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To: Yogizuna who wrote (1570)	11/17/2000 11:35:12 PM
From: nnillionaire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3256

Yogi, Think of the analogy of the World Series. The winning team must take four of the seven games. Now, one team wins four games by one run each time.The other team wins three games by a margin of ten runs each game. The first team wins the World Series, but the second team scored more runs in the overall series. Nobody is challenging that system for 'the future health of the game.'

To: Yogizuna who wrote (1570)	11/20/2000 11:03:25 AM
From: Gerald Walls	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3256

You make some valid and very important points in your reply, but do you not think the people of the United States today would go literally ballistic if we kept having presidential elections where one party kept winning the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College? God forbid we should ever have two elections in a row where the popular vote winner lost the White House, and I think we would have a revolution on our hands..... In my opinion, we have simply been very lucky this sort of election fiasco has not happened before in "modern times"..... The odds of that happening are so slim as to be dismissible out of hand. Before this election the Electoral winner not being the popular winner has happened only twice: 1876 and 1888. In 1824 and 1800 Congress selected the President when no one had a Electoral majority. (This is from a story in today's Investors Business Daily, BTW.) To throw out an important institution because of an extremely-remote outcome would be a grave error. As for recounting the whole country in the event of a "too close to call" popular vote (should we get rid of the electoral college), the better solution would be to have everyone vote again after "mini-campaigns" of two weeks by the presidential contenders. I would favor a run-off between the two top vote getters if no one had a majority if it could be done, but I don't think it can be. If we did this I think you'd see third parties getting a lot more votes since the stupid "a vote for X is a vote for Y" would be even less valid than before. However, how would you do it? What if a third-party candidate were to shockingly be the second-place candidate in one state? Is he on the ballot in that one state and nowhere else even though he plainly has no chance to win enough electors? Or would you say that it's between the top two vote getters nationwide, disenfranchising all his voters in that state? What if the guy actually won a state 33.5 to 33.3 to 33.2 and was then thrown out? Two insurmountable logistical problems that you would immediately encounter would be getting new ballots printed nationwide and getting absentee ballots overseas and back (especially to ships at sea) in a two week period. Unless you want to disenfranchise entire floating cities such as the USS Abraham Lincoln, the USS Carl Vinson, the USS George Washington (all about 5,680 men and women of voting age), the USS Enterprise (about 5,830) and the USS Kitty Hawk (about 5,630) (to name the few listed as currently underway by the Navy's web site) then you have to allow a couple of months or more. Else the 15,159 Sailors and Marines of the 7th Fleet, the 13,456 Sailors and Marines of the 6th Fleet, and the 12,858 Sailors and Marines of the 5th Fleet (not to mention all the other military personnel overseas) are putting themselves in harms way for us and getting no say in the election of their Commander in Chief. BTW, these are interesting sites: navy.mil chinfo.navy.mil