Barack Obama Is One Step Closer To Being President 601
At 3:00 Eastern time on Monday Dec. 15, 538 electors in state capitols across the US cast the votes that actually elected Barack Obama the 44th President. Obama received, unofficially, 365 electoral votes (with 270 needed to win). The exact total will not be official — or Obama officially elected — until Congress certifies the count of electoral votes in a joint session on Jan. 6, 2009. The Electoral College was established in its present form in 1804 by the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution. Electors are not required to vote for the candidate who won their state — in fact, 24 states make it a criminal offense to vote otherwise, but no "faithless elector" has ever been charged with a crime. "On 158 occasions, electors have cast their votes for President or Vice President in a manner different from that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest, or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was in 1836 when 23 Virginia electors changed their vote together. ... To date, faithless electors have never changed the otherwise expected outcome of the election."
Roger MacBride/Tonie Nathan (Score:5, Interesting)
This is news if it goes badly (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:for all the founding fathers did right (Score:4, Interesting)
Frankly, what I would like to see, and what has even LESS chance to get set in than getting rid of the electoral college, is a test that must be taken when one votes that has basic principles of civics.
Re:Why on Slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do we see posts on who is the new PM of Iraq, the new Pope is, or howabout what Obama had for breakfast?
That's a negative little ducky.
Unless there is an upset or irrational event on such an "important" event, the mechanics of the US political infrastructure do not matter.
Re:for all the founding fathers did right (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>a little doubt in the power of democracy. a fuck up
(1) That's because they recalled that a previous Democracy in Athens had killed one of mankind's greatest thinkers, Socrates, simply because they didn't like him. They did not want the right to life to be taken-away by a simple 50% +1 vote.
(2) It's no more fucked-up then how the European Union operates - ya know, a Union of States where States elect ministers to the Council, not the people. You need to understand history, because in 1786 we were not a single nation - we were 13 indepentent nations coming together as an EU-type organization. Hence an election organized by States, not people.
(3) Hence we a Republic of 50 States, where LAW reigns and protects the individual, not a democracy where the majority squashes the individual underfoot.
Re:for all the founding fathers did right (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the "popular vote", California alone chose not to count more absentee ballots than the difference in the reported national vote totals between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The reason that California (and many other states) did not count all of the absentee ballots was because for California, the remaining absentee ballots were fewer than the difference in the vote total for California.
Re:And this is news because? (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember during the 2000 election fiasco, I was watching some news call in show. A woman said that Gore had an unfair advantage, because he was a career politician and probably knew about this electoral college stuff, while she was sure Bush didn't. She apparently had never heard of it.
It doesn't hurt to remind people of the bizarre way that the US Presidential election works.
Re:no, wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
You take the first step, and then maybe I'll give up my gun in an urban environment. Post a sign on your apartment window that says "I believe in gun control. There are no firearms in this residence." The availability of firearms is a general, not specific deterrent. However if you let folks know of your views of how the world should be, then perhaps we can see how well it works out for you.
Good luck.
p.s. You might also help your cause by learning when to use capital letters. It really helps the reader determine when your next sentence begins, and also conveys a sense of pride in authorship.
Re:the popular vote went to al gore (Score:3, Interesting)
the official record is al gore won the popular vote. please, show us contingencies and if-then conditions where this is not true. it doesn't mean anything
The popular vote doesn't matter. The president is not elected by the people. He's elected by the states, through their electors. By the rules of our political game, deciding the president by the popular vote makes as much sense as deciding a football game by most offensive yards gained.
If you want to change the rules, start with your state. Your state decides who will represent it in the electoral college, and can pick them however it wants. After enough states have switched to a proportional system, you're more likely to get support for changing the constitution to eliminate the undue influence of the smaller states.
we need to remove the electoral college, to prevent another a gw bush: gw bush was not the democratic will of the american people, according to factual record (not your suppositions).
You can't really say that. Both candidates ran campaigns which took into account the electoral college. Their strategies would have been vastly different with a popular vote. You wouldn't see both candidates ignore California and New York. Even though both are strongly Democratic, each contains more Republicans than Iowa.
Re:So all that is left. (Score:2, Interesting)
While you can technically have multiple citizenships. When your in USA controlled territory the only one that matters to them is the USA one, any other is irrelevant.
