When blu-ray and hd-dvd players people will say "How is this better than DVD again, seeing as how I don't own an HDTV and I already bought most of my library and I can play DVDs on my laptop on the go?"
When Playstation 3 with blu-ray comes out people will be saying "Where does the line start to buy one? Oh look, it can play the HD-super-ultra-edition of Goldeneye. "
This consortium may help level the playing field for demand for eye-candy movies (LOTR in particular helps HD-DVD) but movies aren't going to be driving early adoption of the players. People talk about how video games are more lucrative than movies - this will prove they're a more important market too.
Divide and conquer, eh? That's obviously effective if you have enough people to spread the work around, and with multiple people counting you can catch any miscounters in the act. But it does become a lot of work if there are many issues on the ballot.
I saw some article somewhere about what ballots might look like if design professionals created them. Long story short, they could be made a lot more readable and therefore make both votecasting and hand votecounting a lot easier on the eyes and less error prone. Also, if you started counting votes before the polls closed you could spread that hassle out over much less time.
My post was not exclusively based on or in reference to this study, it's based on the litany of documented errors, notably bad systems, and questionable results known to have occurred in this election and the ones before. This election had other grievous electronic voting errors, such as the Ohio district where thousands more votes were cast than there were voters in that district. Like I said, such errors should never occur.
As for this study, I'm well familiar with Twain's famous "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" remark - but I also know that most statistics are misleading at the psychological rather than mathematical level, in the sense that groups selectively quote ones that appear to support their position. The truth is statistics can be a very powerful and accurate tool when handled responsibly, and providing the math holds up (which is fully verifiable) a 99.9% certainty of a correlation is worth considering.
And in either case, as you yourself said this study supports the hypothesis that one or both vote counts was biased. Depending on which, it could be good or bad for George Bush - but in either case it means something is wrong and people should be trying to figure out what, and ensuring that the matter is rectified as quickly as possible.
Incidentally, this study was based on results from 2004, 2000, AND 1996, which would suggest if there were a anti-republican bias in 2000 it would have been present in 1996 as well. I personally would like to see how these results correlate with the models of voting machine used in these elections to determine if the bias can be traced to specific devices in any of these elections, or to undocumented factors like markedly different voter rolls.
You seem to suggest that we can worry about fraud and error in this election after we have reliable votes to compare against. But if we aren't raising a stink over provably unreliable and fradulent systems, how do you expect the states to be motivated enough to put reliable and auditable systems in place?
I would suggest, to be more fully certain, that the results of
Also paper ballots are very scalable - if too many people show up at a polling station you just slap up a new curtain and some markers and you're good to go. Worst case scenario you send for more poll workers to help process the check-ins, and print out/send for some more ballots. Not an option with electronic machines. You don't have enough, you're screwed. We've heard plenty of horror stories in this election of lines being hours long, so this is actually a highly critical problem.
Machines do have one critical advantage against paper ballots though (assuming they are properly designed) - they are tamper-resistant and naturally immune to invalid votecasting. Right now the easiest way to screw with a paper ballot is with a mark or punch made surreptitiously turning a valid vote into an overvote, or a no-vote into a vote. Not to mention the actual overvotes people made by mistake, and misreads. Quick and easy, all you have to do is make sure no one's looking and be ready to call voters incompetent. You can also stuff or lose ballot boxes and invalidate whole districts if necessary.
Computers won't allow you to overvote or make other mistakes, their receipts cannot be plausibly altered or misinterpreted by unscrupulous ballot handlers, and the numbers can be double-checked against the electronic tally in the machines. In fact with the right receipt you could do a second optical scan count and a hand recount, and if all three do not agree start raising giant red flags and sending in lawyers to put asses in jail.
While I find the lack of paper trail alarming, I find the failure to get exact results for elections mind-boggling. Calculating election results isn't brain surgery, IT'S COUNTING FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!! The talent you learned in early elementary school! The thing computers are best at! I can see how some ballots might not register correctly, and god knows there are some shitty ballot designs and systems out there, but there should never be errors made in the actual calculating. Ever.
