Maryland Gov to Voters: You Don't Matter

[legion]

Apparently the elected officials in Maryland don't care about what their voters want in the Presidential election.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070410/ap_on_el_pr/electoral_college_maryland

[wludavid]

Seriously? You really think it's better to elect a candidate who received fewer votes than another candidate?

Partisan politics aside, do you honestly believe the electoral college is the way we should still be electing our presidents?

[legion]

If the electoral college exists, I think a state should either devote all of its electoral votes to the winning candidate in that state or apportion its votes by percentage of popular vote in that state.

[teenerted1]

Originally posted by legion
Apparently the elected officials in Maryland don't care about what their voters want in the Presidential election.

actually they would be listening to the voters

"Other states are considering the change to avoid an election in which a candidate wins the national popular vote but loses in the Electoral College, as in 2000 when Democrat Al Gore lost to George W. Bush"

[teenerted1]

Originally posted by legion
If the electoral college exists, I think a state should either devote all of its electoral votes to the winning candidate in that state

i think that is how it works. you win the state you get the votes.

not based on actual numbers. that is why bush won in 2000.

if you counted every vote individually, like you do for every other election. we would have had a different POTUS

if you go by popular winner every vote actually counts. and we actually might get better turn out ratio, if people felt their vote really mattered. JMO

[widebody911]

Maryland officially became the first state on Tuesday to approve a plan to give its electoral votes for president to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the candidate chosen by state voters.

This is a bit misleading. It should read instead of the candidate chosen by the state's electoral college electors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College

[red-beard]

You will never get an amendment passed to change the electoral college, because it requires 3/4th of the states to ratify. Why would a small state vote to reduce it's voice in the election? It will never pass.

What would be smart? Texas still has the right to split up into 6 states. We all know that the area around Austin leans liberal, but the rest of the state is conservative. Can you imagine the shift in power if Texas split into 6 states, adding 2 more liberal/Democratic Senators, but adding 8 more conservative/Republican ones?

And the Electoral college count would also shift by 10, and 8 of them would lean Conservative/Republican.

Ah, the games that one can play.

[ckissick]

People who argue that the winner of the popular vote should win don't seem to get the whole point of the electoral college.

As intended by our founding fathers, the electoral college is meant to take some of the clout away from dense population centers (AKA cities), and give rural states more say in an election. Remember the blue/red map of the US after the Bush/Gore election? There was far more red (Republican) territory, with blue concentrated on the densely populated coasts.

With just the popular vote, the winner would be pretty much be selected by New York and California, and screw the rest of the country. I wonder what Gore's lead was without these 2 states. Did he even have a lead without them?

It's obvious why Democrats are the ones leading this cause. The cities have a huge majority of Democrats.

[Jim727]

Originally posted by wludavid
....Partisan politics aside, do you honestly believe the electoral college is the way we should still be electing our presidents?

Absolutely!! I trust the guys who started this country far more than I trust the jackals in either political party or the bribes - oops "campaign contributions" that bought - oops "supported" them. Direct election magnifies the power of concentrated populations and penalizes rural areas. Jefferson, et. al., weren't dumb.

Proportioning the electoral votes according to the state's voting percentages -- that's a different question, and something I would support since it maintains the fundamental principles inherent in the electoral college. Delivering all the electoral votes to the winner of the state is not something I would support as it is not consistent with the principles of the electoral college system and only serves to enhance the power of the two principal parties and penalizes any opportunity for any other alternative to emerge.

[wludavid]

ckissick, isn't what you describe (and claim the founders wanted) essentially an aristocracy? At least when it comes to presidential elections.

Why should a voter in Wyoming have more say in who gets to be president than I do? Especially in the days of expanding Executive Branch power.

[wludavid]

Originally posted by Jim727
Direct election magnifies the power of concentrated populations and penalizes rural areas. Jefferson, et. al., weren't dumb.

Since when do "areas" elect officials? People elect officials.

[Jim727]

"areas" don't elect officials, obviously. The essential element in this discussion is that the system is a compromise. To allow concentrations of citizens to have absolute (or nearly absolute) control over the election is contrary to the fundamental principle that *all* citizens have rights. The people in Iowa, for example, do not exist just to put food on the tables of New York, for example. At it's extreme that would become a feudal system.

The electoral college forces public servants (a concept you don't hear much about any more) to pay attention to the farmers as well as to the city dwellers. Nobody has so much influence that the rest of the population can be ignored, and nobody has so little influence that they become irrelevant or serfs. Not perfect, but a pretty good compromise, I think.

[Jeff Higgins]

Charlie and Jim are the only two that get it.

The only folks I ever see whining about the Electoral College are the sivelling liberals that slept through civics class. They want the big-city population centers to run the country. Those are the centers of their distorted little universes. The backwater country bumpkin hick rednecks should never have a say; the big-city liberal "intellectuals" (yes, the same ones that slept through those civics classes) know what's best for them. If they would only shut up and take their medicine like good little country bumpkin hick rednecks...

