I am not harping on the point about the EC and the Constitution…or the fact that the uncounted votes possibly changing the vote.
The point I want to make is that this talk of Gore winning the election and electors voting their conscience is not relevant because the rules were set up beforehand and that had a critical effect on how the campaings were run and how people voted. The current popular vote represents the will of the people only as it is related to the EC, not to a true popular vote.
It is obvious that if the popular vote were relevant then the candidates would have spent more itme in New York and California, for example. It is also relevant that voters, knowing their state would turn a certain way, voted differently then they might have if a popular vote was the deciding factor.
You cannot ex post use a different criteria. It would be like a team getting five field goals against two touchdowns and being told that they really lost the game because the other team had more TDs.
So let’s stop worrying about the popular vote and get on with determining who won the elctoral vote.
Popular Vote says “The people of the counry say THIS…” State Vote (where the heads of each state decide the winner) says “The states say THIS…”
The Electoral College says “The people of the states say THIS.” It’s a compromise that leaves power in the hands of individuals AND the states.
If everything was done strictly by popular vote, there’d only be campaigning in New York, California, and Texas. All other states would be ignored. In other words, 94%* of the country would be tossed by the wayside just because some other state has better tourist attractions.
(*Yes, I realize that it’s only 94% on the state level, not on a representational level… but the state level is half of the Legislative branch of the Federal Government.)
True. But a popularly elected candidate losing the election still might bother a populas that does not think of itself as, for example, a “citizen of Pennsyvania” the way it once did. People identify with their state as a political entity, but nowhere near much as they did when their state was, more or less, their nation. Consider how many people now live in only one state their whole lives. The autonomy of a state can not mean as much as it did. So the compromise of the Electoral college does not mean the same thing as it did. I’m not exactly sure what that means myself.
**
Where do you get that? Actually this makes no sense for many reasons- if you only campaigne in NY, California and Texas- what, your basing that on them getting ALL the votes?
And if they wouldn’t go to the less populated areas, why would they go to the electorate poor states?
And, um, I don’t get the “tourist attraction” thing at all.
So where does that leave my morals?
I never agreed that the electoral collage was anything but unethical.
Doesn’t my opinion count for something?
Are my morals now to be discarded along with my vote?
I agree with your view on the electoral college- but the problem is we cannot judge what the popular vote really would be since we have not had a popular election. How many millions of voters stayed home because they knew their state was a lock for one side or the other? With a result as close as this one we cannot say someone was really “peoples choice” unless the election was run as a popular choice contest.
The idea of basing an argument on equating this administration and morals is flawed.
You’re vote does count. This wasn’t a national election. These are 50 state elections. The political position of your state determines who gets those EV’s. If popular vote was used, we would indeed have leaders based on the whims of CA and the Northeast. As a resident of ND this would piss me off.
The Electoral College goes back to the Federalist Papers. It’s in the Constitution. Are we to re-write a main foundation of our country because one political party has a candidate so consumed with his own ego?
OK, point taken.
We don’t know if more people would have picked Gore under another system.
But we do know that more people prefered Gore under this system.
wastelands:
Which administration are you refering to and where is anyone here basing an argument on anything other than their personal morals?
Thanks but I noticed that my vote didn’t count as much as some. As a resident of Pennsylvania I am pissed off that I am underrepresented in government so that people like you can be overrepresented. The states are unequal. By tying the votes of the people to the states you are making them unequal as well.
No. We should rewrite the foundation of our country because that foundation is tainted by unjustified undemocratic ideas.
Why is it considered an egomaniacal move for a candidate to request an accurate count of the votes in a close election?
If the actual count is irrelevant, why are you not arguing that Bush should concede since teh Florida count has been demonstrated to be unreliable and Gore leads in electoral college votes among the other states decided.
Personally, my position is steadfastly behind obtaining an accurate count of those ballots validly cast. If you think that accurately recording the expressed will of the electorate should be subborned to some other ideal, then please tell me what the overriding principal should be and how it favors one candidate over another.
I just want to point out, fwiw, that, if we went by popular vote, rather than electoral college, we would be facing a recount of something like 100 million votes, rather than 4~5 million.
If you think things are bad now, imagine the current situation, x1000.
Okay, let me try to explain this to you clearly…I admit that some of the language from the Gore camp here has not been so subtlety nuisanced on this point (although I think Al himself was clear on it).
