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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (281069)	11/12/2013 6:20:14 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Sun Tzu; Regarding eliminating the electoral college for electing the President: The most corrupt parts of the country are the parts where only one party is ever elected. A good feature of battleground states is that the two parties get elected when the other parties becomes too corrupt. This means that the votes from the battleground states probably have the smallest fraud component. As a result, when we fight over counting the vote we're doing it in the states where both parties are present and powerful. If we went to a straight vote there's no realistic way to fight over votes in Democrat or Republican dominated regions. A feature of two party systems is that the two parties are motivated to compete for the middle of the road voters and so are pushed to have similar policies. This means elections are more likely to be very competitive in the sense that the vote totals are not much different. And this increases the fraud factor. No reason to risk prison if your candidate is going to win the state by 10% or lose by 10%. Another problem we have is that some states no longer are able to count their votes on election day due to mail-in ballots. I think they should only accept these ballots if they arrive before election day; it's ridiculous that America of 75 years ago can figure out who won an election faster than we can now. The most famous error then was the announcement that Dewey had won but that was corrected within a day or two. Now we're subject to waiting for those mail-in ballots to arrive. In addition there's all the "challenged ballots" and similar baloney. The whole purpose of an election is to provide for leadership without having to use guns and ammunition. In this sense, any method that chooses someone (who was not rejected by the vast majority of the population) is adequate. There is no reason for it to be fair. The difference between 49.5% of the population and 50.5% of the population is negligible. Fairness is severely over-rated. -- Carl