Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Attn: Americans!

I voted yesterday about 9 am, with no significant wait. No problems, though I did overhear a poll worker giving wrong info out about provisional ballots to a young man who was voting for the first time but whose name didn't appear on the registration log. Overall, though, we had very good voter turnout -- county-wide, we were at about 57%, with some precincts coming in at 68% (lowest precinct was around 39%). For a rural county in a vastly Republican state (in other words, we are not a swing state), this is pretty darn good by today's standards. (We had a number of contested county and state races, too.) I'm looking forward to seeing what turnout is nationwide.

What was really fun for me, though, was that I got to work with our local newspaper again on election night reporting last night. As some of you know, I'm very active in the League of Women Voters, and last year we began assisting the paper by compiling the precinct by precinct voting results into a large chart for publication. (Since we are a relatively small town, our paper doesn't have the staff to do this otherwise.) So on election night, a few of us hang out at the courthouse (where they tabulate the results), get print-outs of each polling place's results, then run them over to the newspaper office where another few of us enter them into the spreadsheet and format the info for printing.

Last year I got to shadow the Assistant Editor of the paper while she stood watch at the courthouse to do interviews, and this year I hung out with the Editor in Chief in her office putting the data together.

It was fun and interesting for everyone, but for a FoLC, bonding with the editorial staff of the newspaper and gettng to ask them all sorts of questions is a dream come true.

Kathy

/me skids to a halt - you pay to vote over there???????

James

Well, I voted last week... North Carolina allows "no excuses" early voting, and about one million people took advantage of it. I waited in line for about an hour, last Tuesday around noon, and later in the week the lines seemed to get much longer. I drove past the polling place again yesterday, and there was no line whatsoever Guess I should have waited. But it was fun.

Btw, for those who haven't seen it elsewhere -- GWB now has 274 electoral votes (only need 270 to win) and John Kerry has conceded; he'll make the big speech at 1pm Eastern.

and I hear that nationwide, it was about a 60% turnout

P"W"J!
trying not to gloat *too* much... <eg>

Kaylle had to pay for postage because she voted absentee. She goes to school in a different state than the one where she lives. So, she had to pay to send her ballot by mail. Last time, because the ballot sheet got to her late, she had to pay even more to express mail it so that it would get in on time.

Paul, who is very upset about the results and very worried about the fate of the country (and most of the world)

What I want is for someone to finally explain to me the reason for this entire Electoral College system. I passed US Government in high school, but apparently I missed the lecture when it was explained why we don't just use a very simple "most votes wins" system. If the majority of Americans vote for a particular candidate <coughGorecough> how can it be possible for the other guy/gal to win?

I just don't get it.

I'll be over at the Federal Building renewing my passport and getting my 4-year visitor's visa to Australia if anyone can explain this to me...

Lynn (who voted painlessly yesterday in a state that, in the end, didn't make a difference)

Paul beat me to it <g> Yeah, as he said, I vote absentee because it's more important to me to vote in Ohio than in Massachusetts. Last time, in 2000, I didn't receive my ballot until the day before it was due back in Ohio. I had to overnight the stupid thing and it cost me $14 (which I have always thought was outrageous; shouldn't the post office do this for free or something?).

This year I received the ballot in time but I didn't mail it until last week, so I had to send it priority for $4, but that's my own fault <g>.

I spoke to my brother, Ian, last night, and he said he stood in line for NINE HOURS to vote. He's a college student in a really tiny town and my assumption is that they simply weren't prepared for the number of student voters they got. Consequently, he's really angry Kerry's conceded the race before the votes are even counted (as am I! I voted absentee, that means my vote doesn't count?! ). His away message right now is quite colorful...

Kaylle
who is very worried about America...

I'm with you Lynn, it's a mystery. Very frustrating that the events of 4 years ago did absolutely nothing to improve the process as a whole.

To have another race this close and again to be unsatisfied that we have the 'right' result is very disturbing indeed.

~Liz (voted, in NJ, uneventful thank goodness)

Lynn, it's because the US is not a democracy. We're a constitutional republic, with lots and lots of checks & balances built into the system, and with the system set up to give lots of clout to states as opposed to the Federal government. The Electoral College forces both candidates to try to appeal to all voters in all states, instead of hunkering down in a few key, highly-populated areas. In other words, with a direct vote system, nobody would give a crap about what Rhode Island thinks.

Liz, what's unclear? The results in 2000 were mixed, of course, but this time the Electoral count and the popular vote count are both going for Bush -- in fact, he's the first president since 1988 to actually get more than half of the popular vote. I understand lots of people aren't happy about this, but I don't think that invalidates the process.

PJ

I'm gonna go with Pam, here. Not voting is a greater misdeed than voting for any candidate. If you don't participate, you don't have a right to bemoan the outcome.

The part that almost everyone admits is broken is NOT the electoral college; it's the fact that campaigning is expensive and we don't control the sources of campaign money as well as we collectively should. Thus, politics is beholden to interests larger than an electoral bloc. But we're working on it courtesy of the likes of Sen. McCain.

