How McCain Could Win With 22% of the Popular Vote
That's no typo.
Palo Alto-based systems analyst John Felleman, a student of electoral college quirks, has created a statistical scenario wherein a candidate is rejected by 78% of voters and still gains the Oval Office (see table 1, below).
"Granted, the vote distributions are a bit far-fetched," Felleman says. "But even more believable scenarios show how you can win the presidency by exploiting the electoral college."
Felleman shows (in table 2) how, with just 47% of the popular vote, John McCain could very well collect 271 electoral votes and win next Tuesday (victory requires a minimum of 270). Felleman has used current polling numbers with three plausible variables:
1) 30% of undecided voters vote McCain.
2) 3% of voters stating allegiance to Obama actually choose McCain in the voting booth.
3) McCain manages to outperform polls by 1% to 5% in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Nevada.
Such an outcome would hardly be unprecedented. Remember Richard Nixon's demolition of Hubert Humphrey in 1968, 301 electoral votes to 191? In that election Nixon received 511,944 more popular votes than Humphrey, a margin of victory of less than one percent.
And then there was 2000, where (in the event you're new to Earth) the winning candidate received 543,816 less popular votes than the loser.
Felleman explains how the electoral college enables this: "A Wyoming voter has four times the influence that a California voter does on the outcome of the election. And voters in twelve states have a vote with at least twice the influence of a Texas, Florida or California voter." (See table 3)
1969's proposed Bay-Celler Amendment required the winning team to garner at least 40% of the popular vote. The measure died at the hands of small-state conservatives--Democrats as well as Republicans--who felt it would truncate their states' influence.
Had the founding fathers been equipped with PDAs with algorithmic calculation features to account for trends in modern population density and political dynamics, perhaps the Constitution would have offered a more balanced solution.
There's no time like the present to reflect on a system that allows a candidate to gain office regardless of the popular will.
The Huffington Post is officially open to proposed alternatives.
Follow Keith Thomson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kqthomson
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"Granted, the vote distributions are a bit far-fetched," Felleman says. "But even more believable scenarios show how you can win the presidency by exploiting the electoral college."
A bit far-fetched? Millions of votes for one candidate and zero for the other in several states? In any realistic scenario the discrepancy between the EC and the popular vote is nowhere near that large. Are we also going to get rid of the Senate because it is undemocratic. There are a lot of countries in the world that do not have institutions like the EC and Senate to promote stability. Compare the political instability in those countries with the US. Just because you are unhappy with the results of a few elections does not justify nonchalantly rewriting the constitution and dismantling the institutions that have provided the US with a remarkably stable system of government.
As for 'exploiting' the EC, that is the point. To make politicians pay attention to the concerns of people in small states. A national popular vote system is a ploy to increase the power of big city urbanites. Machine politicians could rig the national vote instead of just one state's vote.
A suprising number of people here seem to be ignorant of the fact that the United States is NOT a democracy. We are a Democratic Republic. Each state chooses whom they wish to be President, and if you don't like it I suggest you move to a different country because it is not going to change without a constitutional ammendment, and that would never happen without the small states that so many cry and moan about having "more say" in a presidential election.
Plenty of Democratic Republics have popular votes for president or prime minister.
The USA is listed here as a "federal Republic"
http://en.
The labels really don't mean much.
I'm soon going to boil over with anxiety. Just make it end.
PROPOSED REFORMS OF VOTING SYSTEMS
1. Federally controlled Central Computer System and standardized voting machines that link directly!
2. Team of Federal System Security Analysts with TIGHT Control on access to the Voting Tallies!
3. Popular Vote decides the Winner - simply the one with the MOST VOTES WINS!
4. Get ride of the Electoral College!
5. Accountability in every phase of voting!
6. Audit trails updated every 2 seconds so any Fraud will be easy to nail down to a 2 second window!
PROPOSED REFORMS OF VOTING SYSTEMS
1. Federally controlled Central Computer System and standardized voting machines that like directly!
2. Team of Federal System Security Analysts with TIGHT Control on access to the Voting Tallies!
3. Popular Vote decides the Winner - simply the one with the MOST VOTES WINS!
4. Get ride of the Electoral College!
5. Accountability in every phase of voting!
6. Audit trails updated every 2 seconds so any Fraud will be easy to nail down to a 2 second window!
At least limit the EC to just the number of house reps per state.....
Were that to happen, the Revolution would truly begin.
WHEN PIGS FLY !!!!!
With or without lipstick !
