“All we’ve done is take the quality out of the product and put it where it shows – in the advertising!”
You aren’t from Canada (we don’t vote on Sundays) but yeah, “this”. The registration process, registering your party of affiliation… what the heck? …the whole thing just has too many hands in the pocket. In 2000, I wondered if we needed to send in Canadians as UN observers in Florida and Ohio. Elections Canada runs the whole thing, and we get results done quickly and efficiently. I gather the running of elections is a power left to the states, but for the life of me, can’t you guys be consistent?
Health care reform by itself would be more than most presidents accomplish during a single term. Obama accomplished health care reform, saving the auto industry, stabilizing and reversing the worst recession in our lifetime, successfully ending an occupation of a foreign country without leaving a complete catastrophe behind, and finding and killing the number 1 enemy of the nation, who had evaded justice for a decade.
What the heck do you people want, for him to cook you breakfast and do your laundry too?
I don’t disagree, but people seem to overlook how enormously huge and diverse the US is in comparison to other countries. There are more people living in California than ALL of Canada.
That would be sweet! 
My point wasn’t whether or not Pres. Obama has done anything, just that he’s fighting against the Republican domination of the House of Congress, so the partisan gridlock is due to continue.
So we’d need more volunteers. 
Why? She supports abortion! Though I suppose she did pay for victory.
Well, Obama’s win means that the EPA will probably continue to fight to regulate carbon admissions (I believe the last news on that was the EPA being upheld in an appeals court.) A lot can be done purely through executive power.
(Brit) I’m a happy bunny for all sorts of reasons. The main one, I’m not ashamed to admit, is that I bet a fair bit of money on Obama’s reelection, and would be mighty pissed off to have lost that. But I didn’t lose a lot of sleep over it, as I had Nate Silver (peace be upon him) watching my back the whole time.
Beyond that, you guys restored my faith in you. The 2000 election result disturbed me, the 2004 result freaked me the fuck out (I don’t CARE how dull and uninspiring you think Kerry was, HOW THE FUCK COULD YOU?), the 2008 result made me cautiously optimistic (exactly how proud should you be for realising that a ticket with Palin on it was not something a sane person should seriously consider?). In 2012, notwithstanding Nate Silver (may angels fellate him for the rest of his days), I was a little worried that too many of you would be entranced by that twofaced plutocrat possessed of no principles or ideas except to amass as much money as possible for himself and his 1% friends. And let’s face it, nearly a quarter of you WERE.
(oh and by the way, let’s not tiptoe around this - if you voted for Romney and are not a member of the USA’s most priviledged 1%, you are a drooling imbecile, and the country around you, and the world around it, is a worse place for having you in it, regardless of how much you love your family and/or go to church)
(board rules prohibit me from naming posters here who are such drooling imbeciles, but that’s okay because we all know exactly who they are)
whew…
Quite apart from the big race, I was encouraged by many of the smaller races. You guys are finally starting to pull your heads out of your arses regarding the relative harmlessness of toking up once in a while, and the complete harmlessness of getting hitched to your same-sex partner. Not to mention you sent two fairy-tale-believing rape apologists to the political oblivion they richly deserve.
So congratulations, rational America, on your victories against the yahoos. Put your feet up and take a well earned break. But not for too long, please.
Oh, one thing I forgot to mention (currently the Thursday morning after the two days before). I can sometimes forgive morons for being morons, but I have nothing but contempt for people WHO CAN’T EVEN FUCKING COUNT.
So Texas, Alabama, Wyoming, all you safe red states… okay, you’re dumbasses, but at least you can count.
But FLORIDA… what is your fucking major malfunction? How many more times are you going embarass your country to the rest of the world? Look, THIS piece of paper says Obama, THIS one says Romney, THIS one has an unidentifiable squirt of ink and a chunk of beer-infused vomit on it, so chuck it out and hope the guy who cast that gets run over by a bus tomorrow.
