Well… as of writing this, my vote didn’t count. Last night they called the election and good ol Florida still decided to count hanging chads or whatever it was they were doing. And no matter how put out I feel about it, think of poor Hawaii; who has the lowest voter turnout because, well, the elections are usually called by the time they go to vote. Seriously, that’s not cool ‘merica!
But beyond even that, we here in the states have something called an “electoral college”. And it’s not like one of those prestigious colleges either. It’s like one of those mail correspondence unaccredited art colleges you see on tv in between reality shows.
No! The electoral college was set up to help us dumb folks to not just vote for the wrong person. Because the electoralites (that’s what we’re calling them now) know who the president should be, and of course making a decision based on that. The system was set up way back in 1787 really to assist with the problem of an ill-informed voting public. But with a technologically advanced society we have now, where the other day we had hundreds of thousands of tweets per second, there is absolutely no reason to hold on to an antiquated system that assumes we don’t know why these people are. Hell, most of us are TOO INFORMED! Really now, I was tired of the ad campaigns months ago (and my sincerest condolences for those caught in the big battleground states).
And what was an attempt to even out representation because of population, became the ultimate inequality. Your votes are not as equal as someone else from another state (as a result of how many electoral votes each state has). So not only is someone else voting for you, and that they don’t really need your vote to win (like Hawaii), but the votes you do cast aren’t even as important as someone else’s! Really?! That’s fair? That’s democracy?
So what’s the plan? Well, we don’t need the electoral college. That’s just bollocks. What we need is a purely POPULAR VOTE driven election. Not just that, I say we do away with it being advertised even at the county level or state for that matter. What I mean is, all votes go into a single pot and at the end they are counted up and released; none of this “winning certain states” bologna. Really now, elementary school elections are more democratic than the real thing. This would solve the whole college thing and the feeling of votes not mattering. And to that point, I’d have Hawaii voting a day early. No reason not to have them feeling left out.
Anyways… I’m pretty tired of voting not mattering. At least the local stuff makes a difference and amendments too, but as for general presidential elections, you might as well as write in Mickey Mouse because it won’t make any less of an impact.
I’d just like to take the time to say, screw the parties and their constituents. I live in Ohio, and I haven’t had a proper nights sleep in over a month, because these people have no inclining of the concept of common courtesy when it comes to appropriate hours for calling someone. As such I’d like to make a couple suggestions. One, we all form our own political party with the singular platform of calling all the people who work for the other parties that call us at odd hours and call them at say three in the morning. Secondly, next election, given the way our nation seems to be split evenly on party lines, we all do a write in next election for Anarchy, personally I think it might give our nation a better shot. Third, next election if you find that you live in a battleground state, MOVE, and disconnect your phones.
ouch! yeah, I thought it was bad here until I heard what they were doing over there in Ohio. at least the tv stations are getting some revenue? that’s good right?
The problems with the electoral college is two fold.
1) that some random dudes decide who the people vote for
2) basically every state is an all or nothing.
The first one isn’t that big of a problem currently because those guys know that if they don’t mirror the popular vote they will get kicked out at warp speed. The second one is way worse since it means that candidates completely ignore safe states (California, Texas, New York, etc) and focus almost entirely on swing states. So half the country is criminally under-represented and the other half is way over-represented which is a clear violation of one-person one-vote.
There is a small movement to eliminate the bad-representation by making it mandatory that all states give their electoral college votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote. I haven’t followed it for a while.
Most Republicans are against it because, well, thats their thing. They don’t like change. And swing state politicians are trying to block it because they love the unfair advantage they get in terms of political clout and local advertisers make a killing each election and give money to said politicians.
So be sure to send a letter to your local/state/federal representative and stuff telling them to vote for the stuff above because its the smart thing to do and blah blah blah.
Well here in Europe we many more different systems… ranging from relative ease that noone actualy wins elections so “coalition” is formed which efectively has so “cat dog” compromise that nothing is actualy worth dooing.
To fact that in my country barely 30 percent of populace with voting right actualy goes to pools… that is parlament elections… local elections are somewhere barely visited by ten percent of populace.
I didn´t vote last time, somehow I checked all the lists, and realized there is absolutely noone I was willing to vote for.
yeah, some states make it a felony (if I remember right) if they don’t vote with the popular vote. obviously, I don’t think FL does this…
yikes… well, least they have the choice. I think Australia makes you vote.
My problem with voting….We don’t see how they COUNT the votes. They can do all the adjustments they want ( and there are evidence that votes being ”deleted” or faulty machines changing your vote )
I just don’t trust ”Government” entity because , well, I don’t trust that kind of POWER to ANYBODY…not even myself. And the elections usually feels like ” Pick the lesser evil …at least he won’t steal from you right in your face ! ” ….
I don’t know, maybe I am too cynical… but currently, I think those ”elections” are like the School Popularity races rather than ” Hey, this guy has great ideas to FIX the mess of this country ! ”.
