Old 02-10-2004, 07:36 PM   #1
UltimateSoul
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Default Electoral College

Anyway,the one thing that seems weird about the elections it is the way the final canidates receive votes.Rather than going by the counties they go by state and it seems to me like an all or nothing gambit.This then means that canidates could win all of the "big states"and only pay attention to the "lesser," states with smaller populations.
For example take California,it has well over 50 votes while Alaska only has 3,which do you think the canidates will pay more attention to?
Both the Republican and the Democratic parties have states that they usually win(Texas,California.)
Also, going by counties could reduce the amount of time it takes to determine the winner while going by state could significantly delay the outcome.
So, what are your thoughts on this?
Hope it wasn't that boring.
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Old 02-10-2004, 07:40 PM   #2
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i think the system is fine...california should have more of a say than alaska becasue more people live there...each state is represnted proportionally to its population at the last census...i dont understand what you want to do with counties, but in this case i dont think change is good
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Old 02-10-2004, 07:47 PM   #3
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If you went by counties, Bush would have won by a landslide.

Even though Gore got lots of votes in densely populated areas, Bush got the vote of the true majority of the country.

Thus, this might be a good idea.

http://www.ajocreations.com/images/e...n/Bush_map.gif
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Old 02-10-2004, 07:48 PM   #4
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They get equal proportion. Those votes are based on popultion, so instead of going to an entire state, the people running to be president would just stop in all the major cities around the us.

You can actually win with only a few more than a quarter of the vote. If a little more than half the people in just the biggest states vote for you, you can win That means someone with a little less than 3/4 of the popular vote might not be elected. (That is mathematically correct, but in reality, that would never happen.)

There have been minority presidents though, where 55% voted for another person, and even only with 45% of the popular vote on their side, they still won. It doesn't happen often, but it still happens.
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Old 02-10-2004, 07:53 PM   #5
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That's what the point of the electoral college is.....as you see from the map I posted, Bush deserved to win because he represents the people of the whole country, whereas Gore represents the people of densely populated areas.
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Old 02-10-2004, 08:22 PM   #6
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The question of votiong isn't about area though, or number of counties. The system is based on population, so if a densely populated area votes for candidate A, clearly that should and will have more sway than if Bumsville Idaho votes for candidate B.
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Old 02-10-2004, 09:49 PM   #7
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i dislike the electoral college primarily because it discourages anything other than a two candidate election. minor parties cannot compete under the system, as most people do not want to waste their vote on someone who can not win the election. very few countries (about 15) besides the US use this system; and other countries using alternatives to it so far have been very successful at representing the population. france, for instance, encourages many political parties to form because one only needs to win 1/8 of the votes, and then the majority in a later election.
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Old 02-10-2004, 09:51 PM   #8
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yeah youre talking about france...listen to yourself...they have one of the most unstable governments in the free world...they have like 10 political parties...of which one is a communist party
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Old 02-10-2004, 10:47 PM   #9
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what's wrong with communism?
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Old 02-10-2004, 10:57 PM   #10
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Are you serious? Communism fails. Always. It is not in the nature of human beings to survive in a classless society, there will always be those that rise to the top and sink to the bottom. It's just our nature.

Anyway, I don't like the electoral college because I think it discourages the idea that the voters are actually voting for their president...for instance, in the last election, Gore won the popular vote, but lost the electoral (and made a big stink about it while doing so). I think that we should get rid of Delegates and the electoral college and have the people directly vote for who they want...it would make their votes seem like they count more, and I'll bet we'd get a higher turnout of voters.

Interesting statistic: for a country that puts so much emphasis on freedom to vote and democracy, only about 55% of elegible, registered voters actually vote in Presidential elections. Then you take a country like Russia, which everybody thinks of as such a communist nation, and nearly 96% of elegible voters do so. Wierd, eh? Just shows that we love a hypocrite.
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Old 02-10-2004, 10:59 PM   #11
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That electoral college keeps any president from winning with 10% of the popular vote. If votes are split between 20 different parties, that could happen, even when 2 or 3 parties are fairly close. They steal votes away from each other when all of them would have been alright. Instead a 4th of 5th place person wins and you have even MORE people dissatisfied with the government.


