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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."
they still had a little aristocratic doubt in the back of their minds, and put this ridiculous electoral college system in place. an arostocratic hedge. a little doubt in the power of democracy. a fuck up
al gore should have rightfully been president of the united states in 2000, and for all that you can accuse al gore of potentially screwing up (what, too much environmental regulation?), there's nothing he could have done to the usa as bad as what gw bush did. our economy, our international image, our own faith in our govt to protect our freedoms, torture, preemptive war, etc
of course, i understand in reality the chance of getting rid of the ec is incredibly difficult, its too entrenched. but maybe at least we can, on a state by state basis, convince the states that ec votes should be awarded proportional to popular vote, like maine and nebraska do now (i think). so texas will suddenly cough up a bunch of democratic votes, but so will new york suddenly cough up some republican votes. isn't it necessary that we star thinking less partisan? is it fair to people in austin that texas is viewed as a republican block? is it fair to people in upstate new york that new york is viewed as a democratic block? don't these people's voices deserve equal share in the vote for president?
of course, if texas passed such a law, but not new york, or new york passed such a law, but not texas, this obviously skews results for republicans or democrats. in which case, you'd still need to make sure the key swing states that traditionally, now, deliver breadbaskets of electoral votes for one party or another, all start delivering proportionally on the same presidential election, so it would have ot happen in one 4 year span
incredibly difficult still, but doable. and do we another gw bush presidency to convince you it needs to be done?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is news for nerds because the difference between the way things are expected to work and the way they are actually implemented is a nerd interest.
The fact that this something that happens regularly every four years doesn't mean it isn't news. If that were the case, then we would not see stories with titles like "The worst/best/most/least ____ of 2008" in the upcoming weeks.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The article is crap, but you got the reasons reversed. It definitely matters, but it's not news. The leader of one of the largest and most influential countries in the world is being replaced, and that matters. If something strange had happened it would be news, as it is we're just seeing the electoral system do the same thing it always does.
Seriously, could we get any more fawning over President-elect Obama? I don't recall Slashdot carrying this level of minutiae for either of the prior Bush terms.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
he could not in good conscience vote for Nixon.
That's why I've never like the term "faithless" elector. The way the electoral college is supposed to work, is that we should know who our electors are, and they should be people we trust to make the best choice they can.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The real reason:
By the end of the day, you'll see hundreds of posts to this thread. Many rants about Bush. Comments about the evangelical Christians and their agenda. Comments about bailouts. Etc...
This will draw many many eyeballs to advertisements and clicks. The end of the quarter is coming up and they need try to make the numbers. Even then, I'm sure there's going to be layoffs at Slashdot next year, too. Then, we'll really see the dupes!
we're talking about the presidential vote, the electoral college. hello?
we're not talking about execution by vote. this isn't a science fiction convention
can you keep your emotional propaganda in your pants please?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
believe me, if you don't like the present situation, remember, it gets worse as you go up the chain of replacements. You've got a person who can strategically do the least harm atm, let's keep it that way..
Remember, it's not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you...
Yeah, but on Digg 99% of the comments consist of something along the lines of "LOL PWNED!" That's not really the audience of users I trust to decide what is important and what isn't.
The most popular story on Digg right now isn't even a story. It's some asshole's comic, entitled "Stupid TV! Be more helpful!"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Mr. Hopey Changey is filling his cabinet with storied Washington insiders.
Why not? That's what I'd do, if I wanted to get anything done. The last president to fill most of his staff with Washington outsiders was Jimmy Carter; while he is underrated as a President, this decision cost him a lot of effectiveness. The last major initiative headed by a Washington outsider was the Clinton's health plan. Not knowing how national politics worked wasn't exactly an asset.
Ronald Reagan was, in terms of getting his policy initiatives acted upon, one of the most successful presidents in modern history. His administration was staffed largely by Nixon admiinstration veterans, former congressmen, and scions of old political families. The few outsiders in his administration were either at departments he wanted to fail (Education). The only exception was Attorney General, a position he preferred to fill with old, loyal California cronies.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The structure of a government body or an electoral process is a technology. These are artifacts that are designed to meet certain requirements. There are rich fields of mathematics describing what it and is not possible, and various designs (such as proportional representation or approval voting) which represent different tradeoffs between incompatible ends.
