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French "Three Strikes" Law Gets New Life
Kjella writes "A little over a week ago we discussed the EU's forbidding of disconnecting users from the Internet. But even after having passed with an 88% approval in the European Parliament, and passing through the European Commission, it was all undone last week. The European Council, led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, removed the amendment before passing the Telecom package. This means that there's now nothing stopping France's controversial 'three strikes' law from going into effect. What hope is there for a 'parliament' where near-unanimous agreement can be completely undone so easily?"
You're a nitwit. The popular vote determines what representatives will be voting in the electoral college and that is all. The only thing Al Gore ever won in his life was a double chin.
One more time:
Gore would not have won Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia counties in the recount.
Gore would have won a state-wide recount, a common-sense solution BushII et alia prevented by having the GOP use the Federal court and then the Supreme Court to kick the Florida courts and state law in the teeth.
All in all, an interesting overriding of "state's rights" by a party that claims to highly prize those rights. (For the irony-impaired, that's what irony sounds like.)
Al Gore did not win the election. He had the majority of the popular vote.
Al Gore -did- win the election, by any rational measure, including the electoral college.
Aside from Florida Bush had 246 electoral votes Gore at 266.
Giving Bush Florida gave him 271, and won him the election. Winning Florida requires winning the popular vote in Florida; ie having the most vote for him. but Bush VERY didn't likely do that. The voting machines and process was defective, and the manual recounts were consistently adding votes to Gore's tally.
The Bush campaign essentially ultimately blocked and stalled the recounts to 'allow' Florida to declare a winner without having been allowed to make an accurate count of the votes. (Especially if you consider Katherine Harris' blatant conflict of interest in the situation as a republican in charge of 'certifying the result' and who participated enthusiastically with the Bush campaigns efforts to prevent and stall recount efforts.)
Now we can dig further and talk about overvotes, undervotes, hanging and dimpled chad, etc, but the real test should have been 'can the voter's intention be discerned'? And by that measure Gore won.
I mean seriously, their were some 1200+ votes (mostly for Gore) where the voter had selected a candidate on the ballot, and then wrote his name in the write-in line as well. To not count those votes for either party, in race this close, is completely idiotic.
Frankly, given Florida was as close as it was, and a recount effort was not possible, and a federal deadline was looming, the fairest thing for Florida to have done, would have been to allocate its electoral votes evenly ... say 13 for Bush, 12 for Gore. (Given that Bush had won the initial count.) And the election would have gone to Gore (278 to 259). Of course that would probably violate the Florida constitution/rules/whatever...
But abstaining would have been practically equivalent (Gore wins 266 to 246), and it would not have been impossible for them to simply say "We cannot certify a result in time for the deadline and will abstain from the electoral college vote.' I suspect this is might have happened if Katherine Harris & co had been democrat. Or even better -- neutral non-partisans -- which is how it SHOULD BE.
Do you mean "French resistance" instead of "French occupation" ?
You dork bag. You totally failed it.
... and Obama won by a "landslide".
I never said that, and I don't believe it to be true. Frankly, I was shocked by how close that race ultimately was.
Al Gore "won" the popular vote by less than 1% nationwide. That means that all you can say is he had a statistical dead heat in the popular vote. If you wanted to have a national recount, there were plenty of states with margins that could easily have swung the other way around and not gone for Gore in a recount,
I'd be willing to take that bet. For what its worth the voting process itself is implicitly biased towards republicans. Your generally going to find more voting errors made by Democrats, and manual recounts will find more Democrat votes than otherwise. (not the republicans fault, just a reality resulting from the demographics the parties draw from... poor non-english speaking people trend as democrats, and these are the people most likely to vote "incorrectly". (circling a name instead of following the instructions and checking-off a box... etc)
it's just that Florida (and in particular, a couple of Florida counties) got focused on.
Because that it was where it was the closest.
Of course, the OTHER option would have been to throw Florida's votes out, and then turn it over to the constitutional option when nobody has a majority...
Really? What voting system requires you to have a majority of the POSSIBLE votes? All that I've ever seen have required you to have the majority of CAST votes. I.e. if there are 501 senators and 301 of them don't show up, and the rest vote 150-50 on some vote than the 150 vote wins. You don't need 251 to 'win', unless EVERYONE votes. You just need the majority of the votes actually cast... you need more votes than the other side.
So, if you throw the votes out (or if Florida had abstained), you would reduce the total possible votes by that amount, and it would have given Gore the majority. (But even if it had given Bush the majority I wouldn't have complained. It would at least have been fair.
And frankly, setting it up that way would be pretty lousy policy regardless, since it would give Florida that much less clout overall (ever noticed that nobody, political campaigning/advertising-wise, gives a crap about the couple of states that DO send in a "roughly proportional" number of electors?)
Its pretty lousy policy at the -federal- level that you can even have swing states that decide elections. Too many states simply don't matter and have no real voice. The electoral college is a joke.
turned over to 7et and some of the the 4roblems