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The Votemaster Is...Andrew Tanenbaum
A reader writes: " www.electoral-vote.com, a site of daily updated maps of the US electoral college based on a number of polls is probably a site that the policially inclined check daily. Well, it has been revealed that the person behind the site, AKA the votemaster, is none other than Andrew Tanenbaum, noted author of numerous CS books." He's also known for a little discussion with someone named Linus Torvalds.
If you were to set up the same vote for say England you would be luckly to find many people in the US to know who is actually running against Mr Blair.
If you had the same question in the United States, you'd be shocked to find that most Americans think he's the King.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
http://www.electoral-vote.com was running Apache on Linux when last queried at 1-Nov-2004 15:33:26 GMT :)
I was in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, so I haven't commented much on ELECTORAL COLLEGE (not that I would have said much had I been around), but for what it is worth, I have a couple of comments now.
As a result of my occupation, I think I know a bit about where politics are going in the next decade or so. Two aspects stand out:
1. MICROPOLITICS VS MONOLITHIC ELECTORAL SYSTEM
Most states are Monolithic Electoral Systems. Votes are tallied in each state and the winner of each state recieves all of the electoral votes for that state. Even if 49.9% of voters are for candidate #2, the 50.1% for candidate #1 means he gets all of the state's electoral votes.
While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually are in politics, the debate is essentially over. Micropolitics have won.
The only real argument for monolithic electoral systems was performance, and there is now enough evidence showing that micropolitics systems can be just as fast as monolithic electoral systems systems (e.g., Florida 2000 never would have happened if we would have just counted up every American's vote and the candidate with the greatest percent over 40% would win) that it is now all over but the shoutin'.
2. Portability
The Micropolitical Voting system was made to be portable to other future democracies such as Iraq, Afghanistan and has proven that it is scalable to nation states as large as China and India, the Monolithic electoral system would involve much more work in creating districts, states, commonwealths, etc. to the point that it is really not worth porting and would need to be started from scratch.
Don't get me wrong, I am not unhappy with the Electoral System. It will get all the people who want to turn Micropolitics into a true democracy off my back. But in all honesty, I would suggest that people who want a **MODERN** "free" nation look around for a micropolitical-based, portable political system.
- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, 2004.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
To sum up:
"Ich bin ein Berliner!" JFK 1963
"I'm a Napoleon!" GWB, USS Lincoln, 2003
Both Berliners and Napoleons are tasty, delicate pastries.
I, as a European, want to firmly say:
4 more years! We love Bush! All Europeans think Kerry is a lame-Americain! Boo Kerry!
Really!
"/Dread"