The electoral college is a case in point. The original idea was to moderate public passions by filtering them through elected representatives from each state. However once you do that, you are presented with a problem: under such a system, residents of less populous states would, in effect, have no say in an election that was entirely determined by a few large states. So they tweaked the weight of each state's vote to provide what, at the time, amounted to an equalization of power between residents of different states (as well as ensuring that no drastic measures were taken at the Federal level which would damage economies dependent on slave importation).
Of course, this leads to the "old lady who swallowed the fly" scenario: while ensuring equalization of influence between states of different sizes, it creates severe imbalances of influence between safe states and battleground states.
And that's a hallmark of an engineering problem: you can't have everything because fixes in one place create problems in other places.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Many people, who have not carefully pondered the elctoral college system consider it an anachronism.
And it's true some of it's purposes, such as not requiringing candidates to make the perilous journey to all the states and to prevent religious institutions from swaying direct democratic vote have lost their original purposes. And indeed those aspects are gone. The electors are bound democraticly not by the legislative branch as was the norm.
But it's remaining features are of great interest to nerds. It's a very clever optimization problem with a very clever robust solution.
Some people think that the president should be chosen by a popular vote. But instead the design of the college is intended to optimize a different criteria. It's purpose is to choose the person who is best able to govern and is the most broadly representative, not the most popular.
here's the three central challenges it is addressing.
1) Whenever two candidates are sufficiently close in the popular vote as to both be highly popular, the best choice is not the one that eeks out a few extra votes, but rather the one that gathers the votes from the most geographically diverse base. The states form an excellent proxy for diversity.
2) the president is the man who must follow the will of the legislative branch. Like it or not we have a union formed around a senate which has a large small state bias. If you dislike the small state bias, then you should complain about the senate not the electoral college. The president has to work with the senate after he's elected so it makes a lot of sense to give the presidentially election a minor small state bias.
this 2=extra elector bias is quite small but insures that desiderata 1 and 2 are carried out.
3) the third function of the EC system is population normalization. The president is president of all the people, not just the ones that voted or even the ones that voted for for him. He's even the president of the ones that can't vote. (felons, children, women, and slaves all counted towards the population count since the begining). Thus no matter how many people cast votes, the total effect of tose votes is viewed as a sampling of the TOTAL population of the state. So the vote's effect is renormalized to the total state population by the EC system. Even if one person voted in CA, they get 45 electors.
As an example, in the last election, the turnout in Alaska was quite small for whatever reason. but they still get the full electoral count.
The real problem with the EC system is not that it does not perfectly track the popular vote--it's not trying to be an approximation of that criteria. It's really trying to bias the choice to someone who is both popular and diversely popular.
the real reason the EC system has some difficulties is the silly winner-take-all process.
instead of eliminating it here's a suggestion. remove the winner take-all division of electors. instead, take the top-two vote-getters and approtion the electors between them in each state according to the state's popular votes. Award a 2-elector bonus to the overall vote-getter.
this preserves the renormalization, the small state bias, and the diversity bonus. But it removes all the problems.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
No, what we need is over 1000 trained ninjas attacking in concert in the middle of the night to attack the members of the electoral college as well as all the members of Congress in DC, so that we can start fresh with this whole democracy thing. Funny how we're supposed to be fighting regimes that block citizens of other countries from having a democracy but we don't have anything more than a sham here...
Two parties? Are you serious? Aren't we just about the only two-party democracy in the western world? I have co-workers that didn't know there were other candidates for president besides McCain and Obama...
2^3 * 31 * 647
Chicago. Detroit. DC. Poorer cities with high crime rates. New York is a relatively wealthy city - you're distancing the historical root of crime - poverty - and blaming it on inanimate objects and better police protection, which New York can afford. You want to restrict the freedom of the law-abiding needlessly, even within cities.