US elections positively reek of either concerted fraud or extreme stupidity, and it's totally unacceptable. Let me point out the glaringly obvious:
1) Not only must there be a paper trail, it should also be hand counted to verify the results from the more rapid machine counting. 2) Makers of "faulty" electronic systems should be indited for treason or fined into poverty.
As for balloting, it's a toss-up between optically counted paper ballots and receipt-printing computer balloting. Paper ballots are cheap and scalable, but can be tampered with (turning a valid ballot into an overvote is as simple as a surreptitious mark/punch from someone handling the ballots in most designs). On the other hand, computer systems are more flexible, prevent under/overvoting, and their paper reciepts are resistant to post-casting fraud and verifiable against the machine tally, but they are expensive and high-maintenance and not scalable at all (though they could have been made a lot cheaper and lower-maintenance - or just used ATMs instead).
Watching those in power in congress ram district changes through the process would be even uglier and more unfair than what we normally see. They probably wouldn't even end up with anywhere near the same number of voters in each district.
If you don't believe me, you should look up how Texas districts changed this past election.
Popular vote is the only logical change to make. And it has many of its own difficulties.
A negative or print has orders of magnitude more information intrinsically stored in the pigments than digital photos have stored in bits. If you really wanted to, you could print out a coded transcript of the digital photo in a sort of bar code/dot code, or put it in some more durable medium than photo paper, all without altering the data.
In fact, you can do a better job, because the information can be spread around. With photos, a scratch or mark will wipe out the local redundancy entirely. And of course, photo archives won't help you at all with non-image data types.
Perhaps the most fascinating way of combatting bit rot is parity checking and repair. Even if you lose a whole chunk of the file, if you have an equivalent amount of data in a parchive you can repair it completely.
Really, what we need are filesystems with built in mechanisms for backing up key data. For instance if you flag a directory or file to be backed up, it automatically generates backups and parchives and stores them in as many separate locations as possible. If you did it right, even if you erased or formatted the whole disk, you could still retrieve the critical data from standardized locations as long as it wasn't written over.
The more time I spend wading through noise, the less time I'm spending on signal - or anything else of value, for that matter. Just what do you think news organizations are for, anyway? Hearsay and opinion and propaganda has always been around, blogs just spread it around a little faster and wider than before. News services are there to filter that monumental array of worthless and false information into something worth listening too. That some of those services have dropped the ball - or more accurately, are being drowned out by more popular services claiming to offer news but are instead just telling people what they want to hear, and cable networks that have to fill time - does not mean that all of them have. And many of those accusations of bias are overblown and coming from people who demonstrate more bias in a week than most reputable papers show in a whole year.
Perhaps bloggers have some moral credit for wearing their bias on their sleeve, but it sure doesn't give them any academic credit. Specifically, they lack the means and inclination to even attempt to do any novel research or verification. They lack the good grace to own up to mistakes or acknowledge outright lies. And so what - strong emotion always plays better than sound reason and research. Good luck getting the big picture from a bunch of partisans typing in their bedrooms.
And incidentally - Fox News et al is way better at sensationalism than any two-bit blogger. The most bloggers can hope for in the long run is to be the voices at the margins making the talking points. People will always go elsewhere for the slick corporate sensationalist package. Meanwhile, quality news orgs will be vindicated when people get tired of wading through diatribes and go looking for authentic journalism.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." And then what? Suddenly you're somehow better? You are operating under the tacit assumption that bloggers winning the media from the big boys is a good thing. I disagree.
Political blogs rarely exercise objectivity, let alone responsibility or integrity. All noise and no signal. For these self-appointed pundits to call the bigger news orgs and corps biased is almost comical and hypocritical in the extreme, but about as juvenile as their research.
