There's something seriously wrong with a system that allows winning by not winning...

[Postman]

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Todd_McCain_conceeding_popular_vote_1019.html

"That means the McCain path is solely now an Electoral College path. If he wins the Electoral College, it's hard to see how he actually wins the popular vote."

[RagAss]

1. He ain't winning shit !

[EFerrari]

2. It's remarkable how they keep trying to find a way to keep this corpse alive. n/t

[dchill]

10. It's blatant cruelty to animals.

(Beating a dead horse, that is.)

[upi402]

3. Yes, many things wrong. Kucinich, Edwards, Dean maybe...

any of these might have changed things. I'll reserve my hope until I see real action from Obama. Democrats we voted into the majority have used their hand as a seat, or to scoop in cash. They have not played their hand to make our votes count.
:popcorn:

[KharmaTrain]

4. Same Game It's Been Since 1789

Shock of all shocks, our founding fathers didn't trust us. No matter how we deify them and the works they left us, these are people who considered a black 3/5th of a human, women as property and only property owners worthy of voting. They put the election of the President in the hands of an Electoral College...535 people who determine who wins, not you or me. All we do is "advise". There's long been a push for direct popular representation in elections, but (with the exception of Nebraska and Maine) it gains little traction since it dangers the political power of one party of the other.

The road to the White House has always been winning the state needed to secure the Electoral College. With winner-take-all, close doesn't matter and the only polls that matter are the ones cast and counted. Win 270 electoral votes and you're golden...it's simple and the game plan of every campaign. The difference with Democrats this year is that the game has been fought a lot smarter than before. Dr. Dean's 50-state strategy has put the party on the ground in many places it hadn't been and in a position of strength in key areas that will matter on November 4th. I'm feel a lot better seeing Jennifer Brunner rather than Ken Blackwell as Ohio Secretary of State this year.

The GOOP knows it can "win" without the popular vote. They did it in 2000. Just this year there are too many holes in this strategy...it may not be close enough to steal...and it's our job to make sure it isn't.

[jobycom]

5. The Electoral College served a couple of purposes.

The Constitution does not require presidents to be chosen by popular election. States were supposed to appoint the Electors. The EC gave each state influence proportional to their population. The alternative was for each state to have an equal vote, which gave small states undue power. The flip side is that a pure popular vote weakens the influence of less populous states as candidates campaigned only for the votes of the most populous areas.

If you do away with the EC, you'd also have to require that the president be chosen by popular election--something long overdue. Then you'd have to develop a new system of choosing the president at the federal level. Now, the Electors are chosen by the state and send their vote to Congress for Congress to ratify it. That means technically the federal government still chooses the president. The EC is just a device to allow that to happen. Since the federal government doesn't hold elections, the states would still be responsible for reporting the votes, and the federal government would still have to be the one to ratify the vote.

A simple solution would be to keep the Electoral College, but give each state as many Electors as they have popular votes in the election. That way, every voter is an Elector, and when the states reported the Electoral vote to the Senate, they'd be reporting the popular vote. That would also give each state more incentive to increase voting turnout, rather than stifle it.

Just my idea. Probably holes in it. If not, I'm sure someone smarter than me has thought of it already. :)

[TreasonousBastard]

6. As much as it sounds like democracy, the main problem...

I see would be the horrific call for recounts all over the country.

Right now, recounts could be called just in individual states that tipped the EC numbers, but if the EC become proportional, or there is none at all, every ED in the country with a close vote could be asked to recount.

The guys who wrote the Constitution thought it would be murder for that kind of count in thirteen states and less than a million voters. Although they may not have understood the modern country with 150 million voters spread over 50 states, they did have the foresight to set Inaguration Day in January. With a national popular vote, it could take that long to figure out who won.

(Imagine the plight of the news predictors or those election junkies who have to know who won RIGHT NOW.)

[jobycom]

8. I don't understand.

First, a note of trivia: the president used to be sworn in on March 4, per the 12th Amendment, 1804. The Founders weren't worried about recounts, they were worried about transportation. Vote results had to brought to state capitals, then to DC.

But I'm not sure why why you think there would be more recounts with a popular election. The EC is already proportional, so a handful of votes can lead to huge changes already, as we saw in Florida in 2000. With a popular vote, it seems to me, a region would have to find large numbers of votes to affect the outcome. Gore in 2000 won by 550,000 votes. That would have taken a lot of recounts to change. With the EC, the Republicans only had to get rid of 50,000 or so in a couple of districts to steal Florida.

Given that all elections are counted locally, and rarely become a state matter, I doubt you'd see major recounts across the nation. For one thing, districts that go Republican in the presidential race tend to be controlled by Republicans, those that go Democrat by Democrats. So these districts aren't going to want recounts. A candidate would rarely have the resources to challenge district by district.

And if they did have the resources in a close election, nothing would stop them from recounts in the current system anyway. The EC is proportional, so each district contributes to the EC total proportionally, so there's no reason now a candidate couldn't challenge in each district.

I'm not a hack for getting rid of the current system, really. I generally think it works, and the rare problems that pop up each century wouldn't be made any better without it. Any system is going to cause it's own problems.

But I do believe that the Constitution should be amended to require that the president be chosen by election. As it stands now, a state could vote to draw straws, and it would be legal. We amended it so that senators were elected, and we should do that for the presidency. Also, if there was a Constitutional requirement, a lot of the Republican arguments in 2000 as to why we didn't have to count all the votes in Florida would have been moot.

[TreasonousBastard]

12. I see your point, but Gore's 550,000 was...

around a half percent of the total vote, which in a lot of places triggers an automatic recount and, recount or not, there would be a lot of fighting what to do over that tiny spread. Could Bush have summoned the resources to get back the 275,001 votes he needed to win? Who knows, but the stakes are high enough that someone might try, and that would be a sorry mess. Just like picking a state for challenge under the current system, you scour the country for likely EDs to challenge and maybe you can find fifty thousand votes in Chicago, another fifty thousand in New York... And then Gore goes around the country trying to get the votes back...

Bottom line-- I hate to say keep doing it because that's the way we've always done it, but the fact is it usually works, and even though it's the system that gave us Bush, any changes should be made very carefully.

[Arkana]

7. That's the most I've seen Chuck Todd give Obama.

Todd's a prick and should be treated as another RW hack who's trying to make it big.

[Dr. Strange]

9. It's kind of a dumb statement.

Like saying the Broncos' sole chance of winning is by getting more points. McCain's sole path is the same as Obama's: the Electoral College path. That's the only path that has ever mattered.

[gratuitous]

11. George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000

And was installed by Supreme Court fiat, ignoring the actual results in Florida in favor of Bush's claim that he won the state. But regardless of whether Florida's count was correct or not, Bush still polled fewer voters than Al Gore did. John McCain will duplicate George W.'s feat of scoring fewer votes than his Democratic opponent. But he won't win an electoral college victory. He will be lucky to scrape together 200 electors.