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Why don't we have a Federal Standard? I mean with all the problems I have been hearing about how some county's voting problems vary from county to county.

Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming

Why don't we have a Federal Standard? I mean with all the problems I have been hearing about how some county's voting problems vary from county to county.

Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming

Why don't we have a Federal Standard? I mean with all the problems I have been hearing about how some county's voting problems vary from county to county.

Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming

Actually, you're way off base here. The electoral college actually levels the playing field between the states.

Electoral College Votes by State
Population by State

Without the Electoral College a few things would happen.

1. The Dakotas, Vermont, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Idaho, Rhode Island, Maine, D.C., Alaska and Delaware would never see a candidate campaign in their state. They would be completely irrelevant. Carrying Virginia would completely invalidate losses in all of those states.

2. Every ticket would have a Texan, Californian, or New Yorker on the ticket. Politicians from the aforementioned states would be completely ignored. And before anyone nitpicks this one, historically candidates very rarely lose their home state.

Wyoming accounts for roughly 0.1% of the nation's total population, yet it makes up 0.5% of the Electoral College. California accounts for roughly 15% of the nation's total population, but only 10% of the Electoral College. It's not much, but ultimately the EC makes things a little fairer for the smaller states, which is exactly why it was created.

I believe the statistic is that only 1 out of every 10 person (correct me if I am wrong) in America votes in the presidential election.

That's incorrect. In 2000, there were over 105,000,000 votes cast. This was 51.3% of the voting age population of 205,815,000 and 67.5% of the 156,421,311 registered voters.

Source: Federal Election Commission

See page 11 of this publication.

It says that if your advertisements are truly independent, then you can spend as much as you want.

I think it counts as supporting that candidate.

After all, what if Mr. Joe^H^H^HBill Gates wanted to run a few billion dollars worth of ads for his candidate?

I'm not sure on the rules, though. See the F.E.C for more info.

Do contributions made to Kerry or Bush right now count as contributions made to the primary election or the presidential election?

According to the FEC document I read individuals can contribute up to $2000 per candidate per election. But since Kerry (and Bush, I guess) hasn't officially been picked as his party's nominee, can I give him $2k now, wait until this summer, then give him another $2k?

Bush 271, Gore 266

The people elected George Bush though the same process we have for many, many years. Get over it. You've got another election coming up in 8 months, concentrate on bitching about that one instead.

We care. FAQs are here: Federal Election Commission

The rule on campaign disclosures is that your name, occupation, employer, and some other personal information must be disclosed by the campaign to the FEC if you contribute more than $200 in an election cycle. Primaries and general elections are considered different cycles, so you could ostensibly give up to $399.98 without having your information made public. If you're interested, the laws are all posted here [PDF].
All the information is now online at http://herndon1.sdrdc.com/srssea.html.

According to the Federal Election Commission, the following are the results for the 2000 presidential popular vote:

• Gore: 50,999,897
• Bush: 50,456,002

The difference is 543,895. Dividing by the total number of votes, 105,405,100, we compute a proportional difference of 0.005160044438, or 0.52%. As was pointed out to me when I brought this up recently, this is within the margin of error of the voting system.

So, statistically, the 2000 presidential popular vote was indeterminate, as was the Florida vote for the Electoral College. If we ignore the error margin and just count who has the most votes, though, then Gore did definitely win the popular vote.

I must say I don't know what you hope to demonstrate by the map you linked. So the land area of Bush supporters is greater than the land area of Gore supporters: so what? Voting power varies with population, not land area.

Perhaps you're referring to the "population won by Bush: 143 million" bit in the link you have. I'm not sure where they got this number; it definitely wasn't the popular vote figures which I listed above. My guess is that they got this number by comparing the sum of the populations of all the states which voted for Bush with the sum of the populations of all the states which voted for Gore.

This number is basically meaningless. Imagine you have two states which vote 50.1% for Bush and 49.9% for Gore. Then the "population voting for Bush" would be the sum of the populations of each state, and the "population voting for Gore" would be 0. You cannot convince me this is a reasonable representation of the situation.

