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August 18, 2007

Politics Cancelled Due To Perfect Weather

by @ 2:16 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

It’s much too nice outside today to dwell on the political machinations of Czar Bunnypants or the Czariness-to-be or her sister, not-Czariness-to-be.

But I noticed this thread at the Huffington Post that had some interesting comments. The point of the original post was to alert people to the initiative in California to use proportional voting in the electoral college. If this change is implemented before the 2008 election, well… let’s just say we don’t want to go there.

Hawthoria points out that if you look at the last few presidential races, proportional representation across the board, meaning all states and DC, would have swung votes to the Republicans. That’s certainly counter-intuitive. Shouldn’t the percentages be the same as the popular vote count?

Well, no. The whole purpose of the Electoral College is to statistically weight rural states to even out states that have large urban areas. The effect of this is that if you live in NYC, Boston, Philadephia or DC your vote doesn’t count as much as those that come from Befuddle Creek, Idaho, Beaverbelt, Arkansas, or Veryflat, Kansas. At least when you’re voting for President.

Now how good an idea was this? It was such a great idea that no other newly formed democracy would ever again consider it. Don’t you think it’s interesting, for instance, that when we invaded Iraq we established a parliamentary form of government?

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2 Responses to “Politics Cancelled Due To Perfect Weather”

  1. KCinDC Says:

    The California proposal is worse than that. It doesn’t award the electoral votes proportionally. It awards one electoral vote for each congressional district according to who wins the popular vote in that district, plus two statewide electoral votes that go to the popular vote winner for the state. So it’s affected by the gerrymandering of the congressional districts, and the unfairness of the electoral college is repeated at the district level rather than the state level. Candidates would vie for a handful of competitive districts, but most of them would be solidly red or blue and their residents would be even less likely to have a meaningful vote than they are now.

    And of course with only California, among the big states, playing by these rules, it would be extremely likely that we’d have lots more elections in which the popular vote winner doesn’t win.

    Fortunately it appears that the Californians are getting over their love affair with ballot measures.

  2. AltHippo Says:

    That’s a pretty disturbing proposition.

    I hope you’re right that Californians are a bit more circumspect regarding initiatives like this. Because, if you take away the math, the concept sounds appealing.

    Without looking, I’m going to guess that our ole buddy Sal Russo and the gang that invented “Move America Forward” is connected to this.

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