Fair Representation

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In the United States of America if 51% voters vote for lets say Mccain then all the electrical votes go to Macain but that is not fair to the 49% left, they spoke yet its like they voted for the person they didn't want to vote for. So what I say is you split it roughly 51% go for Mccain while roughly 49% would to to Obama. Its not fair for Mccain to get all the votes because its as if that 49% never voted or had there votes altered.

The best solution is direct election of the President, where each vote has an equal value. Currently, very small states are guaranteed electoral votes, and people in those states are worth more (vote-wise) than people in very populous states.

If one candidate got 51% of the popular vote, they would probably get 53-57% of the electoral vote on a nationwide basis. That is not unfair - if they get 51% of the pop vote and they win, everything else is theoretical.

On an individual state basis, some states give all their votes to the candidate that has the most votes; other states split their electoral votes in a roughly proportional way. That is up to each state.

i'd want direct vote with a null vote option introduced where if everyone votes null then the current candidates are thrown out and new ones have to be introduced. it'd certainly add a higher level of responsibility to all levels of candidates. i know there's certainly been a few elections before where i've felt like i wasn't represented but no one was available and i certainly would have used the null vote to express my displeasure.

are you talking like electoral votes per state? i think there are a few states that split up votes...you should get in contact with your state legislation about that.

Yes I am as it is now more people could theoretically vote for a candidate and the less popular one could still win. A thousand apologies if I confused anyone.

Welcome to the Dark Side, comrade. You're half way to admitting democracy is inherently unjust.

theoretically? bush didn't win the popular vote in 2000. i'm not sure how he did in 2004 but yeah....that system failed.

I like skafather's null-vote idea. I would definitely go and campaign for "None of the Above" this November. I'd even put out a yard sign if I had a yard to put it in.

I did a statistical analysis of the electoral college voting system a few years back to calculate the relative value of an individual vote in each state. I'll try to dig it out so I can put out specific numbers, but as of now you'll just have to trust what I remember. Because of various flaws, a vote in one state could be worth up to as much as 4 or 5 votes in another state. Also, there was one case where I found one state had more people voting than another, and yet received less electoral votes because electoral votes are determined by population, not by voting-eligible population, not by registered voting population, and not by actual number of voters. That introduces other problems into the system.

Also, two states had more registered voters than they had people. One of them, if you happened to see my post on the McCain VP thread, was Alaska, the most corrupt state government in America. Our election system is largely a joke- I won't say there's some massive conspiracy to defraud the electorate, but I will say that because our electoral system is so sloppy and so riddled with errors and flaws, the result of any actually contested election ends up being within the polling error. In essence, outside of landslide victories, all our elections may as well be random because the system is so screwed up that there's no way of knowing who legitimately won.

giving credit where credit's due: heard it from jello biafra and i'm not sure where he got it from but it wasn't his idea either...

One example of a massive electoral college swing- in 1860 Lincoln won about 39% of the popular vote. Now, the non-Lincoln vote was split several ways, but even if it had all been unified behind one non-Lincoln candidate, Lincoln would have still won the electoral vote because of how the votes were distributed- if you win with 51% in one state, and get less than 1% in another state, it is very easy to win the electoral vote while being massively behind in the popular vote.

"NOTA" has been bandied about for a very long time. One science-fiction series postulated that the ultimate outcome of including it would be repeated victories for "None of the Above" until "NOTA" was eventually elected "President for Life".

So I suppose that would result in the disbanding of the government in favor of anarchism?

That's one of my biggest gripes about the Electoral System. I live in Oregon which doesn't even have 4 million people, so my vote counts for almost nil. The presidential candidates don't even give a rat's ass about us because we're only worth 7 points.

Oregon, IIRC, was one of the better-off states in terms of voters-electoral influence ratio. Or at least middle-of-the-road.

No. It is fair. Who cares about the 49%? I do not.

Are you suggesting President McCain + Vice President Obama?

That's why I advocate directly voting for the president using an Instant Runoff Voting system.