The electoral college as it currently stands is "democratic" if you consider that the US President is not elected by a single election, but 50 separate elections held by each state. Each voter has an equal vote to determine the outcome in that state. It traces its origins to when the president was not directly elected by voters, but elected by people appointed by their individual states. Each state could use its own method for appointing these electors, which was seen as a good thing back then, to a people who were generally distrustful of central government. (There's a good paper on this here (PDF). I didn't have the time to read all of it before posting here, but I probably will before the next big Electoral College discussion heats up this November.)

So, the real issue is how the results of each election are combined to determine the winner. Whether or not the state results are a result of a popular vote, they still have to be combined. Weighting them equally is obviously not an option -- it gives too much power to the smalelr states. Weighting them proportionally to the number if voters in that election (which is essentially what you advocate) also has its drawbacks too: the votes of people in less populated regions would simply get lost in the noise. I think the current system works rather well, although I think the "winner-take-all" format of most states' electoral college votes needs some work.

Finally, if you thought that the 2000 election was a debacle, remember that Florida was not the only close statewide election, it was simply the election that was closest. If the President was elected by a true national vote, every ballot nationwide would have been opened up for scrutiny during thode few months, and there would have been much more of an opportunity for after-the-fact manipulation of votes in recounts. The Electoral College system neatly confines election problems to one state. I think this is a Good Thing.

That's not entirely true - otherwise we wouldn't have any use for ECC or parity. Computers can make "mistakes" in as much as data can be corrupted by physical processes that having nothing to do with the intended or programmed operation.

Technicalities aside, none of the election problems are about counting accuracy, neither human, nor mechanical, nor electronic. That's not the point. All measurements have an associated accuracy. It's how we deal with it that counts. If the margin of the election is of a size that given the error rate of the system there's a "reasonable" probability that the outcome is in error (1 sigma, 13% probability of error, say, given the error rate of the technology used) then a run-off election should be automatic, even if there's only two candidates in both elections. No matter what the voting technology. A 5% threashold would be statistically supportable.

All sampling systems have a margin of error. It's a 9th grade science mistake to get an F for submitting a graph of plant growth or whatever without any error bars. We seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance in refusing to admit there's an inescapable margin of error, and thereby not accommodating for it.

In 2000, FL and several other states should have held run-off elections between W and G after the first election found them at a "statistical tie". It's not clear which way it would have gone after that, but whoever thereby won would actually have been a democratically elected president, rather than one technically appointed by a divisive judicial coup.

Anyway, the critical failure regarding DREs is the lack of recognition that they are fallible. How do we deal with critical systems that might fail? We create an audit trail so if something goes wrong, we have a chance of undoing the error, or at least figuring out what failed and fixing it, and at the very least knowing that something did in fact go wrong so we can try again.

The systems shipped by Diebold and ESS etc are both intrinsically fallible and intrinsically inauditable, which is intolerable. Further, if a voter has reason to doubt the impartiality of a company that has, for example, pledged to deliver it's electoral votes to the republican in the next election to be run on it's own vote counting equipment, they might have some reason to doubt the veracity of the black-box tallying process and that undermines the authority of democracy. It is important, therefore, even if it were proven technically unnecessary, to provide voters with the familiar indicator of fairness provided by a human-readable, authoritative, tangible ballot.

We've gone through a lot of effort convincing ourselves, and by force much of the world, that having a brainwashed electorate choose one or the other corporate flack as titular head of the country is the best and fairest form of government on the planet (and it may well be, alas); at the very least we can apply basic 9th grade science to finding out whether tweedle dee or tweedle dum won the popularity contest.

I'm Ellen Feiss, and I have an iPodJr.

I think it's great the kind of things we as a community will take and run with. Ellen, the Star Wars kid, Libby Hoeler (oh, don't pretend like it was just me).

Now, let's start a PAC. Who's with me?

Actually, no states choose their electors based on proportion of the popular vote. Refer to here. In all states except for Maine, Nebraska, and Florida, the winner of the popular vote (most votes received statewide, not even necessarily a majority) receives all of the electoral college votes for the state.

In Maine and Nebraska, two of the electoral college votes are decided that way, and the remainder are decided by popular vote within each Congressional district. (This is demonstrably not necessarily proportional to the statewide popular vote.)