Ghandhi did indeed force the British to give India its independence (with a lot of help) - only to see the subcontinent torn apart and put in a state of continuous war by nationalism due in no small part to his personal actions including agreeing to partition. In the end he was shot to death by a Hindu extremist.
Don't most reactor designs require extensive cooling? Maybe it's less for certain designs, but since the basic principle of reactors is to generate heat, and then use the heat differential to drive some other process to generate electricity, you ultimately need to dump the waste heat. Either you dump it directly into the air (difficult with larger designs) or you use evaporative cooling with water to do so. But I reckon water is in very short supply at Yucca mountain, and daytime air temperatures are high at least some of the time, so how would they cool it?
Also, energy distribution has efficiency costs, and putting all your energy production eggs in one basket is asking for trouble.
If there was a Nuclear technology that didn't require extensive transport or processing of fuel and waste, and only produced very short-lived waste products, I would agree. But there's not. Breeder reactors sounded promising since they make their own fuel and can process to the right kind of waste, but they seem to have relatively severe risks otherwise.
Nuclear tech looks attractive on paper. I don't doubt that designs are safer. But the environmental and material costs in mining and disposal are still large, and they make very attractive targets as well.
That the electoral college is nondemocratic and controversial is hardly news. But the winning party never wants to rock the boat, since it's the one that got them there. Thus having both parties get burned by it in succession might be the one thing that would actually promote debate.
Although a tie would mean it would go to the legislature, and therefore be a Bush win, that would hardly be a satisfying or decisive victory, now would it? Of course this is a man who lost the popular vote and had to settle for a supreme court vote to guarantee his electoral margin once already, and still governed as though he had a mandate, so failing to win a majority of electoral votes would hardly cause him to lose sleep. Who needs a mandate from the election when you're chosen by God, eh?
While certainly did insult Dubya, it is unrelated to the issue of electoral reform. As for GWB's imbecility, I hold that truth to be self evident. The relative contributions of the booze, the coke, the cronies, and the church to that is a matter of debate.
Good point. However unfair it may be, if someone has an interest in it and can put the kibbosh on it, it will stay. But large states have a lot of clout in various spheres. They might be able to do something.
However, the electoral college system has been modified at least once when they gave DC three votes (the population of Wyoming is actually less than DC). Puerto Rico (bigger than half the states) really ought to petition for that if they're dead set on staying a commonwealth. As for guam, samoa, and the virgin islands... tough luck for them eh?
Also, even if Kerry took New Mexico and Nevada (and Iowa and Wisconsin) that would only tie the vote if he lost Ohio. I'm not sure where you heard that he would win otherwise.
How about if the northern blue states just quit the US and join Canada as provinces? Canada's population and influence would increase dramatically. With california it'd actually be bigger and richer than what's left of the US.
Just Kidding.
I've seriously considered the prospects of a canadian/US union, with provinces becoming states or something like that. It's not that there's any compelling reason to, it's just when you look at Canadians, and then you look at Americans, we're almost comically similar. We're separate countries, but there are bigger cultural differences within our countries than between them. But...
1) The conservative probably wouldn't like it because they'd almost certainly lose in the new balance of power with that influx of relative liberalism. 2) The balance between state's rights and the federal government has long since fallen in favor of the former, particularly to the increasingly powerful presidency. Unfortunately, the people's voice is rarely heard when it comes to things like making war now. 3) To put it bluntly, for quite some time now Americans could always run to Canada to escape unjust laws (to escape just ones they run to Mexico). In a union that wouldn't be true. 4) Canadians have a reputation as a polite, clean, stable society. Not so if they join the US.
I've said it before, the popular vote means nothing in an electoral contest, because people KNOW it means nothing and vote accordingly. The voter turnout is severely depressed in "safe" states, and inflated in swing states.
If the popular vote did mean something, the numbers would be very different, especially the total voter turnout. People's votes really WOULD count everywhere.