The idea that some clueless moron’s ( no offense but you know it is ture ) vote can cause you and your country suffering….kinda piss me off.
kind of power… thas is non-issue… problem is the magnitude of power…
it’s probably just 1 guy locked in a back room somewhere. speaking of, did they ever tally all of florida’s votes? they seem to be taking their time with that…
I’ve been whinging about the college since Bush got in without the popular vote…I was 14 and I knew it was wrong then.
psh, popular vote… like any politician has cared about what the majority of the people wanted anyways… >)
Everyone is going to hate me for saying this (never stopped me before though), but what needs to be eliminated is public voting for the President. A return to the age when state governments were elected by the means that a state constitution laid out with that state government then appointing the state’s electors who then vote on the President by the means that a state constitution also laid out.
We were created to be a republic with democracy on the state level, not the federal level. This was done because the founders knew the great danger of too much democracy; that “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” A meaningful portion of the vote in this recent Presidential election was just that. People not voting on principles or American ideals, but casting the vote that they believed would get them the most unearned money. They voted not for freedom or liberty or a less wasteful government, but for the idea that they can get something for nothing at another more productive person’s persons or an as yet unborn person’s expense.
That is the trap of too much democracy, and we have fallen into it. The only solution is to either get amazingly lucky in somehow have a voting public within which those voting for free money for themselves are not of a meaningful enough number to have an impact on federal elections (not going to happen), or to return to a more republican (not the party, the system of government) type of government and to eliminate the excess democracy that is allowing for the current level of harm being done to the nation.
Also this would eliminate the advertising you have to suffer from Presidential elections ;) .
Problem is that is about one and only thing that can eliminate this problem…
Not allow people who either do not pay taxes, or people who are living from money provided by state, to vote at all.
(Granted not really original Idea but it generaly always worked… you can see it in Ancient Rome… as amount of people with voting right incresed, efectivity of state decresed. People wanted state to buil sewers, roads… even if what it needed at the moment were legionares on the borders fighting)
Yes, even ancient rome was FEEDING general populace that was unemployed… but it did not provide any other service. People got enough to survive, not anything else, and those completly dependent on help did not get any vote at all…
Democracy works fine in City state… attemting to use it on continental or planetary level is most likely to fail- almost every decision, no matter how minor, will make too many people angry… This is why all large states eventualy collapse- people try to use One state-one law system which does not fit the local needs. (In worst case scenario it becomes “average” that would be ideal for homogenized average value state… but fails utterly in every single spot)
This is, btw, the general problem European union suffers… Northern states are industrial states completly dependent on import of energies and resources… few millenia of building civilization has drained what was here… We can´t allow currency (akka Euro) to devalve or dump large quantities of it into economy… it would be suicidical for us…
however with economy European south has built they can´t operate with currency that “hard”.
Result is that Europe is balancing on the edge of laser-sharpened katana and can´t go either way.
your position in Us is relatively better… at lest in term of resources and energies (even if your powergrids are card-castles)
if I remember correctly, and I might not, this is something kind of in use (or was) in China. like, you elect a guy to represent your town, who elects a guy to represent your county, who elects a guy for the province, who elects the guy on top of that. like turtles all the way down. problem is, by the time you get to the top, the original vote got so watered down that they elect all kinds of wackadoos into office.
I forget the reference, but some story had a system where the leader was randomly chosen every few years. maybe we should just do that. I mean, couldn’t do any worse. XD
I’m in an all or nothing state, so the electoral votes all go to our majority voting. In some states, the electoral votes are split based on the percentage of votes for each candidate, but here, if 51 % go to one candidate, then all of our electoral votes go to that candidate…
only 2 states can break it as it is now. but your state has the right idea. then again, I can’t help but wonder, why even have the middle man? I mean, if all the electoral votes go to the winner of the popular vote, then why even have an electoral vote at all?
Well I’m not in the states, but I’ve never seen the final vote for president as all that important. You only have 2 candidates and most of the time both of them are awful. (This time around they were only bad, not terrible like Bush and his opponents.) The primaries are much more important, but they are also more limited on who votes in them, (this is a problem.)
The whole concept of a 2 party system seems almost as flawed as the soviet’s communist system, (they had voting, you just didn’t have a choice who to vote for.)
In the senate and congress it sort of makes sense to have only 2 parties because minority governments can cause issues, (although personally I’d prefer a collation government to a majority that doesn’t fear the electorate voting against them.)