To many people working for close to the same thing messes everything up. That is why there are representatives in the first place.
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Old 02-11-2004, 06:26 AM   #12
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you need to get 50+% of the electoral votes to win...if not then i think congress then votes on the president
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Old 02-11-2004, 07:04 PM   #13
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It just seems to me that a canidate could win a state by a small margin,and yet still receive all the votes. I'm not saying that the entire system should be dropped,but that slightly different voting system could represent people's opinions better.
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Old 02-29-2004, 06:23 AM   #14
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Yes i agree however if we were to drop some of the system we shouldnt completely go by who gets the most popular votes.
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Old 02-29-2004, 10:57 PM   #15
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To those that say California gets more of a say than Wyoming, let's pretend, you're wrong. Wyoming gets 3 electoral votes, to California's 55. If you did division on the total state population in each state by the number of Electorals, Wyoming is over-represented. I believe Cali is something like 600,000 per vote, while Wyoming is 150,000 per vote. Less people make a bigger impact.
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Old 03-1-2004, 02:08 AM   #16
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You guys dont get it, the electoral college is not about representing the people, it about protecting the people and giving them a more informed vote.

You see with the EC, a canidate gets that state's votes if they have the majority. Let's take a fictional 10million voter state. 70% votes democrat. The other 30% goes republican. If this was a majority vote rules election, the democrats could employ force and intimidation at voting stations and force the republicans to vote the other way, thus getting or negating votes.

Example? When blacks got a limited right to vote in the 1870s in the south, they were intimidated from voting by the KKK.

The EC encourages the canidates to try to win votes in places where they dont have the majority. For example, if bush tried to win votes in Texas, he would be wasting his time. That gives him major incentive to visit other parts of the country.

Also, it prevents the whole recount thing in the 2000 election. With the EC, you recount one state. In a majority rules, you would have to recount ALL THE STATES.

The US uses the electoral college because majority rules has too many problems associated with it.
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Old 03-1-2004, 02:09 AM   #17
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Uh, that was me.

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Old 03-2-2004, 08:56 PM   #18
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I think the electoral college is the most un-democratic way to elect a president ever.

Why?

Because it IGNORES people's votes.

For example:

State A has 5k votes for candidate A, and 8K votes for candidate B.
Well, 5k votes are counted, but as soon as candidate B gets more votes than candidate A, (assuming the polls are officially closed in state A), that's 8k-5k votes that aren't going to count towards shit. So that's 3K votes hat aren't going to count, 3 thousand people whose opinion is compeltely ignored.
What the fuck kind of government doesn't listen to the public's desires? Not a democratic one, that's for sure.
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Old 03-2-2004, 10:33 PM   #19
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The electoral college was made way back when the country was first developing its presidential system. The EC was made to protect the people of the US, like what SotN said. But back in the 1700's most people were pretty uneducated, thats why the EC was made. We have not really changed the system much, if at all. The way the electoral college works (at leat the way i was told) was a state representative votes for the people, and there are a certain ammount of representatives in each state (goes by population or density or something). The representatives vote for the candidates, and whichever party wins the vote gets all of the votes equal to the number of representatives in that state. The representatives vote for who they think the people who put them into office wants, even if its not who the population really wants. The EC is very outdated and I think we should just go by the popular votes, otherwise the popular votes is just for show. This country needs to use a new voting system, not the same thing we have been using for the last 300 years.

edit: nice SotN, you have 1337 posts!
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Old 03-4-2004, 09:16 PM   #20
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The electoral college is stupid. LIke AlbinoLime said it was devised back in the beginning of elections..but not just for protection. We just lacked the technology to count every vote in the country..we didn't have computers or anything..so they just counted up the votes in each state and gave it a number based on its representatives. Today we obviously have enough technology to count every vote in the US..and it's a lot fairer that way. The electoral college basically makes some citizen's opinions more critical in the election than others..for example a voter in New York has a lot more power since if their state wins the candidate they voted for gets a lot more credit than another person in Alaska. Not only is that not fair, but it discourages voting in some regions. A person in Alaska might say "yes I could vote..but even if I do whats the difference, my entire state would have to win the majority..and even if it does we only get a lousy 2 electoral votes." The electoral college, to sum it up, basically says that the voices of people in New York are more important than voices of people in Alaska. If we truely believe that "all men are created equal" then we should just go for an election where the majority of votes win.
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