RARPSL
join:1999-12-08
Suffern, NY
| reply to viperpa33s
Re: guess the vote last year was worthless
said by viperpa33s  : said by shoan :
Heck people still don't get the fact that we do not elect the president our vote is a suggestion to the electorial college. Popular vote means nothing.
There is a reason for the electoral college and our founding fathers new that. Read up and you will see. There may have been a reason back then (such as the lack of real time communication). Thus you in essence supplied a proxy to the Elector to vote for the person who got the most votes and if there was a problem in getting a majority in the first round to keep voting until a majority was reached.
The problem is that there is NO VALID reason to keep it in place as is CURRENTLY constituted. I am not saying to eliminate it and go to direct popular vote but the way the system works should be reformed to make it fairer. By this I mean that the number of electoral votes a state gets is based on the sum of their Senators (ie: 2) plus their Representatives (variable) with a "Winner [of the State Popular Vote] Takes All" allocation. My reform is to only give the State's Senatorial 2 Votes to the State-Wide Popular Vote Winner and allocate the others on a Per-Electoral-District Basis. Since this system is good enough to elect Congress, it should be good enough to elect the President (especially since the number of Votes in the Electoral College is based on the Congressional Election system even though it counts the House Votes as if they were Senate Votes by allocating the House Votes to the winner of the State Popular Vote instead of on a Election District Basis).
In addition there should be UNIFORM Poll Closing Hours NATIONWIDE in Presidential Election Years. By this I mean that ALL Polls close at (lets say) 9PM ET on Tuesday (ie: 6PM PT, 3PM HT [Hawaii], and equivalent times in the CT/MT and Alaska Zones). To compensate for the early Closing Hours in the Non-ET Zones, we would either go to a 24 Hour Poll Hour System or [probably simpler] open the non-ET Zone Polls for a few local time Evening hours on Monday (to replace the "Lost" Tuesday Hours). Thus you could open them from 6PM to 9PM PT on Monday. This would eliminate the effect on the results and turnouts from premature release of East (and Central) Zones results while the West Coast and Hawaii/Alaska still have their Polls open and can still vote. |
