And the winner is George W. Voldemort

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 5545

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, heidi <heidi.h.tandy.c92 at a...> 
wrote:

Thank you for the first hand reports from Epicenter, Florida (and 
thanks to Ebony for the second hand reports, and to everyone for the 
reports from where they are.)

This is such an outrageously weird thing: no one won the electoral 
college while losing the popular vote since Benjamin Harrison in 
1888: it never happened in the whole 1900s century.

> But one thing this should do - it should convince EVERY SINGLE
> PERSON in this country of voting age that YOUR VOTE REALLY DOES 
> COUNT.

NO. *MY* vote didn't count. My best friend Lee told her husband, me, 
and anyone else who values her good will that if we didn't vote for 
Gore and then Gore didn't carry California, she would NEVER forgive 
us. Gore carried California by a comfortable margin, enough that he 
would still have carried California if I had voted for Nader (for 
whom I voted in 1996, not afraid of Lee's threat to never forgive me 
because the LA WEEKLY was So Confident that Clinton would win) and 
Barry had voted for Harry Browne (the Libertarian). 

Speaking of people who blame Nader: what state did Bush carry because 
people who would usually have voted for Gore voted for Nader (remember 
that a lot of people who voted for Nader otherwise would not have 
voted at all)? There were a lot of Nader votes in Wiconsin (all around 
UW-Milwaukee) but Gore carried Wisconsin, right?

It's all because of the Electoral College. The candidate who wins in 
California gets California's 54 electoral votes regardless whether he 
won with less than a majority (in a more than 2-way race), or won by 
50% plus one vote in a 2-way rac, or won by 99.99% of the vote, so 
all California's Gore votes above 50% plus one didn't count.

It's all because of the Electoral College. If the candidate who got 
the majority of the popular vote nationwide won, then Gore would be 
the winner and not quite 2000 votes in Florida wouldn't matter. But 
the narrow margin decides ALL 25 of Florida's electoral votes, and 
the rest of the electoral votes are evenly enough split that 25 more 
votes make the winner.

This might encourage people to circulate petitions to amend the 
Constitution to scrap the Electoral College or at least split each 
state's electoral votes according to the split of its popular vote, 
and the congresscritters MIGHT be angry enough at this current mess 
to pass such an amendment, but then it has to be ratified by (3/4 
IIRC) of the states, and that won't happen.