The point is this: Bush is trying to say, “We won Florida and thus the electoral college and let’s get on with it and quit being a poor loser.” Gore is saying, “Not so fast buddy…You only won Florida by 0.03% [now down to like 0.005% by unofficial tallies] and this triggers an automatic recount and we are also looking into irregularities, etc.” As some justification to not rush things and let the rules follow their course, the Gore camp has pointed out that Al has won the popular vote. This is a way of saying, “Hey, look buddy, don’t tell me that I am trying to swart the will of the people. That will ain’t so clear. So, I have a perfect right to make sure things are counted fairly in Florida.”
So, the sense in which the popular vote count conveys “moral authority” is merely in allowing Gore the chance to contest the vote where it Constitutionally matters…in the electoral college. Otherwise, the Bush camp would continue to try to steamroll things and just try to rile up public opinion for Gore to concede without pursuing his legal options such as the recount.
The problem here is that the expectations for an election are wrong.
If an election were a scientific test, it would be written something like the pre-election polls were - with error bars. In other words, you might say that the election shows Gore to be 200,000 votes ahead, with a margin of error of perhaps 1,000,000 votes. Thus, you’d say that the election was ‘statistically inconclusive’. The mandate is simply not apparent.
The electoral college makes this worse, because each state is winner-take all, and it’s fairly common that a state’s result falls into what would no doubt be considered standard error.
So there’s no mandate, no matter which one wins. It’s perhaps slightly more probable that Gore received a mandate, but we just don’t know because the true results fell within the range of statistical ‘noise’.
That’s why I think you need laws stating that if the results fall inside this range, the mandate is not clear and a national run-off should occur, possibly measured only by popular vote.
That’s also why many other nations have provisions for coalition governments when election results are close.
Or perhaps we should flip a coin. Or perhaps we should leave it to the courts, which may amount to the same thing (a priori, taking into account the variation of state laws).
Contrary to popular belief, the essence of democracy is not promoting the will of the people; otherwise we’d have a lot more referendums. The point is to advance a process of deliberation and a set of incentives that encourage those in power to address the population’s concerns and problems. (OK this point is controversial; basically I am siding with Habermas and Schatsneider (sp))
The fact that both parties put forward prescription drug plans and both have claimed to address future insolvency in the social security system is surely a product of these incentives.
There’s nothing inherently magic about 50%. A tiny number of democratic systems (all very local) operate on the basis of consensus. 41% of US Senators can block any legislation that is important enough to them. Countries with proportional representation (which I like, BTW) often/usually operate under a “super-proportional” variant, whereby tiny parties are disregarded and large parties receive a larger share of representatives.
Picking nits, I would also point out that coalition governments are the rule rather than the exception in most countries, regardless of the closeness of the race. Another product of proportional representation.
Guess I didn’t make myself clear enough. Good thing I’m not a speechwriter, huh?
2sense—I am not overrepresented, nor are you underrepped. The EC gives 1 vote for each Senator and 1 for each representative. Therefore, your state carries more weight in the EC and thus your vote carries more weight than mine when campared side by side.
There’s nothing wrong with your morals 2sense. As I recall, I wasn’t consulted on the Electoral College either. Neither, however, was I consulted on the ban on murder, import tarriffs, income tax or copyright law. However, by living in the country, you are agreeing to accept these rules. Just like if you enter into a baseball game with another team, then you agree to 9 innings in a game, 3 strikes and you’re out, etc.
If you don’t like it, there are legal options you can persue to have it changes (that’s why you have representation in Congress, after all).
The moral thing to do is to go along with the rules of the game, not change them after the game is played if you don’t like the result. If you think the rules are unfair, then you try to change them for the next game, but not the one that was already played.
I wasn’t seeking guidance this time, Spiritus, even unknowingly. Thank you though. The question was rhetorical. I was disputing your disagreement with Daniel. It is my belief that the electoral collage is immoral. My intention was to point out that my moral opinion was relevent.
My sports metaphor is that if I am a placekicker coming into Giants Stadium and I bitch before the game that the staff are opening the big endzone doors when I am kicking and keeping them closed when the home team kicker is on the field then after I go 1 for 3 and miss an extra-point I intend to bitch that much louder about the door shenanigans.
As for the legal recourse, it is made unlikely by the same undemocratic processes that we are trying to reform.
Funny how we never get to vote on the EC, huh?
Er… sorry, I got confused there for a minute.
The previous post is intended as a reply to zev_steinhardt’s last post but for some reason I thought that post was written by Spiritus Mundi.
Strange.