? Perhaps a plurality of people leaving the polls were convinced that they had, in fact, voted for Gore? Sure looks that way. The networks (except, as noted, Fox, whose election coverage was directed by John Ellis - GWB’s first cousin) might simply have been right. No apologies or corrective action required.
The media is indeed mostly liberal. You have pointed out some exceptions.
I wish this were true. I think the networks’ first concern is ratings.
It was network policy not to predict winners until the polls had closed. They didn’t follow that rule in Florida, because polls in the panhandle area closed an hour later. The cock-up hurt Bush, even if it was unintentional. I assume this was caused by incompetence, rather than an anti-Bush conspiracy. Still, one wonders whether the networks would have been more observant if it was a Democratic area that still had open polls. Maybe some reporters are less interested people living in the panhandle, because they see those people as just rednecks.
The only way that could happen is if 50.1% of the people in the US lived in NY and LA. If the population was dispersed in that manner then they did elect their leader fair and square in accordance with the “majority rules” aspect of democracy. They got a leader who will, rightly, care about the issues of urbanites. After all, a majority of the country lives in two huge urban areas. That’s how it works. The other areas will have representation in other areas of government(they would absolutely dominate the senate, for instance) but the President would need to respond to the will of the majority. And that majority, in the hypothetical world you’re devising, lives in NY and LA. The only metric one has to judge a democratic process as fair or unfair is “was the will of the majority upheld?” In the hypothetical situation you’ve created above, the answer would be yes. Majority rule. The basic tenet of democracy.
Razorsharp’s example was fallacious. The nationally-elected positions in the government of the US(specifically President) is not determined by geographic or community boundries, it is determined by votes. Votes are bound to individual voters. If the voters are not evenly distributed through the counties, the votes won’t be either. This is by design, implicit in the way a democracy functions. In a nationwide election it doesn’t matter one bit where a vote originated from, nor should it. All that matters is who it was cast for.
Enjoy,
Steven
Not my system, the Founding Fathers of this Country`s system. They realised that an election could be won by one candidate leaning towards the heavily populated areas only. I realise with todays technology that we may not need the electoral college anymore.
11 states is still way better than two cities.
Elvis - there not any less deserving. What if you lived in the middle of Ohio and every year for the last umpteen elections your vote never counted because every year for the last umpteen years the two cities have had total control over who ran the country. Make it even worse and pretend that they always voted Conservative. No more Liberals in power - ever.
This particular type of ignorance just chaps my hide and is indicative of the damage that today’s public education system is inflicting on the land of the free.
Contrary to popular opinion and repetitive platitudes extolling the virtues of democracy, The United States was founded on the principles of a republic, not a democracy. Specifically, Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution states, “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union, a republican form of government,…”
James Madison, often referred to as the “father of the Constitution”, alluding to the dangers of unrestricted majority rule (democracy), stated, “In all cases where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger.”
When creating the federal legislature, the Founders decided on a bicameral (two-house) system, consisting of a lower house (the House of Representatives) and an upper house (the Senate). The members of the House of Representatives were to be apportioned according to each state’s population, while members of the Senate, as an added protection to states with small populations, were limited to the equal representation of two from each state.
Reinforcing the principles of a republic, the House of Representatives was the only legislative body that was to be elected by a direct vote of the people. The senators for each state, unlike today, were not elected by popular vote, but were appointed by each state’s legislature.
In the matter of electing a President, the Framers of the Constitution created the Electoral College. The Electoral College was to serve two purposes.
First, the Electoral College would protect the integrity of the Presidency by limiting the influence of those who do not possess the faculties required to decipher the intricacies of a “butterfly ballot”.
As outlined in the Federalist Papers, the authoritative records of the Constitutional debates, the framers of the Constitution equated the election of the President by a popular vote of the whole population to an exercise that should be undertaken by the knowledgable, that would, instead, be performed by the ill-informed.
Today, those who advocate the abolishion of the Electoral College point to the expanse of our national media to make the case that our present population is much more informed than the populace of the late eighteenth century.
However, the huge popularity of such media pabulum as MTV, Jerry Springer and so-called “reality TV” shoots that theory square in the ass.
The second purpose of the Electoral College was to protect those states with small populations from the undue influence of states with large populations. This was accomplished by assigning each state a number of electors equal to the combined number of representatives and senators of that state.
Want the real vote count?
BUSH 271 GORE 267
It's a republic, deal with it!"Lie back and enjoy it . . . "
Except 2 cities is fantasy while 11 states is reality.
Yes, I think that was BobLibDem’s point. I only meant “flawed” data in the sense that it ultimately did not predict exactly which votes would get counted by the machines.
And think of England?
The Founding Fuckwits were by no means egalitarian, as Razor somewhat inadvertently points out. There were considerable efforts made to keep the vote out of the grimy hands of the Unwashed and Undeserving. Indeed, a case could be made that our systems of checks and balances derives directly from the FF’s profound suspicion and mistrust of each other.
Yet he is correct, the Electoral College was at least partly inspired by the percieved need of the wealthy and powerful to keep such wealth and power in the hands that God preferred. As such, it is to that extent an excercise in villainy. That it descends from the hands of our wildly over-rated “Founding Fathers” means D for diddly squat.
Over time, it has been accepted with complaisance for precisely what it isn’t: a device for making the will of the people manifest. Any device that might advance that cause is marvelous, and worthy of praise. Any device that thwarts the will of the people is anathema to any true patriot. And thus it has become.
Regardless of how “razor-thin” the plurality, the person who wins the most votes should win election. One voter, one vote, no bullshit.
The pages of law that pertain to the Electoral College should be torn out and distributed for use as toilet paper, should it prove serviceable.
The “two cities” thing was never a real issue. It was something Razorsharp pulled out of thin air. Those two cities had no more or less impact on the 2000 elections than any other group of four million votes, combined, sliced, diced, filleted, or however you wish to get them, in California. I continue to maintain that if the heavily populated areas are heavily populated enough(i.e. if any single city ever manages to become the home of 51% or more of the citizens of the US) that it is perfectly in line with the rules of democracy to have the Chief Executive still be selected in accordance with the votes of the majority. This means that if the city votes candidate A and the entire rest of the country votes candidate B, then candidate A wins. 51% - 49%. Period. Distribution of the votes simply doesn’t matter in a nationwide race.
Enjoy,
Steven
On Preview:
Razorsharp, you’re simply incoherent at this point. I’m well versed on the structure of the US government and I understand just fine the intent behind and the structure of the Electoral College. If you’d like to try to support your assertion that distribution of the votes across boundries like counties(other than state lines, thanks to the screwed-up electoral college system) should make a damn bit of difference then you’re welcome to try. If you’d like to point out the place in my post that you repsonded to where I said STATE lines don’t matter, then you’re welcome to try. I specifically avoided saying STATE lines didn’t matter because of the Electoral College system. Your nonsense about “counties” was completely irrelevant and I demonstrated that.