Re:So all that is left. (Score:2, Interesting)
then there's the issue of him enrolling in a school in Indonesia, at a time when Indonesian citizenship was required to do so, and no dual citizenship was available. To become an Indonesian citizen, he (his mother, actually) would have to renounce his US citizenship.
Or his mother falsified his citizenship status on his school application. I find that to be more likely. In fact I'd bet mother's everywhere do that sort of thing every day to give their precious spawn a better chance.
Re:no, wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
again, let me get this absolutely clear to you: for the sake of the current (flawed) interpretation of the second amendment, there are needless deaths every day in urban settings. right now, for the disproportionate influence of rural people, urban people die.
The Urban tendency is to blame objects for acts degenerates commit. This avoids any uncomfortable questions about the sick culture in the most violent American cities.
Further, your entire post is pretty much negated by the facts- that crime, and armed crime, go up whenever a gun ban is introduced.
Why? Lawful people follow the law, criminals don't, advantage: criminals. It's really, really, simple, and I don't see why so many folks have a hard time grasping this repeatedly demonstrated phenomenon.
i look forward to the day when a few rural folks die for having their gun rights curtailed, rather then the status quo we have today, in which a lot of urban folks die for the sake of irresponsible gun ownership.
Again, rural people don't guy to gun violence, urban people do. The 'irresponsible gun ownership' occurs in the urban environment, because you allow a subculture of entitlement, selfishness and shortsightedness to flourish there, AND the cities with the worst crime have banned guns, making honest people easy targets for criminals.
You have amoral degenerates running around your cities that you refuse to deal with. That is your problem. Not guns.
Rural voters don't deserve to have more rights than urban voters, which is exactly what you are asking for, no matter how you frame it, and it is still wrong. any, ANY disproportionate influence leads to injustice and abuse of power.
Simple fact: Take away the electoral college, and the influence of small states is irrelevant. There is no way they would sign off on that change, and there is no way they would have joined the union without it.
Maine, by splitting their electoral vote to the popular vote, has made themselves irrelevant in campaigning. Most contests are close- within a few percentage points. To get an extra electoral vote in Maine, you'd need to swing an additional >10% of the vote your way.
This would take a massive campaigning effort- if it was even possible- for one additional vote.
Easier to ignore the state instead and get your half, or half +1. States that follow your idea make themselves irrelevant to the campaign and can safely be ignored.
Re:Let's make it interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
> the president is the man who must follow the will of the legislative branch
Do you really think the founding fathers thought that the at present 535 members of congress should be 'leading'? No, I'm not attacking at the present political makeup congress (which is always so easy) but the simply the number of members... heck, go back to the first congress where at the end there were 26 Senators and 64 Representatives... and even in a group of 90 people.
Constitutionally it is clear who the 'leader' is through the presidents delegated powers as well as higher requirements for office.
Re:So all that is left. (Score:1, Interesting)
And that, my friend, is why I will not consider him legally elected until the matter of his citizenship is investigated and resolved.
Get over it, man. He won and is a citizen. Do you really think the Republicans or Clinton never tried to dig up this bit of dirt on him? Maybe McCain/Palin kept harping that tired old "Bill Ayers" lines because that really was all they could dig up on the man.
How can you register with FEC w/o proof? (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing about this whole Obama citizenship debate that bothers me - how the *hell* do we even wind up in a situation where, *after* the election, someone is questioning eligibility? In order to run for President, you have to register your candidacy with the Federal Election Commission, or something, don' you? Why aren't candidates required to prove eligibility as a requirement to even *be in the election*?
We should not have a system where it's even remotely possible that someone could be elected when they aren't eligible.
That said, there really is no question that Obama is a natural citizen. After all, we know who his mother and grandmother are, and we know they are natural born citizens. By definition, if either of your parents are US citizens, you are a natural born citizen. Unless you don't think the woman he claims as his mother really is his mother.
Re:Let's make it interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember the mess in Florida in 2000? Now imagine that instead of having to consider recounting one state, we have to consider recounting all FIFTY.
Re:people like you are one of the reasons (Score:3, Interesting)
The case of New York is particularly interesting because premeditated policy decisions may have exported crime to surrounding areas: