ELECTION WRAP-UP
Well, it looks like the presidential election is unofficially official. I’ve got enough material to fill a week’s worth of blogs, but let me spit out three thoughts real quick.
First, even though I am a Republican I am nervous that the Republicans control the Oval Office and both houses of Congress. I almost voted for Kerry for this very reason; for if he had won, he wouldn’t have been able to get anything through Congress, so the threat of the “liberal” taking office and ushering “big government” back in was an empty one. With Bush now in for another four years, I fear we’ll have another four years of pork being dished out to various special interests and signed into law. I urge people on both sides of the aisle to help me monitor our representatives to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Second, I’ve heard many complaints about the voting system, either the voting machinery itself or the electoral college system. So 2a let’s talk about the various voting systems. It is a bit disarraying that different places have different systems: punch card here, electronic there. So we have a massive upgrade issue. But you also have to come up with a system that simultaneously preserves privacy, accuracy, and verification. In other words, you have to make sure everyone gets one and only one vote. You can’t have a situation where peoples’ vote choices get into the wrong hands. And you have to be able to go back and recount the votes if there’s ever a problem. Let’s hope someone can invent such a system by 2008.
2b let’s talk about the Electoral College. After 2000, people were wondering why we didn’t just use the popular vote to decide the winner: how could we render useless 5 million Democratic votes in Texas, or 8 million Republican votes in California? The “winner take all” system of assigning electoral votes seemed to disenfranchise whole blocks of people in states where they were in the minority party. But remember that an election based on popular vote would mean the candidates would focus all their efforts on densely populated areas; some might not leave the coasts at all in their campaigning. After all, what’s the point of flying to Alaska or criss-crossing Wyoming and Iowa, when that’ll net you just a few hundred thousand votes? Heck, you can reach that many people in a one square mile tract in Manhattan. But now we have another kind of imbalanced campaigning: with most states either decidedly Republican or Democrat, candidates are spending 90% of their time in 10% of the states. So what’s the point of Bush or Kerry stumping in California, since we all know that state’s going Blue (or Texas, since that’s going Red). I’m liking Colorado’s solution, in that electoral votes would be assigned based on the proportion of votes received by each candidate in that particular state. This would mean a couple of good things. First, third-party candidates might steal an electoral vote or two, by putting a relatively strong showing in a state big enough that getting 5% of the vote meant getting a point or two. Second, candidates would have an incentive to campaign in all fifty states. It would be worth Bush stumping in California; even if he gets crushed in the popular vote, if he can swing a few percent of voters in that state into his column, that might net him a couple of electoral votes. Kerry would need to defend in California, to make sure that doesn’t happen and even to try to widen the lead and steal more than the usual proportion of voters. This solution might swing the pendulum back in favor of bigger states, but hey, smaller states have a disproportionate number of senators to begin with, so maybe this is a good counterbalance.
Anyway, I’ve gone from blogging to rambling, so I’ll stop now.
Well, it looks like the presidential election is unofficially official. I’ve got enough material to fill a week’s worth of blogs, but let me spit out three thoughts real quick.
First, even though I am a Republican I am nervous that the Republicans control the Oval Office and both houses of Congress. I almost voted for Kerry for this very reason; for if he had won, he wouldn’t have been able to get anything through Congress, so the threat of the “liberal” taking office and ushering “big government” back in was an empty one. With Bush now in for another four years, I fear we’ll have another four years of pork being dished out to various special interests and signed into law. I urge people on both sides of the aisle to help me monitor our representatives to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Second, I’ve heard many complaints about the voting system, either the voting machinery itself or the electoral college system. So 2a let’s talk about the various voting systems. It is a bit disarraying that different places have different systems: punch card here, electronic there. So we have a massive upgrade issue. But you also have to come up with a system that simultaneously preserves privacy, accuracy, and verification. In other words, you have to make sure everyone gets one and only one vote. You can’t have a situation where peoples’ vote choices get into the wrong hands. And you have to be able to go back and recount the votes if there’s ever a problem. Let’s hope someone can invent such a system by 2008.
2b let’s talk about the Electoral College. After 2000, people were wondering why we didn’t just use the popular vote to decide the winner: how could we render useless 5 million Democratic votes in Texas, or 8 million Republican votes in California? The “winner take all” system of assigning electoral votes seemed to disenfranchise whole blocks of people in states where they were in the minority party. But remember that an election based on popular vote would mean the candidates would focus all their efforts on densely populated areas; some might not leave the coasts at all in their campaigning. After all, what’s the point of flying to Alaska or criss-crossing Wyoming and Iowa, when that’ll net you just a few hundred thousand votes? Heck, you can reach that many people in a one square mile tract in Manhattan. But now we have another kind of imbalanced campaigning: with most states either decidedly Republican or Democrat, candidates are spending 90% of their time in 10% of the states. So what’s the point of Bush or Kerry stumping in California, since we all know that state’s going Blue (or Texas, since that’s going Red). I’m liking Colorado’s solution, in that electoral votes would be assigned based on the proportion of votes received by each candidate in that particular state. This would mean a couple of good things. First, third-party candidates might steal an electoral vote or two, by putting a relatively strong showing in a state big enough that getting 5% of the vote meant getting a point or two. Second, candidates would have an incentive to campaign in all fifty states. It would be worth Bush stumping in California; even if he gets crushed in the popular vote, if he can swing a few percent of voters in that state into his column, that might net him a couple of electoral votes. Kerry would need to defend in California, to make sure that doesn’t happen and even to try to widen the lead and steal more than the usual proportion of voters. This solution might swing the pendulum back in favor of bigger states, but hey, smaller states have a disproportionate number of senators to begin with, so maybe this is a good counterbalance.
Anyway, I’ve gone from blogging to rambling, so I’ll stop now.
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