[wludavid]

Jeff, we sniveling urban liberals (who didn't take civics because we were too busy taking useful classes like physics and calculus) are people too. We make breakfast every morning, go to work during the week, maybe work on the car in the evening, or have a drink at the bar on the way home. We're not trying to "run the country" any more than anyone else is. We simply want a fair voice in choosing the most powerful person in the world.

Again, the "population centers" aren't running the country. The people run the country. It just so happens that a large percentage of the people in this country have chosen to live in an urban area. You yourself are one of the big-city folks who is under-represented in presidential elections. It's only by coincidence that the party you favor comes out ahead in this deal. So please take your class warfare nonsense somewhere else.

I don't claim to understand all the ins and outs of electoral theory. But attempting to malign city-dwellers is off the mark, as well as tiresome. Did you even notice the irony of your remarks? You're defending the "hick rednecks" from an imaginary attack even while viciously insulting "distorted little universes" that many people, including you and me, choose to live near.

And honestly, it saddens me that "intellectual" is now an insult in many circles.

[Rick Lee]

I'm not so sure Gore would be POTUS if we really played by the popular vote rule. Think about the 300 or so vote margin in NM. Imagine you're driving to the polling station in NM around 6:00pm, which is an hour after the polls closed in east coast states. Say CNN has called some big states already and it looks like Gore has it locked up. Would you keep driving to the polls to vote? I would. But don't you think at least 300 people there would have just gone home or gotten out of line to leave? That's what happens when news stations call states in one time zone while polls are open in other time zones, especially since 2000 was so close.

And if we didn't go by the electoral college, would we go by a majority or pluralty of the popular vote? Clinton never got 50% of the popular vote and if he hadn't been president, Gore would be a back bencher Senator still trying to retire his 1988 pres. campaign deb.

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally posted by wludavid
Jeff, we sniveling urban liberals (who didn't take civics because we were too busy taking useful classes like physics and calculus) are people too.

That's a large part of the problem. Liberal "intellectuals" never think how their government runs, and why it runs that way, is important enough to warrent their attention. They never let that get in their way when they would like to suggest how it should run, however.

Originally posted by wludavid
We make breakfast every morning, go to work during the week, maybe work on the car in the evening, or have a drink at the bar on the way home. We're not trying to "run the country" any more than anyone else is. We simply want a fair voice in choosing the most powerful person in the world.

The Electoral Collage provides just that; a fair voice for all of us. There have been any number of scholarly dissertations written on this very topic over the last couple hundred years. I won't attempt to paraphrase them here, as I would do them all a disservice.

Originally posted by wludavid
Again, the "population centers" aren't running the country. The people run the country. It just so happens that a large percentage of the people in this country have chosen to live in an urban area. You yourself are one of the big-city folks who is under-represented in presidential elections. It's only by coincidence that the party you favor comes out ahead in this deal. So please take your class warfare nonsense somewhere else.

Democrats seem to have very quickly forgotton the "coincidence" that led to eight years of Bubba. There was no hue and cry from liberals in those years to change the system. Liberals tend to be somewhat short-sighted in this respect.

Our Founding Fathers anticipated all of this. They knew the hand-wringing ninnies that could not understand the Electoral Collage would one day get their panites in a twist over it when they felt is wasn't "fair". Predictably, after one of their favorite sons loses. That is why they made it so difficult to dispose of; so the more mature could weather these little tantrums of the uninformed.

Originally posted by wludavid
I don't claim to understand all the ins and outs of electoral theory. But attempting to malign city-dwellers is off the mark, as well as tiresome. Did you even notice the irony of your remarks? You're defending the "hick rednecks" from an imaginary attack even while viciously insulting "distorted little universes" that many people, including you and me, choose to live near.

My reference to "distorted little universes" has nothing to do with their physical location. I was refering to their state of being.

Originally posted by wludavid
And honestly, it saddens me that "intellectual" is now an insult in many circles.

"Intellectual" has only recently become an insult, and then only when teamed with "liberal". Think about that for a moment. Think about whose tired rhetoric pushed it into that realm; it certainly wasn't the "dumb rednecks", the targets of "liberal intellectual" derision.

[lendaddy]

Originally posted by wludavid


And honestly, it saddens me that "intellectual" is now an insult in many circles.

The "self-proclaimed" is silent

[hytem]

I'm still trying to figure out how Bush did so much better than the exit polls indicated for a lot of states--in the last two elections, especially Florida in 2000 when two networks projected Gore winning (and winning the election). Not long afterwards, the Florida vote turned around. With the state machinery controlled by his brother, you just have to wonder. Bush himself said they will do whatever it takes to win.

In the last election, I saw the exit polls on the internet, and they consistently underestimated Bush's vote in a lot of close states. Has to be an explanation. Those exit polls traditionally have been very reliable until recently.

[red-beard]

How did Jeb Bush control the "election machinery" when all of the disputed counties were Democratic and run by the local Democratic officials?

[Rick Lee]

If Jeb Bush somehow rigged FL, don't you think he would have made his brother win by more than 534 votes? That's cutting it kind of close.