Best possible outcome

[narcimund 0]

I hope the popular count and the electoral count are split again. Even better will be if there are legal shenanigans that create uncertainty. Even more hopeful to me is that whatever crooked things both sides are certainly doing to predispose the outcome will become a major scandal.

The very best outcome is that in addition to all of that, Bush would win the popular vote and Kerry the electoral count.

Why? Not because I care which of these two creeps acts as president. I don't believe it much matters in the end.

This outcome would be the best possible because it would give both the democrats and republicans an historic opportunity to once again spontaneously reverse their long-held principles. I have no doubt that would occur. I also have no doubt that the unusually intense scrutiny and interest in this election will make it more obvious than ever before that both sides are truly evil.

Anything that sheds light on that is good for the future. Anything that reduces Americans' trust in this crooked system is good. In crisis, we see the parties' true conniving character and I'm hopeful there are still some honorable people left to see it.

First Class Citizen Twice Over

[kelpdiver 2]

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Anything that sheds light on that is good for the future. Anything that reduces Americans' trust in this crooked system is good. In crisis, we see the parties' true conniving character and I'm hopeful there are still some honorable people left to see it.

Which system exactly is "crooked"? I can think of many descriptors, but not that one.

[ChasingBlueSky 0]

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Anything that sheds light on that is good for the future. Anything that reduces Americans' trust in this crooked system is good. In crisis, we see the parties' true conniving character and I'm hopeful there are still some honorable people left to see it.

Which system exactly is "crooked"? I can think of many descriptors, but not that one.

Crooked may be the wrong word. Outdated may be a better word. The electoral college is still a good thing until something better comes along. Going just by the popular vote would make smaller states like RI mean nothing in the election and states like CA be the biggest push for campaigning.

I've started to read more on this:
http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/politics/condorcet.html

I'm still not sure what would be a better option, but the popular vote is NOT the way to go.

The only crooked part about our election are the people associated with it.

_________________________________________
you can burn the land and boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me....
I WILL fly again.....

[kallend 2,150]

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Anything that sheds light on that is good for the future. Anything that reduces Americans' trust in this crooked system is good. In crisis, we see the parties' true conniving character and I'm hopeful there are still some honorable people left to see it.

Which system exactly is "crooked"? I can think of many descriptors, but not that one.

Crooked may be the wrong word. Outdated may be a better word. The electoral college is still a good thing until something better comes along. Going just by the popular vote would make smaller states like RI mean nothing in the election and states like CA be the biggest push for campaigning.

I've started to read more on this:
http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/politics/condorcet.html

I'm still not sure what would be a better option, but the popular vote is NOT the way to go.

The only crooked part about our election are the people associated with it.

Right now CA, IL and NY mean nothing (when did you last see a presidential candidate in IL?). How is that better than RI meaning nothing?

The purpose of the Electoral College is not to protect small states. It is to protect the elite from the wishes of the masses (Federalist No. 68).

THAT is why going to a popular vote is important.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[ChasingBlueSky 0]

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Right now CA, IL and NY mean nothing (when did you last see a presidential candidate in IL?). How is that better than RI meaning nothing?

I'm not sure if it has been a blessing in disguise not having to deal what people in IA, WI, OH and FL have been dealing with the last two months.

However, it is wrong that both candidates can just ignore whole areas of the country - and then even listen to the President mock MA. Mayor Daley has boiled over a few times over being left in the dust and wants IL to have its own primary in 2007.

However, I still don't think that a straight popular vote is the way to go. By going that route, we would still be stuck in a two party system IMO.

I was curious on your thoughts of the condorcet method - do you feel that would be a better way to go? From what I have read, it seems a fair way to go, and a path that would allow someone outside of the typical two parties to gain a seat in government. Of course, the only downfall to it is that it works for major elections with only one seat open.

_________________________________________
you can burn the land and boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me....
I WILL fly again.....

[flyingferret 0]

I very highly disagree with this. In fact, I think the following is an excellent write up, that is fairly objective and bi-partisan.

