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Ya know, I just to hear so many Republicans whine about how Bill Clinton “only” got 43 percent of the vote, and that for some reason being elected by a plurality made an election somehow illegitimate.
Where did all of those people go?
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Ravenman, you don’t happen to have a cite handy for that assertion, do you?
Holy shit… it’s my Evil Twin!!
Wow, now we can have exciting Evil Twin Adventures, just like on Family Matters!
-Rav
[sub]or… am I his Evil Twin?[/sub]
Great now all we need is for Edgar Allen Poe to post to this thread.
Damn, as a computer programmer and technical writer, I wish I could afford that kind of attitude. Who cares if the program is unusable. The users are stupid!
Yes, the users are partly to blame. But, usability errors are seldom an issue of “the users are to blame,” especially when such errors are common, and you are ignorant for saying so.
When the “program” had worked numerous times for countless “users”, it’s stupid to blame the machines.
As a programmer, I would assume you’d be familiar with the acronym GIGO. That’s the applicable principle in this case.
So both candidates sucked? 
By “ignorant English question”, I’m not sure whether you mean the question relates to English language usage, or that you’re posting from England.
But either way, I get hacked off with people treating the electoral college like it’s some weird mutation of democracy that only a nation as warped as the United States would tolerate.
Pay attention now, people: The possibility of winning an election, and not finishing first in the popular vote, is inherent in any electoral system which divides the country into districts. It is possible in Great Britain. It is possible in Canada. It is possible in Germany. It is possible in India. The United States is not unique in this circumstance.
It is no different than representatives putting positions forward in Congress that differ from the majority. That is just what happens in representatively organized governments.
The difference, as far as I have ever read, was statistically negligible. We could recount the entire country and not be any more sure. It is not an indication of a stolen election; it is an indication that our method of election has intrinsic problems that need to be addressed, either in kind, or in application.
If my car is broken, nothing is gained by determining whether it was through my inability to drive or the company’s inability to make a completely reliable methodology for production of them. I just get it fixed.
Ok, I see your point, so why do we use these systems? Why don’t the PTB / us / whoever invented voting in the first damn place use a system where you vote, and it’s counted as one vote, and whoever gets the most, wins.?
Lil
PS Sorry for the crappy quoting, I didn’t realise you aint allowed to edit your posts on here after submission!
Lil
lilabet-
When the electoral system was devised it was perfectly possible that, due to communications errors and distance (this was 200 years ago) the voting for the entire country would be problematic to gather in one place.
So instead we vote for ‘electors’ who then would ride horseback to the capital (or wherever) and cast a ballot representing the voters back home.
It IS silly in this age of modern communications. But no one’s upset enough about it to change it.
Me, IMHO I prefer the Maine/Nebraska approach where each state is NOT winner-take-all and instead each district casts its ballots for an elector they like and whomever gets the majority gets the electors representing the Senators.
We’d finally see some action in the hinterlands instead of just the big media markets.
Jonathan Chance,
That does make sense, thank you. But as you say, it does seem like now is the time to change the system, personally I reckon letting one man (Blair) be in charge of us mere 58,789,194 (according to the 2001 census for the UK) people seems horrendously outdated, as if he could be said to be *representing * our many varied opinions. Let alone one man controlling 284,796,887 people (US census quickfact estimate 2001).
Daft.
Lil
You don’t say how Mom responded. I hope she pointed out that your logic collapses under the slightest scrutiny.
First of all, the “powers that be” that allegedly rigged the 2000 election either were themselves elected, as in the case of the Republican government of Florida, or were appointed by presidents who were elected, as in the case of the United States Supreme Court.
Secondly, if one assumes that these powers are monolithically aligned against Democrats, they apparently can’t rig any election. If they could, Bill Clinton wouldn’t have been elected twice. They can only rig an election that happens to be very, very close.
So the challenge for Democrats is to win by a rig-proof majority–say, to carry states with Republican governments by more than one quarter of one percent. It can be done. The Man from Hope did it with room to spare. So I’m not seeing how voting reduces to a “token privilege”.
Has it, though? Then how come the 1996 election had the same issues with the ballot design? How come these issues were noted in the 1970’s?
Cites: http://www.asktog.com/columns/042ButterflyBallot.html and http://www.upassoc.org/upa_projects/voting_and_usability/2000election.html
Again, you need to look at several issues: are there physical disabilities that you may need to contend with (old age brings poor vision and other issues), how experienced are the users at this task (for many, not very, and voting only happens once every two years, at the most common), how easy is it to undo or try again (none - once a vote is submitted, you cannot take it back), and how important is the task and the impact of improper use (I’ll let you decide on that).
Anyway, are you saying that usability wasn’t a factor in the elections? Or that poor usability is solely the issue/fault of the user and other factors need not be taken into account? I’d like to see cites for either of these two claims, preferably from well-respected usability experts.
That’s the explanation for the American system of indirect election. Parliamentary democracies have arrived at the same result via a very different history, involving the origins of the British parliament as a legislative body (for which districting is natural) which only gradually took over executive functions from the king, and the spread of British practices via colonialism and emulation in other newly emerging democracies.
My point is that many countries around the world, for different reasons, allow for the possibility that their leader may receive fewer votes than the opposition. It’s not just an American thing.
If you don’t vote, you’re a moron. If you don’t like the system, fucking vote for someone you think will change it. Posting vague rants on the SDMB isn’t going to help your vote count more.
Remember, our president is the head of state, not a head of government. He is more analogous to your monarch (back in the days when the monarch was more hands-on, perhaps) than to your Prime Minister. Though the analogy is far from perfect, the Vice President, in his role as President of the Senate, is more like a Prime Minister. There is also a Speaker of the House, chosen by the House of Representatives, who could claim to be Prime-Minister-like.
In our system, the majority party in Congress does not choose the President or Vice President. So Congress and the Executive branch of our government are often controlled by different parties.
There are two main reasons we hold onto the Electoral College system of electing a president. First is that it would be a lot of work to change. Constitutional amendments aren’t easy to make happen.
The second is that it balances out the representation of the various states. Each state gets as many electors as they have congressmen (both representatives and senators) Since senators are two to a state regardless of population, states with low populations get more power through the electoral college than they would have in a straight popular vote. Not much, but a little more. The effect of this is that a President-Vice President ticket must appeal to a wider demographic. In a straight popular vote, a candidate could get elected if he played well just to large population centers, even if every suburban and rural voter was against him. In the Electoral College system, they can’t just ignore the smaller states.
By the way, my state is in the middle of the population range, so the preceding opinions aren’t just because I live in a sparsely-settled state and want extra pull in elections.
It depends on the state - there is no Federal law that prohibits someone from voting differently from what they pledged to vote. Some states do have laws against this, and as a rule, this does not happen.
Cite: http://www.archives.gov/federal_register/electoral_college/faq.html#wrongvote
No. Absolutely not. We must ALWAYS remember the 2000 electoral theft, because those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it. And wouldn’t the Pubbies love us all just to forget the way they “won” in 2000 so they could repeat and repeat and repeat …
I do take your point that there were a bunch of gutless Dems out there in 2000. I hope they won’t be so gutless in 2004 but there still seems to be a lot gutlessness floating around in Dem leadership circles…