The Glade 4.0

The sooner you guys get over this notion you should have a say in how the President is chosen unless your state determines you have a say, the sooner we'll start having reasonable discussions about the Presidential election.

And while you guys are busy quibbling about something that actually has nothing to do with the popular vote in 24 states in any way, shape, or form, because faithless electors can only originate in states with bound electors, I'll just point out ...

1. The Republicans invalidated at least 7 primaries and caucuses and used the Obama's 'no standing' precedents to make it fly in court at the RNC.

2. The Democrats invalidated the two states delegates who planned to ask for a vote of no-confidence in Obama's nomination at the DNC.

3. The end-game on Obama's birth-certificate bullshit was just what I said it would be: a way to give more power to the RP and the DP.

Finally, proportional, bound, and otherwise distributed elector systems are the same as creating a general, popular election for the President. The 17th Amendment has already proven that moving offices to the popular vote decreases State power, decreases individual rights, and decreases control over an already expansive and demonstrably hostile to its citizens Federal government.

Unemployment didn't suddenly drop 3% in 30 days. It's still way over 10%. 8% is a lie.

Growth is still negative.

The inflationary index on quantitative easing totals exceeds the state inflation rate for the United States by a factor of 5. Quite simply, they've printed enough money to cause ~14% inflation in the price of goods and services in the United States across the board.

60% of gas at the pump prices are taxes. Average state taxes have tripled. Federal tax has gone from .25 a gallon to almost 2.00 since Obama took office.

And adjusted for the QE affected dollar, oil is ~$68 a gallon in 2008 dollars, while gas is still up 300% because of tax increases.

The Affordable Care and Recovery act has already spent 3 trillion dollars out of a 10 year implementation cost of 1 trillion.

And this form is full of people who will vote for Obama because Romney is worse, quibble about procedurals, and then pretend for 3 years everything's fine while Obama, his cronies, and our mono-party government (If any of you think Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney are conservatives and there's real policy disparity between the Republicans and Democrats, you're fooling yourselves).

In fact, California's admitted state-wide depression is predominantly Obama's fault as he guts California's defense production industry and over-regulated their silicon production industry. So, with a little over $40 billion in confirmed lost revenue/income over 4 years because of Obama's policies ...

California's still going to vote for him, despite his complete non-concern with the Southern border and other policy issues that have hurt the state extremely.

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This ... doesn't really make sense.

The electoral college is already roughly apportioned by population. If NYC or Los Angeles County have enough population on their own to land the control of the vote of their respective states (and I believe that NYC actually does contain the majority of the population of NY State, while Los Angeles represents a little over a quarter of the population of the state of California), they're already going to get those electoral college votes. The Electoral College doesn't drasticly change the power of the individual in a densely populated area compared to a rural area. All it does is keep the presidency out of the direct control of the people.

(Which may, itself, be a good thing.)

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Actually, that's not true, Taly. Each state has the same number of electors as it has House Reps and Senators. House Reps are apportioned by population, but Senators are not - every state has two Senators, regardless of population. As a result, the electoral college pretty heavily favors voters in small (i.e. rural) states. For example, California has 37.7 million people and 55 electoral votes, which is roughly 685,000 people per electoral vote, while Wyoming has 570,000 people and 3 electoral votes, which is roughly 190,000 people per electoral vote. In other words, a WY resident's vote has about 3.5 times more weight than the vote of a CA resident.

The video makes a good point about the actual effect of the Electoral College system. It gives extreme power to a few states that are battleground states. No candidate cares about New York, California, Kansas, Idaho, etc. There are about 6 states that will ultimately decide the election. Issues that those states care about instantly become the most important issue to the candidates, to the exclusion of all others.

Don't hate Ohio because NY and CA are too homogenous in their beliefs/ideology.

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Its cute cause Ohio only matters once every 4 years.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Or perhaps it is because people only pay lip service to giving a **** about America every 4 years.

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That would be the case even with the popular vote. Those 6 states are unique in that they have a more politically diverse population AND enough electoral votes to be worth a lot of effort.

The only difference is that it'd be cities, not states. Candidates would still ignore small cities and rural areas and larger cities that are already largely one way or another. You wouldn't see Republicans campaigning in San Francisco.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

That's not really true. In the current system, 10000 additional votes for a candidate in California are completely irrelevant. However 10000 additional votes in Ohio could decide the election. In a system that used the popular vote an additional 10k votes would be just as relevant if they were from California, Ohio, Kansas, wherever. You absolutely would have Republicans campaigning in San Francisco. There are definitely Republicans and undecided in California. Just not enough for a Republican to win the state, and currently that is all that matters.