In Florida, of course, the United States Supreme Court chooses decides who receives all of the electoral college votes.

The malpractice of Bush and Harriss is extensively documented.

No its not. Outside of some fringe lunatics like Palast, nobody is claiming this.

There are 500,000 individual donors to the Dean campaign and about 90% of them hold that view.

Ok- so you claim that these 450,000 people (90% of 500k) don't believe Bush was legitimately elected. Even though that is impossible to prove, lets assume it is true. There were over 105 million votes cast for President in 2000. That 450,000 people represents about .4% of the electorate, and I would be willing to bet that part of that 450,000 thinks that any non-democrat President isn't legitimate regardless of the election results. I don't think that is very "substantial".

No, you are wrong. The US also requires an aboslute majority for their elections (in the electorial college that is). If their isn't a majority votes are cast in the Senate, and then the House as needed.

See the page at the FEC here

Here in Washington state the fact is that the law would prevent this system from ever being used in Washington before it was used for 2 years in another state. Other states have similar laws.

If you look into the Help Amerca Vote Act (HAVA), the media presents the case that HAVA requires upgrades. When in fact the bill states entirely different requirments, many systems in place do not need to be upgrade to comply with the act.

Read TITLE III--UNIFORM AND NONDISCRIMINATORY ELECTION TECHNOLOGY AND ADMINISTRATION REQUIREMENTS , of the act for a lot more info. But here's a few key excerpts:

HAVA states:

(A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), the voting system (including any lever voting system, optical scanning voting system, or direct recording electronic system) shall--(i) permit the voter to verify (in a private and independent manner) the votes selected by the voter on the ballot before the ballot is cast and counted.

Then later it states:

Manual audit capacity.-- (i) The voting system shall produce a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity for such system.... (iii) The paper record produced under subparagraph (A) shall be available as an official record for any recount conducted with respect to any election in which the system is used.

So when the media says that Diebold machines are being purchased to comply with the act, isn't that blatantly false? These machines do not comply with the act, and to purchase and install them in fact violates these requirements.

Did you vote? Did you do your best to become informed about the issues and candidates?

It wouldn't have mattered. In the 2000 primary,Gore received more votes than Bush... and look who bought his way into office.

It was less than 50%, but it gets lower every election year so we'll reach 30% soon enough I'm sure.

What? No, it was 67.5% of registered voters, which is 51.3% of the voting-age population. Probably slightly higher actually, since about 2% of people vote but skip the presidential question. And this is actually *higher* than the last election (although the general trend is still down.)

This is all available online, and took me 30 seconds to find with Google.

Which brings me to the real problem: people are too lazy to educate themselves on the real issues. They take things -- "compassionate conservative", "the education president" -- at face value. And they take face value at face value -- we all know that Kerry doesn't stand a chance in 2004 simply because of that hair. Basically, elections are won by mass mind-control. Guess why the current administration is so friendly to the mega-media corporations?

Once you read about how the electorial college works, you'll realize how stupid your post sounds, especially the part about Gore receiving ~500,000 more votes nationwide than Bush being in any way relevant.

According to all the "media recounts", Bush won the election unless you counted the votes against methods prescribed by Florida law -- much like Johnny Carson's Carnac. I don't know if you understand US Presidential Elections, but our President is elected by the Electoral College not by the popular vote. Bush won by 2% in the Electoral College.

Bush and his government do not listen to the UN, detain prisoners with no charges, and therefore do not believe in democracy.

The UN does not dictate to the United States because we are a sovereign country. It would unconstitutional for President Bush to allow the UN to dictate to USA. The US does not detain "prisoners" without charges. We do, however, place into detention terrorists that have attacked or are plotting to attack the US or its military. It is very simple not become a guest of Gitmo, do not conspire with terrorist organizations that threaten to cause mass casualties. We do believe in democracy in America and brought it to many nations around the world. Two shining examples are Germany and Japan.

I understand that it is vogue in many minority "clickish" groups to engage in vitriolic hyperbole in regards to our President. Those that have underestimated our President's intelligence or will have found themselves on the losing side of not only elections but of history. There are many complaints that can be brought up about our President such as his love of big government programs but it is rare to ever hear valid ones from his foes, much to their electoral peril. President Bush main strength is that he is constantly underestimated and overly mocked.

