darkiguana said:
We are not a democracy, we are a republic.
Up with democracy, up with progressivism, up with happy. They're things I like to see furthered, not statements as to what I'd call our government.
While the candidates are focusing mostly on the swing states, remember those change from election to election. OH, PA, and FL may not be "in play" in 08. It may be other states. Then in 08 the candidates would focus on those state.
That different states may get ignored at different times doesn't make the ignorance acceptable.
[quotes]In a pure popular vote the candidates the candidates would focus on the more populous states.[/quote]
No, then
states would cease to matter. They might head where the population is, but whether they call that land California or Florida or Montana, each person would be a potential vote--not a potential tipping over to 50.01% to give you 4% extra of the necessary electoral votes.
Which for the foreseeable future would be the east and west coasts. Why would a candidate campaign heavily in a smaller state when the net gain for them would minimal at best? In a popular vote, being up by 10 points would mean a lot more in NY, than it would mean in Id. In the current system they mean the same thing.
In the current system, being up by 10 points in New York means one side can stop worrying about New York because they've already won, and the other side will stop worrying about New York because they've already lost. In a popular system (or something more like it), both could still be advantaged by trying to impress New Yorkers.
As for Idaho... well, it's a perfect example. By the latest poll (
http://www.electoral-vote.com/ ) Bush is up by 29 points there. The only ones who will bother to touch it are third parties who never expected any electoral votes in the first place.
This is a thought I brought up in our last topic/argument about the electoral college: imagine a state being split (as with Virginia back in the day). Montana has 3 electoral votes. But what if theoretically that same area was East Montana and West Montana? Then each of those states would have 3 electoral votes. The same people would have double the say, just because they're classified into a different subsection of the country. Why does that make sense?
I'd now like to go off onto something related I did a few years back, concerning the 2000 election. This is the same information in two different formats:
http://proth.bravepages.com/temp/President2000thing.html
http://proth.bravepages.com/temp/President2000thing.wks
I considered a couple electoral college compromises, since I realize small states aren't exactly ever going to want to give up the advantage the college has given them. What I did, though, was take the most accurate numbers from the 2000 election I could find, and split each state's EVs by percentage, as accurately as possible. (Down with integers.) While this wouldn't get rid of the goofy small state advantage, at least it would make each individual's vote matter overall. Using this the results were
Code:
Bush: 259.33
Gore: 258.37
Nader: 14.74
Buchanan: 2.38
Other: 3.18
I considered one other slight modification as well. As I've indicated a few times already, I feel sticking with integers is too limiting and not representative enough. So rather than giving each state votes equal to their number of Senators and Representatives, I considered how it would be if theoretically you could have decimal Representatives. For instance, Indiana had 12 electoral votes due to having 2 Senators and 10 Representatives. However, considering Indiana's percent of the national population, it would be more accurate to say Indiana deserves 9.72 Representatives, so I give Indiana 11.72 electoral votes. It increases some states' say and lowers others, but by no huge amount; it's all about accuracy. Thus the results were very similar.
Code:
Bush: 259.07
Gore: 258.66
Nader: 14.77
Buchanan: 2.39
Other: 3.18