I don't think that would be the case. Candidates would still campaign in the places most likely to have the largest number of "swing" voters.

As for those 10,000 votes being irrelevant, thery aren't. They're relevant to the outcome of the election in California. By that logic, all votes for a losing candidate under direct popular vote are irrelevant.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

But that's not an indictment of the Electoral College, that's an indictment of State laws that make the State winner-take-all.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Kaffis, that is probably true.

DE, it depends on what you mean by swing voters. In the current system that means undecided voters in a battleground state. How they vote will swing the entire state into either the Red or Blue direction. It doesn't matter exactly how many undecided voters there are in a state, just whether they are more than the difference between the decided voters. If the difference is 1000 votes, and there are 1001 undecided, that 1001 votes become more important than a million in California.

In a system that used the popular vote, there would be a shift to a concern for the total number of undecided votes in a location.

I'm all for a system that protects the smaller states, I just don't think it does that very well. It dramatically increases the importance of states that have very close races for President. A thousand votes in Florida are more important than 10,000 in Kansas.

Or a million in CA.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Getting rid of the electoral college would make the problem worse, not better. All you'd do is add NY, TX, IL and CA to the list of states that get a lot of attention and promises

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

What's wrong with that? There are a shitton of people who live in those states. It would make sense to have to campaign there.

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Holy shitsnacks!

If you want a guy to chase you, don't be a whore.

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This goes to RD's earlier question, but what's being missed here is that a country is not made up only of people. While Texas and California are two of the largest states in terms of both area and population, and very tiny states like Delaware and Rhode Island have small populations because they simply don't have room for big populations, the simple fact is that the more concentrated a given population of people is, the less relative political weight each person should have. Rural areas with low populations also tend to provide food and natural resources to the cities. Rural dwellers need protection from the greater weight of population of cities not just for their own protection, but to protect the cities themselves from misguided policies applied to rural areas that could, in the long run, lead to all sorts of problems in the cities themselves as the "B Country" is squashed under a combination of exploitation, do-goodery, and disinterest from a population advantage they can't hope to contest.

Rural life is not the same as urban life. Policies that make sense in terms of urban populations can range from irrelevant to disastrous in a rural setting. Gun control, for example. While most gun control arguments are simply wrong in urban areas, in rural setting they are far worse than wrong. Many rural people rely heavily on guns for food and rural people in general cannot count on the police for protection. There are far too few cops relative to distance, and because there are few people, there is a small tax base and adding significantly more police is not feasible (even if the police could substitute for self-defense, which they can't). Rural dwellers even more than urban dwellers need to be able to defend themselves.

Remember the thread on the fire company that let a guy's trailer burn? A lot of outrage from urban and suburban dwellers used to having a fire company and not understanding the funding issue that would make providing fire service based on after-the-fact payment incredibly irresponsible.

Those are just two examples. Distance and land area matter. It isn't about everyone being exactly equal. That's why a state-based vote is important. A state tends to contain land and economic activities that bear a relationship to each other because they are contiguous. Even an enormous state like Alaska is more relevant within itself than it is to, say, life in Mississippi.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Do you guys believe that we should base the number of Senators for each state on population too? The Senate isn't really "fair" to New York and California either. Or how about the UN? Should each country's vote be weighted by population? I'm sure China and India would love that...

I think we have a good balance the way it is. There is something to be said for treating each state as it's own equal entity, regardless of population. But then we have the House to counter-balance that. The presidential election is just a mix of both numbers, which I think works out to a good compromise.

As I posted above, really my only beef with our current system is the all or nothing way that most electoral colleges vote. If you were to break that down by district, so that it was a more granular representation of the people's will, I'd be fine with our current structure.

That isn't the provision of the Electoral College. That is the doing of several states.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Tapatalk 2

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I know right. I'm a conservative in CA, so you can imagine how much my vote matters.

However, I'm still registered in NV, and since its a "Battleground" I'll be voting there.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Isn't that illegal?

Not as far as I know. I lived in NV for over 6 months this year and still hold NV residency.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Letter and spirit.
Does he intend to move back to NV in the near future?
Does he intend to make CA his residence?

Your question is the crux of the whole "suppression" of voting rights by college students argument.

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Ah, gotcha. I thought you had been in Cali for some time now (years).

To Vindi's questions do you view your move to Cali as temporary or your new residence?