Anne wrote:
>I looked at how many people voted in each state, then divided that number by
>the number of electoral votes to find out how many people each delegate to
>the Electoral College actually represents. So, in the District of Columbia,
>a delegade represents 63,233 votes in this election. In Minnesota, on the
>other hand, a delegate represents 243,910 votes. So, if you voted in D.C.,
>your vote counts almost four times as much as if you voted in Minnesota.
I don't know if that is a fair calculation... though it is interesting...
What if you recalculated in terms of how many *eligible* voters there
are... and what if you removed two electoral votes per state before doing
the calculation as well, since every state has an extra two delegates
tacked on to represent the 2 senators... which is why people argue for
keeping the electoral college, since it gives small states more
representation.
Just as a note, I don't really favor keeping the electoral college. At
least if it is kept, all states should relinquish winner-take-all voting.
What if each state's popular vote was simply approportioned among
electorates - not according to district, because there can always be
politicking (districts redrawn, etc) but based on pure percentages of
popular vote.
And - NOTE: I am neither a Bush nor a Gore supporter - I think it is
totally unbelievable that Bush supporters and the Bush camp are willing to
forego the political representations of 20,000 voters for their own
political convenience. Mistakes always happen in an election, and it would
be lovely if we could a) prevent them and b) amend them, but usually we
don't know what the mistakes are. Here we know that a large number of votes
were in error, and we know why. The 3000+ votes for Buchanan make a very
very strong case, statistically speaking (http://madison.hss.cmu.edu/ for
stats analyses on this issue, explained for lay people). If we KNOW that a
large number of votes are in error, isn't the onus on us as a country to do
something about it? No matter how moronic onemight think those Floridians
were for fucking up their ballots after those ballots were available for
viewing prior to the election, does that mean they don't deserve political
representation?
And we have the gall to call this a democracy.
-Yael