Having a Represenative Republic ensures that the medium guys get as much attention as the smaller guys.

I might be wrong, but isn't over 50% of the population in 3 states? New York, California, Florida? In such, these 3 states COULD control the presidency, find a candidate that is willing to sell out the other 47 states and give these guys anything they want and there ya have it.

This is a great myth, but it's simply not true. Because of the electoral college and the way they vote (all votes go to one candidate even if the candidate was elected by 51%) the electoral college actually makes things worse. Consider the following (electoral votes data, census data) (assuming everyone can and does vote, doesn't matter, divide all pop numbers by 4 or whatever):

Plurality of votes:
Total US population (July 1 2002): 288,368,698
Votes needed: 144,184,350
Pop 51% (see below)
CA: 35,116,033 17,909,176
TX: 21,779,893 11,107,745
NY: 19,157,532 9,770,341
FL: 16,713,149 8,523,706
IL: 12,600,620 6,426,316
PA: 12,335,091 6,290,896
OH: 11,421,267 5,824,846
MI: 10,050,446 5,125,727
AZ: 5,456,453
Total: 144,630,484

So you'd need all votes of 9 states (assuming a minority who don't are offset by a minority who do in other states).

WITH the help of the electoral college:
Total Votes: 538
Needed to Win: 270
Pop 51% pop
CA: 55
TX: 34
NY: 31
FL: 27
IL: 21
PA: 21
OH: 20
MI: 17
GA: 15 8,560,310 4,365,758
NJ: 15 8,590,300 4,381,053
NC: 15 8,320,146 4,243,274
Total: 271

So you'd need the electoral votes of 11 states to win. The problem here is that each state only needs to be won by 51% of the vote. You could potentially have a situation where a candidate promises half-assed to sell the rest of the country out for these 11 states, and she would win 51% of the votes in these 11 and none in the other 40 (DC). Wonder what that would look like population-wise? 83,968,838. In our current system, an election could potentially be won with 29% of the total vote! So are we assured that "the medium guys get as much attention as the smaller guys"? No -- not with 51% of a state winning the vote. Make it so the electoral college splits their votes according to the way the state voted, and then you have protection...

not only that, but next election, go out and VOTE.

The most recent congressional statistics I could find were for 1998. Some states had a whopping 28% of voters show up (way to go, Arizona), and the average seemed to be around 40%. I would hope that things are better today (those figures are 5 years old), but I have a hard time believing they are *that* much better.

Sad.

Um, no. Congresspeople can't serve as electors.

Each state (and DC) gets a number of electoral votes equal to its representation in Congress (# representatives + 2), which may be what you're thinking of...

even if Bush honestly won, without falsifying election results, then he _still_ only won by a small margin. Instead of acting like a candidate who'd squeaked by on the barest of margins, he acts like his views are supported by all Americans, and does whatever-the-fuck he wants to. As a president elected with 50% of the populace behind him, he was not elected to serve only those 50%, but all 100%... to not even pay lip service to the other half is insulting not just to them, but to the process itself.

Dude - good argument, but let down a bit by your stats.

50 million is actually rather less than the 105,405,100 people who voted in the last Presidential election. Both Bush and Gore received more than 50 million votes, though by relatively slim margins.

And there aren't 200 million people in the US - there are nigh on 300 million.

Those mechanical systems are indeed pretty good.

However, they are no longer made. See Mechanical level machine for the info on the mechanical machines or Federal Election Commission (scroll down to "Voting Systems") for similar pages on all the different systems.

I agree that the most high tech is often not the best. Canada uses hand-counted ballots, and as far as I know, they are quite happy with it. (I've heard people in the US suggest it, but dismiss it based on the cost of paying the ballot counters).

Those mechanical systems are indeed pretty good.

However, they are no longer made. See Mechanical level machine for the info on the mechanical machines or Federal Election Commission (scroll down to "Voting Systems") for similar pages on all the different systems.

I agree that the most high tech is often not the best. Canada uses hand-counted ballots, and as far as I know, they are quite happy with it. (I've heard people in the US suggest it, but dismiss it based on the cost of paying the ballot counters).

