Post #291,372
8/22/07 10:13:03 PM
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California initiative to keep the President Republican
[link|http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/opinion/22wed1.html?hp|NY Times Editorial]: California currently gives all 55 of its electoral votes \ufffd the biggest electoral college prize in the nation \ufffd to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. Virtually all states use this winner-take-all method. The California initiative, which could go to a vote in June, would instead give the 2008 presidential candidates one electoral vote for every Congressional district that they win, with an additional two electoral votes going to whoever got the most votes statewide. (Democrats appear to have backed off from plans to try just as anti-democratic a trick in North Carolina, which is good.)
The net result of the California initiative would be that if the Democratic candidate wins in that state next year, which is very likely, the Republican candidate might still walk away with 20 or more of the state\ufffds electoral votes. The initiative, backed by a shadowy group called Californians for Equal Representation, is being promoted as an effort to more accurately reflect the choices of the state\ufffds voters, and to force candidates to pay more attention to California, which is usually not in play in presidential elections. It is actually a power grab on behalf of Republicans. [link|http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bell%2C_McAndrews_%26_Hiltachk%2C_LLP|SourceWatch] has some information about the group proposing it. They're clearly heavily tied to Republican interests. The initiative is [link|http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fag.ca.gov%2Fcms_pdfs%2Finitiatives%2F2007-07-17_07-0032_Initiative.pdf&ei=Y-vMRtX8AqbCefWM5aEN&usg=AFQjCNEVwabnq0Y_obzVrsoWNXSCxkSKjA&sig2=RO7SGXCbGOmnNR8MeGVuwQ|here] (4 page .pdf). Since DeLay was so effective in gaining new seats in Texas via redistricting, one shouldn't put it past groups like this to try to keep the Presidency by changing the rules as well. Eternal vigilance, and all that... Cheers, Scott.
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Post #291,374
8/22/07 11:43:44 PM
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I thought at first it was a further decouping of the voting.
Then I read it again, paying closer attention. It's actually the opposite.
In and of itself I think it looks like a good idea. If *all* the states were to do it. And that's really the problem, because it has to be done by each state, one-by-one.
Wade
Is it enough to love
Is it enough to breathe
Somebody rip my heart out
And leave me here to bleed
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Is it enough to die
Somebody save my life
I'd rather be Anything but Ordinary
Please
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-- "Anything but Ordinary" by Avril Lavigne. | · my ·
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Post #291,379
8/23/07 12:04:40 AM
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I seem to recall one state . . .
. . has set this up to take effect as soon as it's passed in all the other states. That's the way to do it.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #291,390
8/23/07 9:36:33 AM
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no point in letting locals be represented
the noisy majority is all that matters. A better idea, let the elctors be elected.
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 #291,395
8/23/07 9:53:55 AM
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An even better idea
would be ditching the whole thing and just counting the votes.
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Post #291,396
8/23/07 9:57:09 AM
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nope, bad idea
means large population centers would control the lives and rights of rural areas. I doubt an urban montrealer represents the dreams and aspirations of a saskatoon resident.
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 #291,401
8/23/07 11:41:13 AM
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And what exactly is wrong with that?
It's not as if real democracy wouldn't mean that larger groups would have a numerical advantage over smaller ones in all kinds of other ways anyway, is it...? So what's so particularly holy about the town-country divide that the hicks would need electoral preferential treatment that is not afforded to, say, gays, blacks, stamp collectors, or parking wardens?
[link|mailto:MyUserId@MyISP.CountryCode|Christian R. Conrad]
(I live in Finland, and my e-mail in-box is at the Saunalahti company.)
Ah, the Germans: Masters of Convoluted Simplification. — [link|http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/?p=1603|Jehovah]
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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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Post #291,514
8/25/07 12:02:45 PM
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Don't know what yer talking about
Look a the map that BeeP keeps point to. Notice the color? Predominately red. Which means that the vast majority of America is Repo.
Now how does an urbanite in one of those teeny tiny blue enclaves control things for the vast area of redness?
jb4
"It's hard for me, you know, living in this beautiful White House, to give you a firsthand assessment."
— George W. Bush, when asked if he believed Iraq was in a state of civil war (Newsweek, 26 Feb 07)
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Post #291,529
8/25/07 5:07:15 PM
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thank you for making my point
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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