For president there is no good reason to limit the choices to 2 people. Only one person wins and if you had 50 choices then you’d still only have 1 winner so all the decisions would still go through them. However giving people first, second and third choice votes might make sense if you had more than 2 candidates who stood a chance.
lol, technically we have a lot of candidates… just only 2 seem to matter. I still believe it’s a throwback to the civil war, you know, north wants national control, south wants less government control, blah blah blah.
still, I hate the 2 party system. though I guess it’s a natural thing, ya know? we as humans like dualities. polarized dualities at that. we like things to be in pairs at opposite ends of the spectrum. we like things to be either black or white, good or evil, yes or no… never so much stuff that’s inbetween. but much like the rest of human nature, it kind of irritates me. >)
Normally, I would say yes: every vote counts. However, I live in an area where my party is a minority party (becoming less and less popular & populated), so when I voted on Tuesday. i found out that I lost every single thing i voted on (but not by alot: only by 3-6%).
So now, I really don’t know why I even bothered to vote.
P.S.: i’m really surprised that you didn’t comment on how Disney bought Lucasfilm and how they plan to make a Star wars episode 7 yet. That sounded like something you would’ve commented on.
Well maybe it will work out… Lucas was ruining original story for some time… (at least now he will shut up).
If they don´t ruin Thrawn and few other things…
sigh… they STILL haven’t counted my vote yet…
lol, yeah… that all kind of happened at a bad time huh? was planning these election ones so maybe next week it’ll show up. honestly, I’m on the fence about it, though I’m leaning a bit towards a “disney can’t screw the series up any more than lucas, but at least we’ll start getting new movies” side.
Welcome to representative democracy! I live in Idaho which gets 4 electoral votes. If I decide I like the republican guy then I don’t vote because my state always votes republican. If I like the democrat guy I don’t vote because my state always votes republican. Otherwise I don’t vote because 4 electoral votes doesn’t mean jack in a presidential election.
I personally liked Starship Troopers where only people who have served in the military get the right to vote.
The whole citizens as opposed to civilians thing is too perfect to ever actually happen.
Not really… Citizens got right to vote… there were many kinds of service, military service was actualy minority choice and Federation actualy discouraged it (well before the war with bugs that is… it gradualy grew in proportion since both infantry and fleet needed to replenish loses).
you could get citizenship in federal service in research (technicaly ran by military but with no combat duty), drug testing, infrastructure and ship building…
plus you had to pay taxes… as citizen… that however granted you services civilians had to pay for anyway. But noone could actualy conscript a civilian to anything.
Citizenship was a choice, and a reward for contribution.
Simply put… Two legs, two hands, and body temperature around 36,5°C should no be entitlement to anything.
I think the real important stuff is the local and federal amendments and stuff. that’s some democracy you can really feel in action. presidential elections are mostly about which head you want in the same suit. John Jackson vs Jack Johnson kind of thing.
Coffin democracy in action can also be very bad thing… Comunists in russia got to power because majority wanted them (well majority wanted their monarchy gone… comunists simply delivered that)
Hitler was voted into office…
In the end it does not matter wheather it is a dictator that takes away freedoms himself… or that other people vote them away…
First one is actualy better… just one man to shoot if he is bad enough for what you believe. In other instance civil war can kill many more people.
Democracy is a means to TRY TO get largest possible amount of people “happy” with situation… (if public choses badly and either representative or decision does not fit the general situation… and yes people can choose badly (f.e. chosing someone who devalves their currency to boost exports when country needs to import resources). Even dictator can choose badly though.
And add to it that any decision, no matter it´s origin, will inevitably take something from other people… most of the time they accept it as general swing that next time it will be decision slightly more in their favor… trade if you will…
but if someone will keep constanlty pushing into one direction eventualy said group will be fed up to point of rebelion. (silent one… paying taxes somewhere else f.e.) or with guns. Then it is only about which side will have last standing combatant on the battlefield.
What is the most funny thing? Each side truly believes it´s path leads to bright future for everyone (usualy even for the opposition)… but there is problem… it is only question of belief- something inherintly subjective and irrational. The other side however believed in completly divergent path… sometimes those paths differ so fundamentaly that people decide that beeing forced on other path is so grose trespass upon their freedom that it is worth killing for… and loosing life is acceptable risk compared to “suffering” the other path.
Why did you in America start independence revolution against the British? Large taxes you got nothing out of as resources were shifted to Britain… that was the point where you started killing.
People kill themselves for religion, belief, money, ideology, way of life… And… none of the reasons is better or worse than other.
Don´t put so much faith into democracy. The only consequence of allowing people to choose… is that they choose badly… sometimes very badly.
Voting is a right and a privilege of being a citizen. The focus of your vote counting should not be soley on the presidency. The president is only part of what makes the country run. State, city and county policitians are also important and those DO run on popular vote for the represented counties. The Electoral College only affects the presidential vote. It is important that you are paying attention to more than who you want the president to be. Elections are also used to approve/fail amendments to the state constitutions and certain types of tax increases in a district. It’s funny that people throw such a fit about the presidential election when your local elections are the ones that have the most effect on your day to day life.
exactly! that’s usually what I focus on most when voting, cause they have a lot of good amendments to help folks and a lot of junk that’s really messed up if it passes. we lucked out this last time, but who knows, if people don’t vote they could pass any kind of trash!