The popular vote really is the way to go. I should point out another ethical argument for it is that it would give US Citizens not living in states the right to vote for the first time, like Puerto Rico or Guam.
While it's theoretically possible Kerry could still win Ohio, he'd have to get 160,000 out of those 175,000 provisional ballots. That's over 90%. Very unlikely. Plus there's still absentee ballots, which tend to go republican due to the military influence (although who knows about army votes this year). Conceding is the proper thing at this point. If by some chance it doesn't go Bush's way, at least we can point and laugh at his illegitimacy again, and at most have people clamoring for Kerry to claim his rightful place and (unlike Gore) he won't have the sore loser stigma.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Frist who? Hagel what? I vaguely recall Pataki. And the others?
But Giuliani could win in a heartbeat. He's moderate, diplomatic, well liked, tough, and a proven effective leader with the ability to find common ground instead of just using his base. The exact opposite of George W. Bush. He cleaned up New York and performed admirably on 9/11. I would vote for him over a democrat, unless that democrat could match him in kind, and as I said I can't think of anyone really inspiring on the democratic side.
I'm not sure what the point of Rice is. No personality and probably wouldn't help capture the black vote. Bill Clinton had way more soul than her.
Actually, Guiliani could run as an independent and win with a majority, though he would gut one party in the process and take a big chunk out of the other (and of course allay fears of being a spoiler by polling as a winner from the start). I wouldn't mind seeing that at all. His only weak point was allegedly unfair treatment of blacks during the early part of his tenure as New York mayor, so a black Veep would be a good addition...
Now that I think of it, Obama may not have the experience for president but provided he handles himself well in office for the next three years he would be a HUGE asset as a vice presidential candidate, which would put him squarely in line for president later...
God... Giuliani/Obama '08... I get goose bumps just thinking about it...
Hillary Clinton is thoroughly hated by a large portion of the country and would be an extremely divisive candidate. And to top it off she's not especially personable. Though popular with insiders she would be a big mistake.
Barak Obama the Golden Boy has real potential but needs to prove himself in office. I don't think four years is enough.
Honestly I can't think of any really obvious candidate with a good shot. The democrats need another appealing moderate. How I wish an independent candidate with real potential will arise.
A second question is who will run in 2008 for the republicans? It ain't gonna be Cheney, that's for sure. I wouldn't put it past them to try to run Bush again, or another Bush. McCain is out. They could butcher the Constitution and all common sense and then try to run Schwartzenegger, who at least seems to be moderate in CA.
And I sincerely hope that he will take great steps to heal the wounds on this country inflicted by both the events of the past 4 years and a VERY bitter election.
Aww, that's cute. Especially considering how he ran the country like he had a right-wing mandate after campaigning as a moderate and winning under the most specious of circumstances, whilst totally unwilling to admit mistakes or negotiate on anything.
But it's good to know some people can remain optimistic.
Yeah. Despite Bush campaign's totally predictable "Just concede already so if you do happen to prevail we can say No Takebacks" speech, Kerry was obviously waiting to see what the numbers of provisional ballots in Ohio were, and if weren't enough of them to concede.
In the best of all worlds Kerry would have taken Electoral and Bush the popular vote, so that a) we would finally be rid of that overrated imbecile b) we would have sweet payback for Gore 2000's popular vote win and electoral loss and c) we could FINALLY have a meaningful dialogue on replacing the electoral college, after both sides had been burned. Bush losing the popular vote and tieing the electoral votes would have been good also.
But, that's not how it went, although it was very close electorally. Of course the popular vote really doesn't matter for this election, because people KNOW it doesn't matter in a lot of states and thus don't bother to vote. Had the turnout in California been bigger, for instance, we might have seen Kerry lead the popular vote.
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When blu-ray and hd-dvd players people will say "How is this better than DVD again, seeing as how I don't own an HDTV and I already bought most of my library and I can play DVDs on my laptop on the go?"
