Bush or Kerry? Or none of the above?

[Josh Hammer]

Has anyone seen that classic 80's movie Brewster's Millions? Richard Pryor plays Montgomery Brewster and at one point he runs for public office and pushes a "None of the Above" campaign because of public distaste for the two existing candidates.
I'm not too familiar with the American electoral system, but isn't there an option to vote "none of the above"? What would happen if an overwhelming percentage of voters had chosen this option? Would the country run another election, this time with better candidates?

[Todi]

I guess you missed the last election huh? It doesn't matter who gets the most votes.. But otherwise the closest thing would maybe be to vote for Nader.

[Josh Hammer]

I guess you missed the last election huh?

That pandemonium in 2000 was an election? From what I gathered it was the US Supreme Court, not the actual citizens of the country, that had appointed Bush as the current president.
Now I'm a bit confused. If the number of votes does not determine a candidate's presidency, then what is the point of voting? To maintain the illusion of democracy?

[ivulfusbar]

Well? That the party with most votes does not win is not so uncommen in many countries and is not particular for U.S. Most system uses a geographical partion of its land, and assigns a number of "positions/points" to each part. Since these are natural numbers and they have not been choosen with respect to how many voters actualy went to election and voted you will get missmatches. Some countries like sweden for exmaple have thought about that and have some equalizing points in the end to spread out to try to make up for these missmatches.

Elections is a compllicated thing. ;))

[GargoyleMT]

Now I'm a bit confused. If the number of votes does not determine a candidate's presidency, then what is the point of voting? To maintain the illusion of democracy?

We're more of a represntational democracy - the popular vote in each state dictates (in most cases) how the state's delegates must vote for the president.

"Why keep the Electoral College?"

If you don't know much about our political system, check out that article, it seems... decent.

[Josh Hammer]

Thanks for the link, I've gained a little understanding of the electoral system now.

In fact, the Founding Fathers always intended that the states -- not the people -- select the president.

Accordingly, they feared that placing unlimited power to elect the president into the politically naive hands of the people could lead to a "tyranny of the majority."

Can't say I'm in favor of the Founding Fathers' ideas though. Did they have so little faith in the choice of the general public?

[cologic]

The electoral college should be abolished. Some immediately forthcoming reasons:

(1) Regarding the claim that it increases geographic dispersion of campaigns' interest: one can get 271 votes with only the top 11 states, even with the electoral college. While CA and TX won't vote together, requiring more states, one can by the same logic show that without the electoral college candidates would need to campaign across wider regions too.

(2) I've lived in highly populated, metropolitan areas and reject that votes from just about everyone in Nebraska on down are worth twice as much as mine (look at the ratios between the "Percentage of Population" and "Percentage of Electors") in order to satisfy some dubious (see next point) desire to compensate those from smaller states for ... er, being smaller I guess.

(3) Smaller states should be less represented. They have fewer people.

(4) Which segues into the federalism point rasied in the about.com link: the idea that states, per se, and not their citizens should be represented is somewhat orthogonal to federalism anyway, and therefore so is the electoral college, regardless of one's position on federalism.

(5) Some question how recounts, for example, should be performed when there's no neat electoral college-defined boundary for their relevance and effect. One can, of course, recount only specific counties, as happened in Florida in 2000. The electoral college makes no difference here.

(6) Others object that voting fraud can have more effect without the electoral college shielding states' internal vote counts and that when such fraud doesn't change a state's plurality winner, such fraud doesn't matter anyway. Two responses: (a) however, when it does, an arbitrarily small (in FL in 2000, a few hundred) number of illicit votes subvert millions' intentions, leading me to much prefer the non-electoral college case; (b) further, that while it may not affect nationwide races directly with the EC, it most certainly affects statewide ones, and should be minimized for that alone anyway.

(7) The most long-term, but ultimately most important (the EC has only disagreed with the popular vote once every 10-15 presidential elections or so) reason to remove the EC is that it hinders adoption of vote-counting methods such as approval voting, instant runoff voting, condorcet voting, borda counts, and other improvements on plurality voting reducing the need for strategic voting which prevents viable third parties due to their spoiler effects, which perversely grow according to their popularity.

The only reason so many democrats care about about Nader's 2000 voters is because he proved a relatively popular third party. The effect of this can be illustrated by the lack of emergence if a viable third party since the US experienced a civil war, 140 years ago. Some stability is nice, but not this much entrenchment.