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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."
What your saying is that McCain has an outside shot?
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.
obama sneezes at
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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!
I don't agree with you. You should be modded down.
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
>>>a little doubt in the power of democracy. a fuck up
(1) That's because they recalled that a previous Democracy in Athens had killed one of mankind's greatest thinkers, Socrates, simply because they didn't like him. They did not want the right to life to be taken-away by a simple 50% +1 vote.
(2) It's no more fucked-up then how the European Union operates - ya know, a Union of States where States elect ministers to the Council, not the people. You need to understand history, because in 1786 we were not a single nation - we were 13 indepentent nations coming together as an EU-type organization. Hence an election organized by States, not people.
(3) Hence we a Republic of 50 States, where LAW reigns and protects the individual, not a democracy where the majority squashes the individual underfoot.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
I remember during the 2000 election fiasco, I was watching some news call in show. A woman said that Gore had an unfair advantage, because he was a career politician and probably knew about this electoral college stuff, while she was sure Bush didn't. She apparently had never heard of it.
It doesn't hurt to remind people of the bizarre way that the US Presidential election works.
Incorrect. Barack Hussein Obama was, indeed, born in Hawaii 2 years after Hawaii achieved statehood. Read all about it on Snopes. Say what you will, but Barb and Dave are usually pretty good about scoping out all the facts.
My blog
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.
Of Code And Men
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.
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.
Actually, the way the Electoral College was suppose to work was changed back after our fourth election for POTUS. Jefferson (the presidential candidate) and Burr (the *VICE* presidential candidate) both got the same number of electoral votes. This happened because the wisdom of our founding fathers dictated that each elector got TWO votes for president. The second place finisher was suppose to be vice president. This was the first campaign where the election of president was actually contested, and the results led to the creation of our first two party system with Federalists and Republicans (who later became known as the Democratic Republicans and even later as Democrats).
Since all of the Republican electors chose both Jefferson and Burr, they were tied in the Electoral College. Officially, Burr should have stepped aside and let Jefferson be president. However, Federalists convinced Burr not to drop out, and the vote went to the House where after 30 ballots, there was still no decision. Hamilton -- a Federalist -- convinced Federalist House members that not respecting the outcome of the election was probably more damaging to the Republic than allowing an "atheist" like Jefferson as President.
The whole Electoral College system came about because we didn't have universal suffrage in this country. In Virginia, the most populous state, only White males with the largest land holdings could vote while in Pennsylvania, almost all freemen were allowed to vote. Allowing a direct vote for President would mean that smaller Pennsylvania would have two to three times the voting power of Virginia.
The Constitutional Convention tried to come up with tax and landholding requirements for voting, but failed. Plus, there was disagreement about how slaves should affect a state's voting power for the office. The Electoral College was a punt. The Constitution didn't even bother to specify how electors would be chosen.
They did give each elector the ability to have two votes for President, so they could choose one local guy and one guy who wasn't a resident of that state. This was done because when you only have a very small select group of men voting, their was fear that there would be a lot of political hanky-panky and vote trading. Allowing the electors an outlet to cast a spurious vote for a local political bigwig was a way of venting this political horse trading. After all, what was the worse that could happen?
In the first three elections, all electors were chosen by the voters, and the electors were chosen by districts. This was how the election was envisioned to happen by our founding fathers. However, when Adams ran against Jefferson, states started mucking up the rules. In New York, the way electors were chosen was changed from election (which would allow the Republicans to get some electors) to having the legislature choose them (to guarantee all electors would be Federalists). When the Federalists lost the legislature, the outgoing legislature changed the rules to allow the Governor to choose them instead of the Republican dominated incoming legislature.
Election shenanigans wasn't a Federalist monopoly. Almost all states changed the way electors were chosen in order to satisfy the dominant political party. It was the first time states used a winner takes all method of selecting electors. A method that is still with us today, and probably not something the original writers of the Constitution imagined would happen.
Today, the United States is one of the few presidential republics that don't allow direct election of their president. Historically, electoral colleges were used to keep the powers in power. It was the way Indonesia used to keep Suharto in power and it is currently used in Hong Kong to keep democracy advocates at bay. It's a great way to make sure that you can remain in power when you don't have popular support.
The Electoral College in the U.S. lost its initial purpose with the election of Andrew Jackson which started a period of universal suffrage when property and
When questions about his birth appeared, he published a scanned copy of his Certificate of Live Birth on his website. FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com both show copies of it.
For purposes of proving birth, it is accepted by all other states and the federal government as proof. You can use it to get a passport.
When requesting proof of birth, the State of Hawaii, like many other states, does not send someone down to the archives to photocopy old records. Instead, the State of Hawaii will look up the data, print out a certificate, put a seal on it, and put a stamped signature. The COLB is a short form copy that does not have all the details of the long form original like the hospital. Because some individuals are not born in a hospital, the short form copy lists only those fields which are relevant to all births like "Place of Birth".
To be clear, Obama's team has never claimed that the COLB was his original birth certificate only that it was an official copy of his birth certificate. As for possessing an original birth certificate, many people do not have theirs. They may have been lost over the years. For most people, when you request a copy from your state, most likely the state will print out a copy as Hawaii as done here.
Both the seal and the signature appear on the back of the form which was not scanned. The seal is raised and would not easily appear on a scan anyways. Viewing the document at an angle, you can see the seal. Factcheck.org has seen the COLB and has taken other pictures.
Most government signatures for documents like this are not hand signatures; they are stamped signatures.
The look of birth certificates varies from state to state and in some cases, county to county. The COLB presented by Obama is the same form as any other COLB from Hawaii.
The COLB lists the Place of Birth. In Obama's case, it lists "Honolulu".
Starting in 1982, the State of Hawaii allowed parents to register their children who were born elsewhere as an secondary means of proof just like a passport proves citizenship in lieu of a Certificate of Naturalization or a birth certificate. However, the COLB would not deviate the Place of Birth from the original birth certificate. If a child was not born in Hawaii, the COLB would list their Place of Birth as some place other than "Hawaii". This registration was not an option for Obama's mother as he was born in 1961.
Obama's campaign says blacking out the numbers was a cautionary move just in case the number was security sensitive just like you would not post a SSN online. As it turns out, it was not. FactCheck shows the number.
A datestamp on the jpeg can mean anything like
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.