Of greater concern to me is the misuse of our forefathers' determination to separate church and state but conveniently failing to protect the need for that to be bilateral. I suggest that we need to prevent our constitutional republic from becoming a thinly-veiled theocracy.

Sherry (who's finally decided to register with a political party--Libertarian)

It could have very easily gone the other way, though, Pam. (And it might well have, if there hadn't been Republican party members challenging people to show multiple forms of ID when they have voted in the same place for years -- given Laura's story and the reports of hours several *hours* long in Ohio, how many people left instead of putting up with the situation? What about people who had young kids with them, or elderly people would couldn't physically stand for 4 hours straight? Or blue collar employees who had to get to work or be fired? No matter how you look at it, no matter what party was doing it, this kind of harassment was just plain wrong, and definitely unAmerican.)

If I recall the numbers from the news correctly, Bush won the popular vote by about 3 million this time, but he only won Ohio by about 100,000. If 110,000 more people in Ohio had voted for Kerry, he would have won the state and the presidency ... yet he would have still lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. It could have very easily been the opposite of what happened in 2000 with Gore.

And I think it's a safe bet that if we would have had the same results as 2000, only with the Democratic candidate winning, the Republican party would have been first in line to criticize the electoral college.

There is a movement in that direction, regardless, and while I'm glad the process wasn't drawn out again this year, I almost wish it would have happened (with Kerry winning the electoral college even though Bush had more votes) because it would have brought the issue even more to the forefront. I, too, think the electoral college process is outdated and should be replaced. The argument that voters in small states are ignored doesn't hold water with me because *my* vote is ignored the way it is now -- I'm a Democrat in a predominately Republican state, which means my vote in presidential elections is pretty much void. Campaigning and technology are totally different now than they were in 1776, and I don't think we can take the same reasons for the system to be automatically valid anymore.

All that said, and as much as I wish there had been a different result, I'm glad we're not going through the nightmare of 2000. It's better to have it decided now. Even if I find the result very scary for the future of this country.

Kathy (who, even as a Democrat, voted a split ticket for my local and state races)

Well, it's funny. With the exception of ads and mailings for local politicians and initiatives, here in California you'd barely even know that this was an election year. It was accepted weeks - months? - ago that California was going to go for Kerry, so both candidates stopped campaigning here, didn't broadcast any ads.

Now, I'm a Canadian citizen living in the US, so I can't vote. But if I did, I would be upset at living in a system where the candidates just didn't bother to campaign in my state for weeks, figuring it was a waste of time and money. For me, then depending on which political party I belonged to I might see it as a waste of my time to bother to vote, right? And that's hardly the message that the leaders of our government want to convey to the public.

Kathy

The Electoral College itself is not the problem, but the way states approach it totally is.

My Kerry vote in the state of Georgia was essentially moot because it's a conservative state and more people wanted Bush. That isn't fair to me -- it's tantamount to my not voting for the president at all.

The EC will not change. It's in the Constitution, so changing it would require 3/4 of the states to ratify the amendment, and that won't happen. The only thing we can do is to push for our states to adopt Maine's attitude towards the EC, where the electoral votes are split based on election results. So, if 60 percent of Georgia goes Bush, 9 of the state's electoral votes go to him, and the other 6 go to Kerry.

Until that happens (and it's a long-shot in certain states, notably mine), I am going to continue to feel disenfranchised. Also SERIOUSLY freaked about what we've got coming on our horizon.

What's unclear to me is if there was a definitive winner in Ohio. That Kerry chose not to persue a recount of the provisional ballots doesn't make it any less of a feeling. I think that if we had a foolproof way to count ballots I wouldn't feel like we somehow missed some votes.

I also agree with Kathy..the voting process in general is not consistent across the country so the differences in experiences right here in this thread points to unnecessary hardship for some who wanted to vote. That alone could tip the balance..for either side especially when the margins are so razor thin.

~Liz

Hey guys, now you know how I felt in '96 North Carolina pretty much always goes Republican for president (and just as often has a Democrat governor, go figure), and we went for Dole, but Clinton won anyway. And yeah, this year, Bush took us pretty much for granted. It happens. I always vote anyway.

Oh, and Kathy...

I really have to disagree with this. Hey, we're conservative; we don't want to toss out a 200+ year system just because it didn't break our way one time...

PJ

I think Maine does have the right idea - it merges the spirit of the electoral college with real-life results an actual election puts forth. By assigning a percentage of electoral points of a state based on the parallel percentage of actual votes, then every voter's vote does mean something.

I live in Illinois which was a forgone Kerry state. As such, I voted only out of a sense of civic duty, not because I felt my vote (for Kerry) would actually make a difference. My mother, on the other hand, faced the same situation as Kathy B - voting for Kerry in a state that is heavily Republican. As such, she wasted the hour she stood in line because her vote essentially meant nothing. What the system does is tell anyone who might go against the majority in their particular state to just stay home on voting day or move to another state where their candidate has a fighting chance (which looks to be Ohio, Florida, and a few other key swing states). I find it highly ironic that the message to "get out the vote" is so big yet quite often, an individual's vote means nothing in the end.