The easy way. Odds are you can use this and simply mail it in.

There are 74 million families in America.
-- http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/cp s2002/tabF1-all.pdf

Assuming a phone number represents a family, 41 million families (55%) explicitly stated that they don't want to be called.

Should there not be an "I-Want-To-Be-Called-List" instead?

3 out of 10 eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 44 vote.
-- http://www.fec.gov/pages/98demog/98demog.htm

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil". -- Donald Knuth

No, they didn't.

Clinton received 43.09% of the popular vote in 1992.
Clinton received 49.24% of the popular vote in 1996.

Bush received 47.89% of the popular vote in 2000.
Gore received 48.38% of the popular vote in 2000.

Sources:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_el ection,_1992
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_el ection,_1996
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2000/prespop.htm

My parents have told me about living in Washington, D.C. in 1972, a year of record low voter turnout in that area. Their two votes counted for .001% of the total, a number that sounds small until you realize that any other year the percentage their votes accounted for would have to be expressed as a logarithm.

So please, convince more people to think like you! It just makes my vote worth more.

For those of you who _aren't_ registered to vote (those of you that are over 18, and US residents, of course), go take a look at the Federal Election Commission's webpage. Since I'm an Illinois resident, I'll also point out the page that's specifically for Illinoisians (and it's pronounced ill-uh-noy, not ill-uh-noiyz): http://www.elections.state.il.us/ElecInfo/pages/Do wnReg.htm

My generation (which is those of us who just turned 18) makes me sick. I can count on one hand the number of people I know (that are my age) who are registered to vote. Letting your country decide everything for you is most definately _not_ the American way--you should be exercising the little trace of a voice that you have as an individual in this country!

So far as I recall, the court basically refuted the legislature and told them that it was illegal to alter the rules of voting proceedure during a vote. What is most screwed up about the voting system is not the dimpled chads or whatever garbage they were arguing about, but rather the Electoral College system is flawed, giving people the sense that their vote doesn't count (which, in a sense, it doesn't). We vote for congressmen to represent our districts, but when we vote for president, the state as a whole is taken. Mighty fine way for the majority of the people to say "Candidate A" and for Candidate B to win due to fuzzyness in the system.

Australia?

(Being that Australia was originally a British penal colony, and the extimated population of Australia is 19,896,826; according to this article there are 57 million US P2P users, by this article, so maybe the coast part of Australia isn't large enough, anyway.)

57 million. Unbelievable. That's just a little short of half the people who voted last Presidential election.

Okay, I went off on a bit of a tangent there.

There are many , many people who vastly prefer Bush ( almost 50 % last time around).

Well....

There were approximately 200 million voting-aged people in the 2000 election, and only half of them showed up to vote[*]. Bush got around 47% of the popular vote, so that means that 24.1% of Americans eligible to vote supported Bush. With 48% of the popular vote, Gore didn't do much better, with only 24.6% of Americans supporting him.

As to whether this 24.1% of voters "vastly preferred" Bush, that's impossible to know. All we do know is that 75.8% of voters either voted against him, or didn't like him enough to even come out and vote. To claim that nearly 50% of voters vastly prefer Bush is rank partisan spin.

As Jim Hightower said, "if God had meant us to vote, He would have given us candidates".

[*] According to this site, the exact numbers were 105,586,274 voters out of 205,815,000 eligible voters.

Sixth, after the election, NUMEROUS privately-sponsored recounts were held, and every single one of them came to the conclusion that Bush won the election, fair and square.

that's not entirely true. at least not in terms of popular vote. bush lost the popular election by about 500,000 people. however he carried the right states and had the right amount of electorial college votes.

so it wasn't really fair or square, however it was entirely legal.

Ok, I found this site: http://www.fec.gov/pages/faqvdayeprocedures.htm and of course I live in PA where they can be no closer than 10 feet which is tied for closest with NH. I don't know if it's 10 feet from the door or the mahcine itself but these people were in the lobby of a synagogue and the voting machine was like 30 feet past them.

