Remember to VOTE!

[dvlnblkdrs]

hmmm idk about that.. its difficult as it is to have a political conversation without issues, as we have all seen here.. imo if they think they know what is best for us.. why vote if they are deciding for us.. and didnt they put bush into the second term? i dont keep up on politics cuz everything is bias...

[GeneW]

Originally Posted by dvlnblkdrs

hmmm idk about that.. its difficult as it is to have a political conversation without issues, as we have all seen here.. imo if they think they know what is best for us.. why vote if they are deciding for us..

The Electoral Collage is a throwback to a time when we didn't have instant communications. Yet it serves a purpose.

The idea is to give uniform regions of the country an equal voice in choosing the President. Urban areas do not get more of a voice than rural areas and thus cannot use their weight to push us around.

The Collage does not "choose' a President. That's non-sense. They vote for a President based upon the State's popular vote. This is the way it's supposed to go unless you get a "Faithless Elector", who will not go along with the State's popular vote. Gore in 2000 tried to get some of the electors to change their votes from Bush to him but it did not work.

Originally Posted by dvlnblkdrs

and didnt they put bush into the second term? i dont keep up on politics cuz everything is bias...

No. That was the first run, in 2000. Gore got a majority of the popular vote but still lost the election because of recounts in Florida.

Gore had a PR firm ready to challenge votes in Southern Florida based upon their antique ballots. People were to complain to this firm that they were "not sure" who they voted for because the ballots used punch out "chads" instead of voting machines or the easily manipulated machines that we use today. Gore did this in case he lost the counts there.

Soon after the results from Florida were announced the PR firm sprung into action. Elderly voters complained that they were cheated because they were confused by the instructions, because the "chads" did not punch out and a lot of other silly crap.

Gore wanted the recounts limited to "Democratic strongholds" in Dade County and a few other places. The Republicans complained that this favored Gore and wanted the recount to cover all of Florida. The Florida Supreme Court was heavily Democrat and limited counting to the counties Gore wanted. The US Supreme Court allowed the recount all over the State, and hence some have claimed that they "picked the President", which is patent horseshit.

The recounts were farcical. If the counter wasn't sure if the vote was for Gore or Bush they checked out other votes. This often happened if both chads were punched out. If most of them were for a Democrat they picked Gore and vice versa. Some Republican observers claimed that some counters would punch out both chads and then give the vote to Gore. The Democrats complained that Bush's hatchetman in Florida, James Baker, was using Cuban "thugs" to "intimidate" the counters.

In fact a conservative group did storm the Bureau of Elections in Dade County to protest the vote counting.

A study after the election, conducted by the New York Times, claimed that the recount was honest. Gore really did lose the election.


The Bush Kerry contest centered in Ohio and allegations of irregular counts, especially of voting precincts in urban areas being jammed with voters while rural precincts had few lines. This is a far complaint and I suspect it has been addressed since 2004.

Yet in Pennsylvania mental patients were taken to voting polls and given cigarettes in exchange for votes for Kerry. There were also allegations of ACORN buying registrations, including for cartoon characters.

Nobody bothered to ask why Philadelphia PA had a 104 percent turnout - 104 percent of registered voters voted, and that Kerry won there. Kind of hard to have more voters than you have registrations, huh? This result was published in a local newspaper and to this day I cannot understand why it was not investigated.

This next contest will probably be another scrap over allegations that the voting machines did not "take" certain votes. Since 2000 it's been lawyered to death.

Bias? You live in California. Everything out there is political, sad to say.

Gene