The more time you take to recount, the more time you have to play with the ballots. In a “machine” state like Louisiana, more changes could be made after the election than on election night.
Popular voting would be worse, IMHO, but not for the reason you present. Even in the case of popular voting each individual state would be in control of their election process and would certify their own results. Only then would that state’s counts be added to the national pot. States which had results within their legally mandated threshold (like Florida’s 1/2 of 1%) would be subject to recount. I doubt that there would be a provision for a national recount.
Not really,
Only very close states may need to be recounted and there are pretty strict proceedures for the handling of ballots.
FL is very close and the recount there is by state law not at the request of the candidates.
I have always hated the Electoral college. (their football team sucks) I lived in OK for a while and being a dem I knew my vote was a waste of time because OK always goes Republican. I know a lot of Dems who didn’t vote in that state because they knew their would be meaningless. I am sure that there are Republicans in states that usualy go Democratic that feel the same way. The idea that the electoral college forces the candidates to visit every state is bs. They spend their time in states with close races and blow off states they know the other guy (or gal) will win.
Besides,
I want to vote for president!
Yes, we would have to recount every state right now if there were popular vote. It wouldn’t matter if an individual state race was close or not. It would only matter if the final vote were close.
The last time I checked MSNBC Gore was only ahead 167,838 votes in the popular vote. This was out of a total of 100,804,464 votes. The difference is so small that it would be easy to imagine a total recount changing the results.
Can you imagine the trouble if we had to recount evey state? It would be FL times 50 right now.