What is really sadly at risk is our honor in the whole believe in representative democracy:

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THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT


November 01, 2004 1636 GMT

By George Friedman

We are now hours away from the 2004 presidential election in the United
States. Everybody has had his say, including Osama bin Laden. It is now
up to one of the strangest -- and most successful -- electoral systems
yet devised, a system made even stranger by the fact that there is no
longer really any such thing as Election Day. A large number of voters
will have already voted, which makes it a statistical certainty that
some will be dead by Election Day. We have institutionalized the
graveyard vote.

At this point, if we are to believe the polls, the most likely outcome
is that U.S. President George W. Bush will win a narrow victory. As we
go into Election Day, the spread of the polls is from dead even to Bush
being ahead by 5 percentage points. There were few, if any, polls over
the weekend showing that Kerry is in the lead. In many of them, the
spread is within the margin of error. However, when multiple polls
confirm the same finding, the significance of the margin of error
declines. Going into the weekend, Bush was ahead.

This should not be overstated. If he is ahead, it is only by a few
percentage points. By past practice, the challenger normally picks up
support over the weekend before the elections because undecided voters
tend to support the challenger. The problem this time is not only that
there are so few undecided voters, but that anyone who is still
undecided after this campaign is either utterly indifferent, locked in a
cave or deeply troubled. That means the normal weekend flop might
happen, but given the size and makeup of the undecided vote, it is not
clear that precedent applies. The last-minute surge will be small, and
might easily split between Bush and Kerry or go to Kerry.

Obviously, winning the popular vote doesn't guarantee victory in the
Electoral College. Therefore, it is possible Bush will win the popular
vote, but lose the election. Large majorities in the states in which he
has strong support -- the mountain states and the south -- make this a
possible outcome. It is not a likely outcome, simply because the swing
states appear to be tracking the national polls, and because several of
the swing states, such as Florida and New Mexico, appear to be moving
toward Bush.

It is possible to imagine Bush winning by as much as 5 points and
winning a surprisingly large number of states. It is possible to imagine
Kerry winning by 1 to 3 percentage points and solidly winning the
election. It is also possible to imagine Bush winning by 1 to 2 points
and losing the election -- or very narrowly winning in the Electoral
College. What is difficult to imagine is the outcome everyone dreads --
a repeat of 2000.

It is necessary to understand the extent to which 2000 was a freak. In
order to repeat 2000, two things must happen: First, the electoral vote
must be a virtual tie, in the sense that except for one state (or more,
but that makes the outcome even more improbable), all states are
committed, without giving either candidate a majority. Second, the votes
in that state (or multiple
states) must come in at a virtual tie as well. That is what happened in
Florida in 2000 when the vote was tied.

On the surface, when the first vote was counted, Bush had 535 votes more
than Al Gore. In fact, they had exactly the same number of votes. Any
system that must count several million of anything has a built-in error
rate. Anyone who has done inventory in a warehouse knows that no matter
how hard you try, you will never get a perfectly accurate count. Assume,
for the moment, that with your best efforts, you could count a million
votes with 99.9 percent accuracy
-- an incredibly dubious proposition, since nothing is that accurate.
Nevertheless, the Florida election came in as smaller than even this
preposterously high accuracy rate could accommodate. Count and recount
the vote all you want, and as many times as you would like, the outcome
would still be flawed. Human beings don't count millions of items at the
level of accuracy needed to reach a clear conclusion in Florida.

Florida was a dead tie on top of a dead tie in the Electoral College. An
absolute tie might have triggered some sort of obscure law, but a
virtual tie was simply something the law couldn't handle. It appeared
that Bush won or -- if different rules were used or a recount held --
that Gore won. The fact was you could recount as often as you wanted and
get almost any outcome you liked. The built-in error rate could take you
anywhere.

In Florida, of course, the built-in error rate became the foundation for
a challenge to Bush's victory. There was no way to deal with the reality
of the matter -- it was a tie that would decide the election, so it was
a do-over. Each side had to craft a legal argument demonstrating that
its method of interpreting the tie was the only legal way to do it. The
Republicans were outraged when the Democrat-dominated Florida Supreme
Court ruled in favor of a plan that would let the Democrats win. The
Democrats praised the rule of law. All this reversed when the
Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 in favor of what the
Republicans wanted and the Democrats were disgusted with the utter
partisanship of it -- forgetting that the four Democrats on the Supreme
Court voted in as much of a partisan fashion as the Republicans.