Conceal-carry states are relatively poorer than their neighbors and have relatively lower crime rates than states with more restrictive gun rights. You don't pay attention to what works and what doesn't in gun control. You ignore the matter that gun owners - particularly those with conceal-carry permits - don't commit crimes and want to punish them for something they aren't doing.
If you seriously think that discussing how the electoral college works makes someone a democratic party hack, you are the single most butthurt partisan I've ever seen. So what, for the next 4-8 years, every time someone mentions anything having to do with the office of the president, they're a Democratic party hack? Waaaaaaa!!!!!!
I love how everyone insists that THEIR version of Authoritarianism is really the One and True Freedom.
Freeedom is great! Just don't be doing anything that I don't like.
SCOTUS refused to hear the because they agreed that the lower court's ruling that the plaintiff lacked standing was correct. They did not rule on the merits of the case.
Again, just clarifying, not agreeing with the nutjobs ;)
Learn about Photography Basics.
Which still have a 10 min response time. To simulate the effects of 10 min where every second matters, stare at a clock for the next 10 min and count every second that passes.
Well, Pudge is a moron then.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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
Someone please explain that sentence to me, because to me it sounds like: "In the US, driving you car on the sidewalks is allowed -- in fact you'll go to jail in most states if you do so."
It's a painfully horrible sentence. I think this is what it's trying (unsuccessfully) to say:
"In 26 states, electors are not required to vote for the candidate who won their state, while the other 24 states make it a criminal offense to vote otherwise."
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Do you have evidence to cast reasonable doubt on the State Department and the State of Hawaii?
If you do not, why can't you convince yourself of the weakness of your position?
What rule do you assert has not been "followed to the letter?"
The constructive argument at work here is quite simple:
Obama is a U.S. Citizen.
There is no evidence that this citizenship was conferred artificially.
Therefore Obama is a Natural-Born U.S. Citizen.
The sole authority for these two premises is the State Department, which didn't argue on Berg's behalf. This means there was never anything that Berg could question.
In order to believe that Obama was born in Kenya, one must accept a conspiracy theory that almost rivals anything in the JFK world. State and Federal agencies in on the fraud starting in '61. An ordinary housewife leaving the country and re-entering, with the efficiency and secrecy of the best spies. Several newspapers. The U.S. Senate. The Bush Administration. The RNC *AND* the DNC, and the McCain campaign, several courts and even the U.S. Supreme Court, all in on a coverup to protect the forgers of Obama's birth certificate.
There are people who still believe this, but I wonder why none has gone so far as to accuse the perpetrators of the fraud by bringing a criminal case. Start with the Notary Public whose name appears on the back of the COLB that was posted. Also, right from the beginning, you can name at least two state officials in Hawaii, and probably should name the Governor of Hawaii and possibly the Secretary of State, since all of these people would be actively involved in the fraud.
But I don't see Berg making any criminal accusations, where he would have to go under oath personally and face potentially serious consequences if he has no evidence on which to base the accusations.
Donofrio, on the other hand, claims that Obama was born in Hawaii. It's amusing that some people supported both Berg and Donofrio, even though they make contradictory claims. Then it becomes clear that we are dealing with people who simply oppose Obama, and any vehicle that allows them to voice that opposition is accepted by them.
Or maybe the whole thing is a sham and there is a gigantic conspiracy inside and outside the government to keep it covered up.
Your call. Unless you are in the military, there is no law that says you personally are obligated to "consider the President legally elected." Basically, any action the government takes is subject to redress by you. Good luck.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Chris, I hate to be the one to tell you..
We all lost, I will not get over it.
In a little over 30 days from now...
Things will continue as per the agenda, the war(s) will escalate, you will still not have health care and the new administration will begin to chip away at the freedoms of the citizens of the United States of America where their predecessors left off.
Cheers!
Precisely. I can't believe Snopes made such an obvious mistake.