New York:19,011,378

Rhode Island 1,058,920

Electoral College Votes of: New York 33

Rhode Island 4

Votes per Electoral College Vote:

New York: 576,102

Rhode Island: 264,730

Think about it. A Rhode Island vote is effectively worth 2 New York votes.

I mean, come on, California has as many senators as South Dakota. No disrespect meant for South Dakota, but 34 million people ought to get more senators than 750K

They do -- California gets 54 votes, and south dakota gets 3... That's two senators and a miminum of one house representative.

This legislation can be stopped. It only takes 40 Senators to filibuster a bill, and if the Democrats are willing to show some guts, there might be enough pro-civil liberties Republicans to shoot it down there, too.

Immediately go the ACLU's action page where you can send a free fax to your representatives. It'll take you all of 15 seconds.

Next, call both of your Senators and your representative. Politely but firmly demand that they vote against this. Make clear that how your senator votes on civil liberties issues is very important to you.

If you haven't already done so, Register to Vote (PDF document).

Write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Doesn't have to be a great work of prose, just give an example or two of how the PATRIOT Act threatens the constitution. Give the Ben Franklin quote. Letters to the Editor is one of the most read sections of the newspaper, and politicos read it closely.

Tell your friends. Sure, some people get irritated when politics gets brought up, but that's a small price to pay for the future of American democracy.

Lastly, act on your belief when election time comes around. Donate, volunteer, and vote for candidates who are on record supporting constitutional liberties.

Um, no. Everyone may thank five citizens and an obsolete and outmoded Consitutional body for the current leadership. See what you get when you let democracy break down, people?

I'll just assume for one second, you are not an American. And if I assumed wrong, maybe you should know this this.

Do I think the world would be all rosy and sunshine if the guy who was probably elected actually got into office?

Here is some information that might help you understand why Bush was, in fact, elected:

How the Electoral College Works

Hopefully, armed with that information, you'll be less likely to make yourself look silly in the future.

The popular vote does not choose a president. The electoral college does.

It was set up by the framers of the consitution this way for a specific reason. So that a very populous state with it's own regional political views cant dominate the federal government. Consider at the time, New York had probably a hundred times the population of the entire western half of the country.

This isnt the first time in which the winner lost the popular vote, but won the election.

Please learn how the system works, then you can criticize it effectively.

Clinton never had more then 49% of the popular vote, and that was in 1996, in 1992 is was only 43%. Should Clinton not have been elected president then? Oh wait, I'm sure such rules about requiring a true majority only apply to Republican candidates, right? :-P

http://www.fec.gov/pdf/eleccoll.pdf

Hovering around 50% for many years actually -- for the Presidential elections only -- and there are several factors in the way the statistic is calculated that tend to make it underestimate voter participation. The percentage is based on the number of votes cast for the principal office on the ballot divided by the VAP (Voting Age Population). The first number may be a bit low because, according to the FEC, about 2% of voters "fail" to vote for the highest office (I know of a couple of people who did this in the last election because they were disgusted with the choices, but did vote in other races), and the VAP is concededly larger than the number of people truly eligible to vote (millions of noncitizens, illegal aliens, ex-felons, and so on, are indeed "voting age"). Of that number, a somewhat smaller percentage is registered. So, if a 50% turnout is reported based on VAP, the turnout of registered voters may be more like 70%.

Turnout for primaries and local elections can fall *really* low.

I'm describing this because election theory is a personal interest, and because election stats are often misused to try to prove political arguments. The VAP problem shows how little the press knows what they're talking about. But I suppose Election 2000 cleared up the press's competence clearly enough. (Have you heard of VNS? Another wellspring of disaster. Groan.)

ANYWAY, the relevant point is that there's no obvious reason to assume that Mac users vary from the population at large. Many are too young or have other disabilities preventing voting. Some don't show up to vote. Also, I have no idea what Apple's 5% of computer sales translates into as a percentage of individuals. Nor are we users complete slaves: only some of us would vote for Jobs. It's thus a very long shot that Mac users would come anywhere near the 19% of turnout that went for Perot. Perhaps, joined by enough others, they could form the nucleus of a significant bloc. (I wonder what kind of candidate Jobs would make? I'm sure it would be interesting, but I'd rather he stay with Apple.)