Post #291,406
8/23/07 12:14:36 PM
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We've got a long history of having a federal system.
We're a nation made up of individual states. The federal government was constructed by small and large states and the resulting compromise gives more power to the smaller states than a pure democracy would. While many of the [link|http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed68.htm|reasons for having electors] may no longer apply, there isn't a simple solution to making the presidential election more representative while maintaining its important national character, IMO. The [link|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College|Wikipedia article on the Electoral College] is pretty good. It is also theoretically possible to win the election by winning all of eleven states and disregarding the rest of the country. If one ticket were to take California (55 votes), Texas (34), New York (31), Florida (27) Illinois (21), Pennsylvania (21), Ohio (20), Michigan (17), Georgia (15), New Jersey (15), and North Carolina (15), that ticket would have 271 votes, which would be enough to win. (In theory, if a minimum number of voters were to vote in those eleven states, the other major ticket could have a landslide victory in the popular vote and still lose the election.) But such exercises are just that - exercises. There is no election in American history in which such an event has occurred or come close to occurring. In the close elections of 2000 and 2004, these eleven states gave 111 votes to Republican candidate George W. Bush and 160 votes to Democratic candidates Al Gore and John Kerry.
Proponents claim, however, that adoption of the popular vote would simply shift the disproportionate focus to large cities at the expense of rural areas.[2] Candidates might also be inclined to campaign hardest in their "base" areas to maximize turnout among core supporters, and ignore more closely divided parts of the country. Whether such developments would be good or bad is a matter of normative political theory and political interests of the voters in question. FWIW. Cheers, Scott.
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Post #291,407
8/23/07 12:22:44 PM
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Additionally...
Our electoral college system doesn't seem dissimilar to that of the European Union, where each country votes individually and has a set number of council votes allocated to it and smaller countries having a disproportionately larger share of the votes.
Regards,
-scott anderson
"Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
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Post #291,408
8/23/07 12:33:26 PM
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Yeah, and we all know how well that's working out
;)
Lots of people pissed off by the edicts coming out of Brussels these days, esp. in the business community.
As for the weight given to rural vs. urban votes; let's not forget that previous to WWII, the majority of the population lived in rural areas; it wasn't until the advent of industrial farming practices and mechanization that most people in North America moved off the land and into the cities... so that weighting actually reflected reality until recently. Considering the proportion of the nation's bills that are paid by urbanites (the vast majority, esp. in a country like mine where more people actually live in the cities) the extra weighting given to rural people seems more like a rip-off than anything else.
Finally, isn't the extra weighting given to rural districts in the House of Representatives, as well as the equal weighting given to both small and large states in the Senate, enough to assure that the interests of the small are well considered next to those of the large? Seeing as our political philosophy is based on the individual, it seems both more democratic and more sensible to choose the chief executive strictly on the basis of how many votes they got.
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Post #291,415
8/23/07 3:14:06 PM
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congress is weighted to the population centers
x amount of headcount = congressional district. Alaska only has one congress critter but 2 senators, same as everyone else.
thanx,
bill
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 51 years. meep
reach me at [link|mailto:bill.oxley@cox.net|mailto:bill.oxley@cox.net]
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Post #291,417
8/23/07 3:28:58 PM
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As long as NC is one of the eleven states, ...
what's the problem? :)
Some states are more equal than others.
Alex
Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law. -- Sophocles (496? - 406 BCE)
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Post #291,422
8/23/07 7:01:31 PM
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But the noble intent of all these arrangements remains -
{{Somehow}} to ameliorate the obvious problems of majority-digital-logic:
AKA Winner-take-All The tyranny of the majority.
Wanna be labelled a 'Christian'.. (whichever competing flavour) or treated in all governmental manner as-if?
Majority, say:
Don't like smoking? {anywhere} - 3 AM enforcement visits.
Don't like queers? Heh - try to stamp That out.
Want 'voting-life begins at conception'? (Masturbation: second degree murder = also 'interfering with an election'.)
So then, nobody knows how exactly (or approximately) to restrain the inevitable majority tyranny-trend VS the many minority abstainers - but at least, Our Group of nation designers: Tried.
(Not that it cannot all be eviscerated by the 'election' of YAN Ayatollah, real soon now)
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