The way I remember my history, the electoral college was the only way for the states to get their votes in back in the days before computers, before tv, before telephones, before motor vehicles, before telegraph. The members of the electoral college carried the results of the states' voting, and the tallying was really a second tally because the first had been done at the state level. Until recent years the inauguration took place in March to allow time for travel to the electoral college and counting the vote.
Now that we have instant communication, isn't it about time we eliminate this now unnecessary step of the electoral college and changed to popular vote? Really, isn't that a BIG DUH?! Someone will still try to buck the system, but it would be better.
The electoral college was designed for more than that. The founding fathers didn't trust the people. Not entirely. They feared that the people could be too easily swayed into electing someone unqualified (read: unfit) who ran a good campaign, playing of fears instead of issues. So they inserted the electoral college in between the people and the presidency to ensure that scenario could never happen. Of course, our current unqualified president got the job the first time by exploiting the electoral college to win despite losing the popular vote, which is irony, Karma, or both.
Actually, if you read the Constitution, there is nothing about voting for President in it. The states would choose their own electors by whatever method they wanted. In other words, if the governor simply wanted to choose people that they liked who they KNEW would vote for the "right" person, they could do that. If they wanted a popular vote, they could do that. If the legislature wanted to choose, they could do that, as long as the governor then signed it into law......
It wasn't for several election cycles that they started actually holding a popular vote, and even then they've assigned the electors several different ways since then.
It's easy. In Australia you mark your choices in order of preference. Then, the computer simulates a runoff if no candidate gets a majority of first choice votes. Then Obama and Clinton don't have to destroy each other and the issues get focused, and citiaens can think without distractions of personalities, all of which makes the electorate smarter, so they don't elect so many sexual psychopaths and criminals as Americans tend to elect. And Australia's a civilized country, where they have something called shools, and an education system and a population with a much lower illiteracy rate and higher life expectancy. The U.C. Berkeley Student Body elections, developed by a bunch of kids who studied so they didn't have to go kill people with Kerry, created that system in the early 1970's. But those were the days when we had more colleges than prisons.
The electoral college is long over-due for elimination.
A truly terrifying prospect. That is not my feeling on a possible McCain win with that little of a mandate(Although I'm not for McCain, I prefer "That one"), but more as a potential prospect for someone to successfully be elected into the executive branch with not only so few of the country FOR them, but for so many to have voted AGAINST.
But I doubt the electoral college would be removed or even seriously challenged unless something insane as a President rising to power with(Theoretically) sixty-six million out of three hundred million voting them in. Obviously turnout will never be that high in reality, but it is still a rather....
Go Westminster.
Turn the President into ceremonial figurehead with minimal powers. Preferably an apolitical appointee who is chosen for their ability to unite the people through rhetoric and example.
Turn the Congress into a proper Parliament, so that the majority House Leader is Prime Minister and Head of Government, and the Senate is primarily a review body representing the States. Introduce on-floor debates and question time.
The Speaker becomes a separate officer, adjudicating debate and administering procedure - this person should ideally be an apolitical, full time employee of the House.
Vest power over the Administration in the Congress, so that the House Leader appoints only House and Senate members as Secretaries.
It would look like this, from all round the world:
Canada: http://au.
New Zealand: http://au.
Israel: http://au.
India: http://au.
Japan: http://au.
UK: http://au.
Australia: http://au.
See http://en.
That's how formerly British countries run it, and they haven't had electoral college woes recently. They're also pretty well governed in an alternate democratic fashion.
http://www
New GOP Ad Accuses Democrats of Trying to 'Steal' Ohio Election
The Ohio Republican Party launched a new statewide ad Tuesday claiming Democrats are trying to “steal the election in Ohio” by allowing hundreds of thousands of people to vote illegally, the latest effort by GOP operatives in the battleground state to challenge the eligibility of newly registered voters, many of who are expected to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
“As Election Day approaches, consider this: could Ohio’s election be stolen?” a woman says in the 60-second spot. “Hundreds of thousands of new voter registrations are questionable. Many may be fraudulent. Yet [Ohio] Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is concealing the evidence.”
By the way--there's NO CAMPAIGN that hasn't been 'exploiting the Electoral College' like OBAMA'S!! We've been living in Electoral College land for eight or nine months now. LOOK at all the states that are colored BLUE already! That's what a FIFTY STATE STRATEGY is all about!! Popular votes are WONDERFUL and necessary, but Electoral MAPS are what decide where the $$ is spent and the campaigning is done.....
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