From: Dehede011@aol.com
Date: Wed Jan 22 2003 - 21:23:54 MST
Kai Becker writes: [The U.S.] First world? A president not elected by the
majority of the voters.
Kai,
This is why I usually suggest that as a German or other non American
you should stay out of heavy discussions of American internal affairs. You
are certainly welcome to listen and to ask questions, perhaps to even
contrast what we tell you with the German system but please don't make flat
statements of fact like the one above.
As you are plainly uninformed let me explain our vote counting
procedure in broad terms. You could validate what I am about to tell you if
you had the time to come over and observe a Presidential election up close
and personal.
Our Presidential elections are held on an electorial college basis.
As each states votes are tallied we determine who won the electoral votes for
each individual state. The electors go to Washington and cast the final
votes, the winner gets to become the President. That man in 2000 AD was
George W. Bush.
Now to the tally of the individual votes for President. What happens
in each state is that when we start counting the votes we know the total
number of votes, at least approximately, before we know the voting outcome.
As the tally progresses we often reach a point where one man is going to win
even if all the remaining votes go to his opponent. At that point we often
or maybe even usually quit as the remaining votes will not change the outcome
even if, to remind you, all of them go to one candidate. We turn in the vote
we have and that is that. The uncounted votes are eventually simply
discarded and never totalled at all. I don't know if this is always the case
in all voting jurisdictions but it is very typical. In this last election
after election reports say that several million votes disappeared.
Percentage wise they were too few to change anything so far as the electorial
vote is concerned.
George Bush clearly won by the electorial system that is our lawful
system and which we have used for roughly 210 years. You can cry about that
but it is the lawful system and eventually everyone gets to find themselves
on both sides of the question.
Now, at that time we looked to see how the popular vote turned out.
We always do this after every election. Naturally when the Democrats saw the
results they screamed triumphantly that their man had won the popular vote.
They have been repeating that observation every since. It will probably go
down in the history books that way.
Yet, think of those millions of votes that were discarded. No one
knows how that count would have gone as they were never counted. In fact we
don't know who would have won the popular vote had all the individual votes
been counted.
We do know it makes no difference to the result of the election. The
next question is should we switch from the electoral system to a straight
popular vote?
I was on my High School debate team when we debated that very question
in the school year of 1949-50. I debated in favor of changing to a popular
vote. But frankly the question isn't all that clear.
One good thing about the electorial system is that it is designed to
be a winner take all system resulting in very few close elections. Instead
when all is said and done it produces some very one sided results. A popular
vote would mean counting millions of votes and possibly have the result hang
on very few votes -- I can imagine that turning into a nightmare.
So please don't say that Bush lost the popular vote -- the fact is we
don't know who won.
Ron h.
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