512 Paths to the White House

> The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view.

Translation:

> It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority.

Nonsense!

The least you should have done is actually reply to my post rather than do a drive-by with your own imaginary conclusions. Here it is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736105

This --and the statement you refer to and mangle-- has nothing to do with me (or proponents of an alternative approach) getting their way. You almost make it sound like a childish whine to which I take offense.

This is about having fair and intelligent elections. Elections today feel like you are watching five-year-olds blame each other for who broke Mom's flowers. It's idiotic at best.

Candidates should not be allowed to engage in stupidity. Talk about your platform, ideas and approach. Leave the other guys alone. Let me decide based on who you are and what you say you are going to do.

This is also about making it possible for anyone to run for office. I said in another reply that someone like Stephen Hawking has zero chance to run for office today. In this media-driven election system we seem to have looking good, speaking well, being able to crack a joke, sing and dance seems to be a requirement. Do you know how many super-smart people have the personality of a brick? Maybe not that extreme, but I hope you get the point.

And, how about money. If you don't have or can't raise a billion dollars, forget it. Again, tons of incredibly gifted people don't stand a chance. They wouldn't even get off the line. That is wrong.

The electoral college also means that Independent candidates have an almost zero chance of winning the presidential election. Zero. States like California have a significant number of independent voters. I was talking to one the other day and he said something akin to "My vote really doesn't count. In order to feel like it counts I have to choose to vote for either a Republican or Democratic candidate.". How fair is that system.

A popular vote, devoid of state lines and with rules aimed at reducing the bullshit factor would allow the very real possibility of having more than two choices. It should allow almost anyone to run and be heard.

There's no reason why it couldn't start on a website where candidates --hundreds of them, thousands of them-- stated their platform and start being filtered two years in advance of the election. Don't have a computer? Want to participate in the process? Go to a library and use on of the computers there. I find it funny to note that some of these purportedly disenfranchised voters are walking around with iPhones, driving SUV's and watching satellite television on their 50 inch LCD TV's.

I agree with you on the point about mandatory voting. I lived in Argentina for a number of years and watched how mandatory voting is twisted and turned there for candidates' benefits. They'd literally buy votes through all sorts of giveaways. What's worst is that the people being manipulated are the poor and uneducated. The ugly truth is that they just follow the carrot.

The opposite of this is that absolute morons are allowed to vote in either system. Voluntary voting does not guarantee that informed people will vote any more than it guarantees that votes are not being bought. I've had conversations with people who absolutely floored me. One guy was in absolute awe of the government because, as he put it, "they are so smart that they can predict eclipses and shit like that. Anybody that can do that is incredible". Another person, who happens to be the daughter of a friend of mine who has a PhD in Physics didn't understand and couldn't get her head around what the national debt means to her. She obviously didn't follow in her fathers footsteps, at least in the math department.

How do you fix this? I don't know. I know it isn't popular to say that not everyone should vote. If people are required to pass a test to obtain a driver's license, why shouldn't they be required to pass a test every year in order to be able to vote? They can actually kill more people with their vote than by not knowing how to drive a car. Not so? How about the religious morons who vote across hard religious beliefs and against issues of health, science and progress that could save millions of lives? Before anyone goes off for this comment, I am not a Democrat or Republican. I hate aspects of both parties and like aspects of both.

The electoral college is just not good any more. The same is true of the way we allow these campaigns to be run and funded.

You cannot mandate voting in the U.S. because the sovereign right to rule originates with the people. The government simply does not have the legal authority to mandate such a thing, any more than it has the legal authority to force people to speak if they don't want to.

I understand that you are making your suggestions with good intentions, but they are fundamentally impossible in the U.S. because of how seriously we take being a republic. The government simply does not have the legal authority to create or enforce these types of restrictions under the Constitution as it exists today. I happen to think that is a good thing. You might disagree about that, but the fact is that your ideas would require at minimum a few new Constitutional amendments.

is there a library out there that mimics this visualization? very powerful stuff

I think the problem would be that the focus would not necessarily be on urban voters (they are pretty dependable Democratic votes) but on very specific swing-voter geographies. This is also an issue with the existing Electoral College but is mediated by the fact that the smallest geographical unit (in most cases) is an entire state.

The Electoral College also helps to avoid a national recount should the popular vote be very close.