do you agree with the electoral college stsyem?

oleDirtyBast4rd

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I'm a conservative in CA and think it's bullshit that all 55 electoral votes go to the Democrats. Makes me feel like my votes don't count. What says you sherdog? Can anybody support the current system?
 
It should be one person equals one vote, all counted the same. That's how voting works. The electoral college bullshit allows people who lost the vote to get elected anyway (Bush Jr, for example). No logic, unfair, not democratic.
 
It was a system required when the country was founded due to communication limits.

I
 
It should be one person equals one vote, all counted the same. That's how voting works. The electoral college bullshit allows people who lost the vote to get elected anyway (Bush Jr, for example). No logic, unfair, not democratic.

Bush was leading in the polls prior to the election. Without an electoral system the early results in Florida would not have been used to call the election while the polls were still open in every other time zone, and the popular vote might have turned out quite different.

Before the election, there was actually talk of there being an electoral/popular vote mismatch in Gore's favor, and amusingly both sides argued for the version that would benefit themselves according to the backwards prediction, and the opposite of what turned out.

But yeah, ditch the anachronism. Not that pure democracy means pure good by the way. While we're at it the president needs to be a lot less powerful so the election isn't such a windfall for the winning side.
 
I'm a conservative in CA and think it's bullshit that all 55 electoral votes go to the Democrats. Makes me feel like my votes don't count. What says you sherdog? Can anybody support the current system?

It doesnt have to be like that, some states break it up differently, but a state where one party has a strong majority like in California would never do that because it would only weaken them
 
I would have an entirely new system in place, all these methods and opportunities to cheat are high, we have to have candidates from both parties representing thus they would want to succeed rather than trample the other. :icon_chee
 
Makes me feel like my votes don't count.

Honest question: What makes you feel like they do?

From what I understand, the EC was created for two reasons:

1. To give smaller states more power.
2. To have a buffer between the population and the direct selection of President.

Evidently the founding fathers believed public opinion was more prone to manipulation by tyrants if such a connection was left un-buffered.
 
When I learned what the electoral college was, I lol'd hard.

Most people have a confused definition of democracy.
 
In theory, going straight popular vote sounds like an improvement.

However, there's one HUGE misgiving I have about doing that - corrupt partisan states.

Right now, the incentive to cheat the vote counts is pretty low in most states, because the outcome isn't in doubt. If one candidate is already polling at 55-45%, there's no need to cheat him up to 58-42. It accomplishes nothing. Only a handful (2-8?) of states are really in doubt when election day comes, so all the attention on possible fraud and verification can be focused narrowly.
If you make every vote matter, now tweaking the results in any state can 'help your guy's cause' and when all 50 state have possible meaningful fraud, it becomes much harder to monitor.


* By "fraud", I mean potentially many things, however, my primary fears are a) electronic machine rigging and b) Republican efforts to suppress votes (voter list purging, requiring IDs, understaffing urban polling places causing insane wait times, etc)
 
There is a potential benefit to the electoral college. If there was a significant impediment for people to make it to the polls in one part of the country (say a huge snow storm in liberal New England) then the votes of the people who do make it are given the full weight of the populations from which they come. Without the electoral college, conservative Southern votes could be more numerous than liberal North East votes (and a Republican president elected) just because people in the NE couldn't get to the polls to cast the vote they wanted to.

Edit: Of course, then there's the question of how states should divide their votes. States could divide their votes in the electoral college to closely represent the numbers each candidate received within the state, but most don't.
 
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I remember one time on sherdog I was explaining my pro-popular vote election argument and I was quickly besmirched. It was as if only because my opinion was different that it was ripped apart.

Honest question: What makes you feel like they do?

From what I understand, the EC was created for two reasons:

1. To give smaller states more power.
2. To have a buffer between the population and the direct selection of President.

Evidently the founding fathers believed public opinion was more prone to manipulation by tyrants if such a connection was left un-buffered.

My question is sort of rhethorical, but I'll give it a shot anyway. Then how does the current EC benefit those smaller states? The campaigns are primarily focused on the larger states for that very reason.
 
^ Nobody campaigns in the big states either, because the Dems have a lock on NY and CA, and the Repubs have a lock in TX... but that's fading fast due to... you can guess.

They should break it up by districts, much like the electoral college system, however they need to remove the 'winner takes all' approach and instead just add up each district.
 
I remember one time on sherdog I was explaining my pro-popular vote election argument and I was quickly besmirched. It was as if only because my opinion was different that it was ripped apart.



My question is sort of rhethorical, but I'll give it a shot anyway. Then how does the current EC benefit those smaller states? The campaigns are primarily focused on the larger states for that very reason.

Their electoral votes are disproportional to their percentage of the overall population.

For instance, each individual vote in Wyoming counts nearly four times as much in the Electoral College as each individual vote in Texas. This is because Wyoming has three (3) electoral votes for a population of 532,668 citizens (as of 2008 Census Bureau estimates) and Texas has thirty-two (32) electoral votes for a population of almost 25 million. By dividing the population by electoral votes, we can see that Wyoming has one "elector" for every 177,556 people and Texas has one "elector" for about every 715,499. The difference between these two states of 537,943 is the largest in the Electoral College.

http://www.fairvote.org/reforms/nat...ollege/problems-with-the-electoral-college/#2
 
When I learned what the electoral college was, I lol'd hard.

Most people have a confused definition of democracy.

the United States is not a democracy

go take your ged again
 
I think we've fucked up enough shit already, if you want to change something make politicians live full time in their own districts, outlaw lobbyist and earmarks.
 
saw these the other night and it made a lot of sense. It explains why the current elections process will always inevitably end up in a 2 party race and suggests an alternate method for maximizing the utility of votes.

Part 1:
[YT]s7tWHJfhiyo[/YT]

Part 2:
[YT]l8XOZJkozfI[/YT]
 
the Repubs have a lock in TX... but that's fading fast due to... you can guess.

Their utter failure to appeal to latino voters? Yeah, republicans really dropped the ball there.

They should break it up by districts, much like the electoral college system, however they need to remove the 'winner takes all' approach and instead just add up each district.

Republicans should be praising the electoral college to Allah, because without political welfare and gerrymandering they'd be sunk to fuck.
 
It's complete and utter bullshiit. It discourages voter participation and makes it so candidates only have to pander to a handful of states...i think its easily the biggest flaw and most insulting aspect of our voting system.
 
How about the fact that a Wyoming voter's senate vote has 30x the power of a California voter's senate vote? I mean a state will send two senators to the Senate no matter if they have 1M voters or 60M voters.

And then you have all the gerrymandering of House districts...
 
Their utter failure to appeal to latino voters? Yeah, republicans really dropped the ball there.

Jeb Bush and more importantly George Prescott Bush will save the Republican Party. Sane GOP just need to get immigration reform a settled issue already, so they can stop the moron eruptions from the far right nutters on the issue and then nice, good looking Latino American George Prescott Bush will be elected Texas Governor in 2018 or 2022 and President soon thereafter.
 
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