Just how fucking difficult can it BE? Grr. :mad:
They overlook it because it’s irrelevant. If you have more people, you open more polling stations and hire more ballot counters.
Great username/post combo.
Great rebuttal. India is almost as big, has more people, and is more diverse, and has a much simpler (and quicker) electoral system despite rampant corruption. Do you really think the reason elections in the US are a mess is because no system could handle 100 million voters?
Please elaborate. Like RNATB I’m rather keen to figure out, or have explained to me, exactly why you cannot use exactly the same voting mechanics for larger electorates as for smaller ones, just with a proportionately larger number of election officers. (or at worst a number that scales as n*log(n))
(In particular I’d absolutely love to know why it’s essential to use electronic voting machines with closed source software, but that’s a separate issue)
I don’t know anything about India’s system, so can’t speak to that. But I have to wonder if rampant corruption doesn’t make their system appear deceptively simple.
Why hasn’t Florida changed their process at all yet?
The biggest problems, honestly, are:
- The lack of an extant neutral non-partisan group to suggest this and oversee it.
- Inertia. We’re used to the way things are now, where states control their own voting processes. Any politician to suggest standardizing the voting process on a federal level is going to be shouted down by cries of partisanship from the other party–see the current voting machine controversy.
- Keeping bias out of the process. In a nation the size of the US, it is absolutely inevitable that some doofus somewhere is going to apply for, get, and take one of the new pollster positions in an effort to further their own political agenda. They’ll discourage voters, discard votes, etc. It would only take a few of these stories to make the entire nation lose faith in the new experimental system, and it’d end up getting scrapped anyway.
But then, I’m a pessimist.
There is a sizable group of people in the USA who consider change to be dangerous.
We call them ‘conservatives’.
That is one of the many reasons why our voting process is so wacky.
As a progressive American, I thank the many of you who have posted to congratulate us on our win. We are a relatively young country and one that is still run by the plutocratic families, by and large. But, we are learning as time goes by that change can be good.
I hate to burst your bubble but roughly half of us voted voted for the crazy-land simulator.
Heh. If I lived in Canada, I could easily see myself voting for the conservative party. Universal health care. Financial regulation that avoided the derivative-backed real estate bubble. A stimulus package, followed by belt tightening. In short, solid technocratic policies.
In the US, I’m on the far left fringe of the political spectrum.
Oh yes, the US political spectrum - far right, and further right. 
See, it seems somewhat puzzling to many of us looking in from the outside that you seem to prefer to find fault with a system that works elsewhere and might possibly fail for you (though I don’t think it would) while keeping a system that constantly *is *failing you.
How do you keep bias out of the process is, of course, the only really question in the above three, and I don’t see the problem.
Here’s the German system again: we have voting precincts of about 1000 voters each, and six volunteers to staff the polling station, three in the mornings (we vote from 8am to 6pm) and three in the afternoon. At 6pm, all six are available again, the seals on the box are broken and people sort and count the ballots. After each stack of ballots has been counted twice by different people, and a number is agreed, the results get transmitted to a central voting office, which talies the results; ballots are re-sealed, and sent off to storage (and a possible recount if necessary).
If you insist, use the voter registration system and make it mandatory that of the 6 people, two are registered Democrats, 2 Republicans, and 2 Independents, with a proven track record (i.e., not new registrations). They can watch each other. If worst comes to worst, you’ll have a somewhat miscounted stack of 1000 votes–although quite frankly, I guess if you genuinely have to fear fraud from lowest-level vote counters to the extent that an election might depend on it (i.e., six people out of every 1000, in the system outlined above!), you’ve got much worse problems than the precise voting proceedure. (And, of course, it’s apparently much easier to rig an election under your current system, so…)
Well I thought he was talking about New Zealand…
But other than that…heck yeah!
I heave a sigh of relief too. I don’t know but somehow I feared that Mitt Romney might start WW3. The right wing is just far too crazy for me.
Then again, maybe Obama would.