To say that it is only because we "lost" that we are unhappy with an antiquated system seems a bit unfair. If we were to live by all of the systems and rules set down by our founding fathers back in 1776, I wouldn't even be able to vote because I'm a woman. One of the things so wonderful about our governmental system is its ability to change and grow as society changes and grows. Certainly Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and John Adams never imagined that some day someone would be voting via computer or that a pervasive, far reaching media would mean that a candidate could simultaneously campaign in all 50 states(heck, they didn't even imagine 50 states). Yes, the fear that a candidate would set up shop in Philadelphia or New York City or Boston, before travel was so much easier, was real and there was a need for a system to prevent a candidate from doing just that. You can't tell me that if, today, a candidate only focused on the needs of huge population centers such as NYC, LA and Chicago, the rest of the country would not express their displeasure with a no vote.

It's 2004, not 1804. Just because a system once held good reasons for being doesn't mean that it should continue to be used if those reasons no longer apply. That's called tradition, which IMO isn't very applicable when in comes to matters of such great importance as presidential elections.

Lynn

As a resident of Puerto Rico, where 4 million disenfranchised American citizens are at the total mercy of a President for whom we cannot vote , I would be more than amiable to the idea of eliminating the Electoral College!

The first year I filled out my federal tax return and realized I had to pay federal taxes - it's a long story, but most Puerto Rican residents do not pay federal taxes - I went to the ACLU. Does the phrase "Taxation without Representation" sound familiar? The man at the ACLU said there wasn't a thing they could do about it, short of changing the constitution to eliminate the Electoral College! I've been paying federal taxes ever since, and I can't vote for President, nor do I have a single Senator or Congressman representing me.

Actually, I disagree that without the EC, no-one would care what the people of Rhode Island think. I believe that *with* the EC, no-one cares. Both Bush & Kerry put the majority of their efforts into winning CA, NY, NJ, etc. Who cares about RI's 2 EC votes? On the other hand, if we had a true democracy, with one man-one vote, then Joe Black's vote in Rhode Island would count as much as Jane Brown's vote in California. (IMHO)

- Vicki

And Our dear George would still have won .
58 million popular vote, baby!

WOOHOOO Dubya!

TEEEEEEEJ

Easy TEEEJ, there's a warning up from Annette about that sort of behavior on the other thread.

Vicki, if you object to paying Federal Taxes you'd certainly object to what you'd pay if you had the right to vote as a state. You get plenty of protection and benefit from the US constitution unrelated to who is in office. Doesn't that count for something? If you want the vote, are you and the constituency of PR ready for the other obligations of statehood? The reason PR isn't a state yet is specifically because the population has refused to vote for assuming the overhead. The option comes around every few years.

Sherry

As I said in my earlier post, not in California, Vicki. Maybe both Bush and Kerry did some campaigning here in the early days, but there hasn't been anything literally for weeks, if not months. We would read stories in the newspaper of people being deluged by ads on TV - we never saw a single ad from either candidate. Apart from a few ads about local propositions, etc., we would almost not have known that there was an election occurring at all. California was accepted as a Democratic win long ago.

Well, although personally I do think that the US should get rid of the Electoral College, I can see the fear of the smaller states, and why it will never happen. As I said, Bush and Kerry campaigned very little in California as far as I can tell, yet Kerry picked up 5.5 million votes and Bush 1 million less. And they were hardly here.

If the EC were eliminated, I could see candidates spending the bulk of their time in population-heavy states and ignoring the little ones like RI. After all, this election is a prime example to show how they ignore states where the outcome is a given - like CA. So why wouldn't candidates ignore the little tadpoles in the big ocean?

I personally like the way that Maine does it. That way, probably no state is a foregone conclusion - certainly not California - and then the candidates can "spread the wealth".

Kathy

The thing about the EC is that no state can have less than 3 EVs. It's based on the number of congressmen. Every state has 2 senators, and representatives are based on popluation. So, even a state with a total popluation lower than that of Manhattan Island gets 3 EVs.

On the one hand, that means that no state gets left out. Small states still matter.

On the other hand, it means that minority votes in any given state (CA, for example) don't count. It also means that a vote in a small state counts proportionately more than a vote in a larger state. Even with EVs split proportionately, some votes won't really count. What do you do, for example, if your state has 4 EVs and the population is split 55/45? Maine was split 52/48, but Kerry still got all 4 of their votes because the system is by county (or something).

So, okay, we're in a democratic republic. Our leaders/representatives are elected by the people, but government is handled through the states (Congress, for example, works via state representatives, not direct public election). The system is designed around state's rights, with Federal power spread around to prevent a tyrany from arising.

That's still not a good enough reason, IMHO, to have a national popluar election in which some votes count more than others or perhaps not at all.

Of course, as mentioned, it's not likely to change. We'd need a constitutional amendment, and the odds are stacked against that.

Oh well. There are worse problems.

Paul