When Playstation 3 with blu-ray comes out people will be saying "Where does the line start to buy one? Oh look, it can play the HD-super-ultra-edition of Goldeneye. "
This consortium may help level the playing field for demand for eye-candy movies (LOTR in particular helps HD-DVD) but movies aren't going to be driving early adoption of the players. People talk about how video games are more lucrative than movies - this will prove they're a more important market too.
That is a terrible idea. Let me extrapolate that for you.
"I just want to make sure we voted the same way. Don't you question me! Yeah, just fill out that field and press enter. Oh you fucking whore!" *SMACK*
Divide and conquer, eh? That's obviously effective if you have enough people to spread the work around, and with multiple people counting you can catch any miscounters in the act. But it does become a lot of work if there are many issues on the ballot.
I saw some article somewhere about what ballots might look like if design professionals created them. Long story short, they could be made a lot more readable and therefore make both votecasting and hand votecounting a lot easier on the eyes and less error prone. Also, if you started counting votes before the polls closed you could spread that hassle out over much less time.
My post was not exclusively based on or in reference to this study, it's based on the litany of documented errors, notably bad systems, and questionable results known to have occurred in this election and the ones before. This election had other grievous electronic voting errors, such as the Ohio district where thousands more votes were cast than there were voters in that district. Like I said, such errors should never occur.
As for this study, I'm well familiar with Twain's famous "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" remark - but I also know that most statistics are misleading at the psychological rather than mathematical level, in the sense that groups selectively quote ones that appear to support their position. The truth is statistics can be a very powerful and accurate tool when handled responsibly, and providing the math holds up (which is fully verifiable) a 99.9% certainty of a correlation is worth considering.
And in either case, as you yourself said this study supports the hypothesis that one or both vote counts was biased. Depending on which, it could be good or bad for George Bush - but in either case it means something is wrong and people should be trying to figure out what, and ensuring that the matter is rectified as quickly as possible.
Incidentally, this study was based on results from 2004, 2000, AND 1996, which would suggest if there were a anti-republican bias in 2000 it would have been present in 1996 as well. I personally would like to see how these results correlate with the models of voting machine used in these elections to determine if the bias can be traced to specific devices in any of these elections, or to undocumented factors like markedly different voter rolls.
You seem to suggest that we can worry about fraud and error in this election after we have reliable votes to compare against. But if we aren't raising a stink over provably unreliable and fradulent systems, how do you expect the states to be motivated enough to put reliable and auditable systems in place?
I would suggest, to be more fully certain, that the results of
Also paper ballots are very scalable - if too many people show up at a polling station you just slap up a new curtain and some markers and you're good to go. Worst case scenario you send for more poll workers to help process the check-ins, and print out/send for some more ballots. Not an option with electronic machines. You don't have enough, you're screwed. We've heard plenty of horror stories in this election of lines being hours long, so this is actually a highly critical problem.
Machines do have one critical advantage against paper ballots though (assuming they are properly designed) - they are tamper-resistant and naturally immune to invalid votecasting. Right now the easiest way to screw with a paper ballot is with a mark or punch made surreptitiously turning a valid vote into an overvote, or a no-vote into a vote. Not to mention the actual overvotes people made by mistake, and misreads. Quick and easy, all you have to do is make sure no one's looking and be ready to call voters incompetent. You can also stuff or lose ballot boxes and invalidate whole districts if necessary.
Computers won't allow you to overvote or make other mistakes, their receipts cannot be plausibly altered or misinterpreted by unscrupulous ballot handlers, and the numbers can be double-checked against the electronic tally in the machines. In fact with the right receipt you could do a second optical scan count and a hand recount, and if all three do not agree start raising giant red flags and sending in lawyers to put asses in jail.
While I find the lack of paper trail alarming, I find the failure to get exact results for elections mind-boggling. Calculating election results isn't brain surgery, IT'S COUNTING FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!! The talent you learned in early elementary school! The thing computers are best at! I can see how some ballots might not register correctly, and god knows there are some shitty ballot designs and systems out there, but there should never be errors made in the actual calculating. Ever.
US elections positively reek of either concerted fraud or extreme stupidity, and it's totally unacceptable. Let me point out the glaringly obvious:
1) Not only must there be a paper trail, it should also be hand counted to verify the results from the more rapid machine counting.
2) Makers of "faulty" electronic systems should be indited for treason or fined into poverty.
As for balloting, it's a toss-up between optically counted paper ballots and receipt-printing computer balloting. Paper ballots are cheap and scalable, but can be tampered with (turning a valid ballot into an overvote is as simple as a surreptitious mark/punch from someone handling the ballots in most designs). On the other hand, computer systems are more flexible, prevent under/overvoting, and their paper reciepts are resistant to post-casting fraud and verifiable against the machine tally, but they are expensive and high-maintenance and not scalable at all (though they could have been made a lot cheaper and lower-maintenance - or just used ATMs instead).
I think plasma sails are more likely in the short term.
Watching those in power in congress ram district changes through the process would be even uglier and more unfair than what we normally see. They probably wouldn't even end up with anywhere near the same number of voters in each district.
If you don't believe me, you should look up how Texas districts changed this past election.
Popular vote is the only logical change to make. And it has many of its own difficulties.
A negative or print has orders of magnitude more information intrinsically stored in the pigments than digital photos have stored in bits. If you really wanted to, you could print out a coded transcript of the digital photo in a sort of bar code/dot code, or put it in some more durable medium than photo paper, all without altering the data.
In fact, you can do a better job, because the information can be spread around. With photos, a scratch or mark will wipe out the local redundancy entirely. And of course, photo archives won't help you at all with non-image data types.
Perhaps the most fascinating way of combatting bit rot is parity checking and repair. Even if you lose a whole chunk of the file, if you have an equivalent amount of data in a parchive you can repair it completely.
Really, what we need are filesystems with built in mechanisms for backing up key data. For instance if you flag a directory or file to be backed up, it automatically generates backups and parchives and stores them in as many separate locations as possible. If you did it right, even if you erased or formatted the whole disk, you could still retrieve the critical data from standardized locations as long as it wasn't written over.
Hanging's too good for 'em.
The more time I spend wading through noise, the less time I'm spending on signal - or anything else of value, for that matter. Just what do you think news organizations are for, anyway? Hearsay and opinion and propaganda has always been around, blogs just spread it around a little faster and wider than before. News services are there to filter that monumental array of worthless and false information into something worth listening too. That some of those services have dropped the ball - or more accurately, are being drowned out by more popular services claiming to offer news but are instead just telling people what they want to hear, and cable networks that have to fill time - does not mean that all of them have. And many of those accusations of bias are overblown and coming from people who demonstrate more bias in a week than most reputable papers show in a whole year.
Perhaps bloggers have some moral credit for wearing their bias on their sleeve, but it sure doesn't give them any academic credit. Specifically, they lack the means and inclination to even attempt to do any novel research or verification. They lack the good grace to own up to mistakes or acknowledge outright lies.
And so what - strong emotion always plays better than sound reason and research. Good luck getting the big picture from a bunch of partisans typing in their bedrooms.
And incidentally - Fox News et al is way better at sensationalism than any two-bit blogger. The most bloggers can hope for in the long run is to be the voices at the margins making the talking points. People will always go elsewhere for the slick corporate sensationalist package. Meanwhile, quality news orgs will be vindicated when people get tired of wading through diatribes and go looking for authentic journalism.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." And then what? Suddenly you're somehow better? You are operating under the tacit assumption that bloggers winning the media from the big boys is a good thing. I disagree.
Political blogs rarely exercise objectivity, let alone responsibility or integrity. All noise and no signal. For these self-appointed pundits to call the bigger news orgs and corps biased is almost comical and hypocritical in the extreme, but about as juvenile as their research.
Ghandhi did indeed force the British to give India its independence (with a lot of help) - only to see the subcontinent torn apart and put in a state of continuous war by nationalism due in no small part to his personal actions including agreeing to partition. In the end he was shot to death by a Hindu extremist.
Don't most reactor designs require extensive cooling? Maybe it's less for certain designs, but since the basic principle of reactors is to generate heat, and then use the heat differential to drive some other process to generate electricity, you ultimately need to dump the waste heat. Either you dump it directly into the air (difficult with larger designs) or you use evaporative cooling with water to do so. But I reckon water is in very short supply at Yucca mountain, and daytime air temperatures are high at least some of the time, so how would they cool it?
Also, energy distribution has efficiency costs, and putting all your energy production eggs in one basket is asking for trouble.
If there was a Nuclear technology that didn't require extensive transport or processing of fuel and waste, and only produced very short-lived waste products, I would agree. But there's not. Breeder reactors sounded promising since they make their own fuel and can process to the right kind of waste, but they seem to have relatively severe risks otherwise.
Nuclear tech looks attractive on paper. I don't doubt that designs are safer. But the environmental and material costs in mining and disposal are still large, and they make very attractive targets as well.
That the electoral college is nondemocratic and controversial is hardly news. But the winning party never wants to rock the boat, since it's the one that got them there. Thus having both parties get burned by it in succession might be the one thing that would actually promote debate.
Although a tie would mean it would go to the legislature, and therefore be a Bush win, that would hardly be a satisfying or decisive victory, now would it? Of course this is a man who lost the popular vote and had to settle for a supreme court vote to guarantee his electoral margin once already, and still governed as though he had a mandate, so failing to win a majority of electoral votes would hardly cause him to lose sleep. Who needs a mandate from the election when you're chosen by God, eh?
While certainly did insult Dubya, it is unrelated to the issue of electoral reform. As for GWB's imbecility, I hold that truth to be self evident. The relative contributions of the booze, the coke, the cronies, and the church to that is a matter of debate.
Good point. However unfair it may be, if someone has an interest in it and can put the kibbosh on it, it will stay. But large states have a lot of clout in various spheres. They might be able to do something.
However, the electoral college system has been modified at least once when they gave DC three votes (the population of Wyoming is actually less than DC). Puerto Rico (bigger than half the states) really ought to petition for that if they're dead set on staying a commonwealth. As for guam, samoa, and the virgin islands... tough luck for them eh?
Also, even if Kerry took New Mexico and Nevada (and Iowa and Wisconsin) that would only tie the vote if he lost Ohio. I'm not sure where you heard that he would win otherwise.
Timing is everything.
How about if the northern blue states just quit the US and join Canada as provinces? Canada's population and influence would increase dramatically. With california it'd actually be bigger and richer than what's left of the US.
Just Kidding.
I've seriously considered the prospects of a canadian/US union, with provinces becoming states or something like that. It's not that there's any compelling reason to, it's just when you look at Canadians, and then you look at Americans, we're almost comically similar. We're separate countries, but there are bigger cultural differences within our countries than between them. But...
1) The conservative probably wouldn't like it because they'd almost certainly lose in the new balance of power with that influx of relative liberalism.
2) The balance between state's rights and the federal government has long since fallen in favor of the former, particularly to the increasingly powerful presidency. Unfortunately, the people's voice is rarely heard when it comes to things like making war now.
3) To put it bluntly, for quite some time now Americans could always run to Canada to escape unjust laws (to escape just ones they run to Mexico). In a union that wouldn't be true.
4) Canadians have a reputation as a polite, clean, stable society. Not so if they join the US.
They may not want you living next door to them, but they're perfectly happy to force their beliefs on you.
The way you say it America sounds like a rich self-absorbed teenager.
I've said it before, the popular vote means nothing in an electoral contest, because people KNOW it means nothing and vote accordingly. The voter turnout is severely depressed in "safe" states, and inflated in swing states.