I can. Read some of their articles on a subject where you know a bit. It can be painful. My main complaint is that they present themselves as authoritative, as though they've done all the research so that you don't have to. At least Wikipedia is honest about its incompleteness.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
That has far more to do with a corrupt and dishonest media than it does with democracy or our electoral system (or even the two parties). If the media actually covered the other candidates, or allowed them to participate in the media moderated and sponsored debates, people would know about them.
Actually, we don't have a true democracy here (thank goodness). We have a federal republic with checks and balances. And that's very fortunate, because democracy in its pure form is simply mob rule. We have some checks on the majority to keep it from just running rampant over minorities, which does technically break with pure democracy but is a very good idea. Ultimately, of course, at the end of the day super-majorities do have the ultimate say, because that's better than a king, but fortunately we do not have a pure democracy.
Now, if you are trying to claim that the will of the people is not properly represented within the system we currently have, I call bull and demand that you provide some evidence. Yes, our government is pretty terrible at the moment (and I think will be even worse when the new congress and administration come in), but it isn't because the government isn't reflecting us. Rather, it is because the government reflects us that it is so terrible. We as a society are becoming a bunch of lazy, uneducated, entitlement people who think we have a right to everything without actually working hard at learning and producing. We, as a society, don't bother to learn anything about economics, government (especially how ours is supposed to work), foreign affairs or anything else. Then we go to the polls and vote based on our ignorance (usually for whoever "looks presidential" or "will fix our lives" or "promised us X").
No, the sad fact is, our government is a VERY good reflection of what we are becoming as a society and a nation. Does congress look like a whiny, clueless island of misfit toys? Yes, but so do we.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Barack Obama will be my president, and I reserve the right to criticize all the corrupt, stupid shit he has stated he is going to do. This is a constitutional republic, not a dictatorship.
After all, (and I will be modded down for stating this fact)
Except you weren't modded down. You were, as you knew perfectly well you would be, modded up. Because you couldn't just say what you had to say, you had to try to impress us with how tough and brave and individualistic you are, standing up speaking truth to power, whatever the risk.
Whatever. Next time try punching your statement up by leading with, "This may not be very politically correct of me, but ..." Because that also shows what a tough, brave individualist you are, and it adds a little variety. A bold rebel in the battle for truth, that's you!
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Can one yearn for the good old days even if they happened before one was born?
Indeed, one can. It is almost always a mistake.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
After all, (and I should be modded down for stating this lie), he hasn't actually completed a term in the last two offices he has held.
Fixed that for you. Obama served two and a half terms in the Illinois state legislature before being elected to the U.S. Senate.
I would also like to know where all these conservative Concern Trolls were in 2000, when Al Gore (30 years public service) was running against George W. Bush, who's resume consisted of drinking, skipping out on his Air Guard commitments, driving companies into the ground, and serving for five years as the 5th most powerful politician in Texas (TX Constitution gives little power to the governor).
Bush was a two term governor of a large state before he was elected.
5 years as the 5th most powerful politician in the state of Texas (Texas constitution gives little power to the state governor). Prior to that, his resume consisted of drinking, skipping out on his Air Guard commitments, and driving companies into the ground in positions he was given by friends of his father. Every accomplishment in Bush's life has come from his last name. If he were George W. Smith, right now he'd be taking orders from a 17 year old assistant manager at a Burger King.
As opposed to Obama, who served 4 years in the U.S. Senate (from the 5th most populous state) and 8 years in the Illinois state senate (from a district with a higher population than the state of Alaska). Prior to that, he went to Columbia, was head of the Harvard law review, graduated magna cum laude, spent 3 years as a community organizer and taught Constitutional law for ten years. Obama earned all his accomplishments through intelligence, skill, and hard work - not based on his last name. Not even Bahgdad Bob would try to claim that Obama has less experience than Bush, much less Sarah Palin. But you do find Republicans doing this on a regular basis - like their wingnut merit badges will be revoked if they stop engaging in eye-popping double standards and situational ethics.
Who is the dumb fat fuck now?
Do you really want me to answer this question?