Barack Obama Is One Step Closer To Being President

At 3:00 Eastern time on Monday Dec. 15, 538 electors in state capitols across the US cast the votes that actually elected Barack Obama the 44th President. Obama received, unofficially, 365 electoral votes (with 270 needed to win). The exact total will not be official — or Obama officially elected — until Congress certifies the count of electoral votes in a joint session on Jan. 6, 2009. The Electoral College was established in its present form in 1804 by the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution. Electors are not required to vote for the candidate who won their state — in fact, 24 states make it a criminal offense to vote otherwise, but no "faithless elector" has ever been charged with a crime. "On 158 occasions, electors have cast their votes for President or Vice President in a manner different from that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest, or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was in 1836 when 23 Virginia electors changed their vote together. ... To date, faithless electors have never changed the otherwise expected outcome of the election."

Comments

So..

[Anonymous Coward]

What your saying is that McCain has an outside shot?

Re:So..

[4D6963]

What your saying is that McCain has an outside shot?

Nope, but Sarah Palin does, from her helicopter. She can see the Congress from up there. And shoot any wolves that come near. And by wolves I mean electors.

Re:So..

[Anonymous Coward]

And it doesn't really matter anyway who won or will be elected by the College, considering how Obama's change and freshness brings us people like Clinton, Kerry, Gore and all those other "new" faces.

Yeah, how embarrassing! I voted for him because I wanted to see a cabinet of toddlers and homeless people, not experienced and competent people!

Re:And?

[ionix5891]

obama sneezes at

gooda love the google ads here

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Re:And this is news because?

[MikeDirnt69]

I don't agree with you. You should be modded down.

Re:So all that is left.

[Choad Namath]

(2) Obama may have been born in Southeast Asia, and therefore not a natural born citizen.

Dude, you can't even get your conspiracy theories right... Obama was born in Hawaii, but since his father was a centaur, he's ineligible to be President.

Re:And?

[Poltras]

Personally, I suspect pudge is behind this one, since he wrote a rant last night about how nobody at all covered this, and how the news companies that did screwed up by calling it "official".

Suddenly, slashdot has an article about the "unofficial" electoral college results. What a coincidence?

Metal is stronger than ice, since we make boats out of metal instead of ice. At room temperature, ice will melt faster than metal. And yet, the Titanic sank because of a supposedly iceberg. And no word on this from the government... Also, if you take the word "TITANIC" and you remove the letters T, I, and T, and then you add the letters C, O, S, P, R, and Y, then it spells conspiracy. Coincidence???

Theory conspiracist will always be the same... And "what a coincidence?" doesn't make much sense. Are you asking a question or not?

Titanic stuff taken from Maddox.