If the popular vote did mean something, the numbers would be very different, especially the total voter turnout. People's votes really WOULD count everywhere.
The popular vote really is the way to go. I should point out another ethical argument for it is that it would give US Citizens not living in states the right to vote for the first time, like Puerto Rico or Guam.
While it's theoretically possible Kerry could still win Ohio, he'd have to get 160,000 out of those 175,000 provisional ballots. That's over 90%. Very unlikely. Plus there's still absentee ballots, which tend to go republican due to the military influence (although who knows about army votes this year). Conceding is the proper thing at this point. If by some chance it doesn't go Bush's way, at least we can point and laugh at his illegitimacy again, and at most have people clamoring for Kerry to claim his rightful place and (unlike Gore) he won't have the sore loser stigma.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Frist who? Hagel what? I vaguely recall Pataki. And the others?
But Giuliani could win in a heartbeat. He's moderate, diplomatic, well liked, tough, and a proven effective leader with the ability to find common ground instead of just using his base. The exact opposite of George W. Bush. He cleaned up New York and performed admirably on 9/11. I would vote for him over a democrat, unless that democrat could match him in kind, and as I said I can't think of anyone really inspiring on the democratic side.
I'm not sure what the point of Rice is. No personality and probably wouldn't help capture the black vote. Bill Clinton had way more soul than her.
Actually, Guiliani could run as an independent and win with a majority, though he would gut one party in the process and take a big chunk out of the other (and of course allay fears of being a spoiler by polling as a winner from the start). I wouldn't mind seeing that at all. His only weak point was allegedly unfair treatment of blacks during the early part of his tenure as New York mayor, so a black Veep would be a good addition...
Now that I think of it, Obama may not have the experience for president but provided he handles himself well in office for the next three years he would be a HUGE asset as a vice presidential candidate, which would put him squarely in line for president later...
God... Giuliani/Obama '08... I get goose bumps just thinking about it...
Hillary Clinton is thoroughly hated by a large portion of the country and would be an extremely divisive candidate. And to top it off she's not especially personable. Though popular with insiders she would be a big mistake.
Barak Obama the Golden Boy has real potential but needs to prove himself in office. I don't think four years is enough.
Honestly I can't think of any really obvious candidate with a good shot. The democrats need another appealing moderate. How I wish an independent candidate with real potential will arise.
A second question is who will run in 2008 for the republicans? It ain't gonna be Cheney, that's for sure. I wouldn't put it past them to try to run Bush again, or another Bush. McCain is out. They could butcher the Constitution and all common sense and then try to run Schwartzenegger, who at least seems to be moderate in CA.
And I sincerely hope that he will take great steps to heal the wounds on this country inflicted by both the events of the past 4 years and a VERY bitter election.
Aww, that's cute. Especially considering how he ran the country like he had a right-wing mandate after campaigning as a moderate and winning under the most specious of circumstances, whilst totally unwilling to admit mistakes or negotiate on anything.
But it's good to know some people can remain optimistic.
Yeah. Despite Bush campaign's totally predictable "Just concede already so if you do happen to prevail we can say No Takebacks" speech, Kerry was obviously waiting to see what the numbers of provisional ballots in Ohio were, and if weren't enough of them to concede.
In the best of all worlds Kerry would have taken Electoral and Bush the popular vote, so that a) we would finally be rid of that overrated imbecile b) we would have sweet payback for Gore 2000's popular vote win and electoral loss and c) we could FINALLY have a meaningful dialogue on replacing the electoral college, after both sides had been burned. Bush losing the popular vote and tieing the electoral votes would have been good also.
But, that's not how it went, although it was very close electorally. Of course the popular vote really doesn't matter for this election, because people KNOW it doesn't matter in a lot of states and thus don't bother to vote. Had the turnout in California been bigger, for instance, we might have seen Kerry lead the popular vote.