What happened in 2000 was a natural and unplanned accident. If another
state had gone Republican or Democrat, then Florida would have been
irrelevant. You needed two absolute ties to make this happen. The
probability of a tie in the Electoral College and a tie in the remaining
state -- a difference so small that it can't be counted -- is the least
likely scenario.

The problem is this: While Florida was a case where no one could count
the vote, a barrier has been broken in which challenging the outcome of
the election no longer requires an outcome below statistical
measurement. Both parties have readied challenges to the legitimacy of
the election that would seem to apply regardless of the count. The
Republicans are challenging newly registered voters and the Democrats
are going to challenge the Republican challenges. There are other issues
on the table as well. For example, the Democrats have made it clear they
don't trust the new electronic voting machines.

In other words, the election could wind up in a legal tangle if it is no
more than moderately close, but the difference is above the statistical
screen. A cultural shift appears to have taken place since 2000 in which
the very legitimacy of the electoral system has been cast into doubt.
There have certainly been episodes of fraud in many elections in the
United States. The miracle is not that there have been frauds, but that
there have been so few and that the republic has survived them.

If we are to believe reports that have become ubiquitous, John F.
Kennedy stole the 1960 election. More precisely, Chicago's mayor and
leader of the Cook County Democratic Party -- at least by urban legend
-- at the behest of Chicago Mafia chief Sam Giancana waited until it
became clear how many votes were needed to give Illinois to Kennedy, and
then whipped them up -- no electronic voting machines needed. If the
story is true, it would not have been the first or last time an election
was stolen in the United States.

Richard Nixon lost that election. Again, according to legend, he was
approached by Republican leaders and told that he should challenge the
election. Nixon -- and if this is true, then it was certainly his finest
moment -- refused to challenge on the basis that even if he won, the
presidency would have been rendered worthless.

We are now reduced to this question: Where have all the Dick Nixons
gone? If we are to believe what each party is saying, there are no
longer any limits to which either party would go to challenge the
election legally. That about puts the situation into context: Nixon had
a finer ethical sense than the leadership of either party today. He let
Kennedy steal the election rather than sully the presidency. The current
crop would try to find any means to win the election, regardless of
consequences.

We do not think that the factual basis of the 2000 challenge is likely
to repeat itself. We do believe it is possible for a pseudo-factual
basis to be generated. If that were to happen, it would be the most
geopolitically significant event we could imagine -- far more important
than whether Bush or Kerry wins. Either one winning would be better --
regardless of who one votes for -- than a situation in which the United
States is paralyzed for weeks or months by legal maneuvering and the new
president takes office with a sense of scandal and illegitimacy hanging
over him.

It was relatively placid in 2000 as years go, but 2004 finds the United
States engaged in global warfare. Were the United States convulsed in a
constitutional crisis lasting three months, the consequences would be
enormous, both in the perception of the United States and the practical
ability of Bush -- who would still be president -- to govern. If nothing
else, the intellectual bandwidth of the political system would be
absorbed in the crisis rather than the war, and the war cannot be
allowed to drift for four years.

One would expect the political leadership to be unified on one thing:
avoiding this. Even if the double miracle of 2000 were to repeat, it
could be expected that the two parties would deliberately avoid a
2000-style confrontation because there is a war on. We would expect them
to emulate the spirit of Nixon -- not that high a hurdle, one would
think. But the fact is that they are prepared to replicate 2000
regardless of whether the facts repeat themselves -- and indifferent to
the war.

A modest proposal presents itself: In the event that the election is
seriously contested, both Bush and Kerry should agree to withdraw their
names from candidacy. They should then meet and jointly select a third
person that they can both agree would be a suitable president, and ask
their electors to vote for him.

We do not know either of these men and don't know whether their
ambitions are such that they could tolerate this solution. Nor do we
know if they could agree on a suitable substitute who could straddle the
difference. Frankly, we think they are likely to fight for the last
morsel of power. Possibly, a political movement could generate itself in
this country to force a compromise.

What is clear is this: A repeat of 2000 is unlikely unless the two
parties create one. They seem committed to that course. If they do, they
will be playing with fire during war. From an objective standpoint, a
victory by either candidate too substantial to be challenged by the
lawyers is far preferable to what seems to be coming -- a close election
and the country torn apart.

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

--
All the flaming and trolls of wreck dot with a pretty GUI.