Presidential Election

Girl-From-Mars

what does everyone think abotu bush becoming president, even though gore got more votes? is it really so wrong to ask for all the votes to be counted? i think they should be counted before a president is actually decided, why doesnt bush want them counted? the fact its taken so long is just madness though, cant it be counted right the first time?

Former Member

Those were probably the most stupid elections I've 'seen'. And just the system the president is choosed by. (Now me knows only words in .is lol)
At least I wouldn't want to vote for someone and not have my vote counted. I don't think I'm going to vote in the future anyways so I'll just drop the twaddle. :P

So I got not much more to say...

-Faf

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I fly like Wilma!!!

Former Member

When you have to count millions of votes, there's always going to be some error in there. The problem was that in Florida B & G were so close the difference was much less than the normal margin of error.

As to counting them before a president is decided, well they were, several times. Gore kept arguing (through the courts as well) that it wasn't done accurately enough, and needed to be redone, again. From some Republican's (Bush's) point of view Gore was trying to recount again and again till he got the result he wanted.

The peculiarity of Gore losing though he had more votes is not that unusual - most electoral systems have problems like that. 'First past the post' (UK) could end up with that happening (I think), and pretty much always gives the winner a majority in parliament even when they didn't get a majority in terms of votes. 'Proportional representation' (lots of countries in Europe) is fairer, but can end up with weak coalition governments.

I have to say I think Bush is bad news, if not for America then definitely for everywhere else, because he's isolationist and doesn't have a clue about the rest of the world, or about world politics. In general he also seems short sighted and downright stupid - plus his record as governor of Texas is hardly exemplary. He doesn't have a clean past either, so you can expect a scandal at some point IMO.

Former Member

I think the whole elctrion was weird, I stayd up that nite watching itn all the way thru it looked like Bush should win, the amount of states Bush won compared to Gore, it was just the little states with loadsa ppl in that made it close. I think by the looks of the voting Bush was wanted by more of a cross-section of America then Gore.

Former Member

The whole thing was a farce. as soon as the Yanks realise what fools they have made of themselves maybe they'll take a long hard look at their so called "democracy" where they elect people on the basis of how much they spend on TV advertising.
The world would be better off without the USA, who here agrees?!?!?

Former Member

Originally posted by Whowhere:
The whole thing was a farce. as soon as the Yanks realise what fools they have made of themselves maybe they'll take a long hard look at their so called "democracy" where they elect people on the basis of how much they spend on TV advertising.

I agree the system is morally corrupt at least partly because of this, but do you think that it produced the unusual result here? It was a very close run election, and most voting systems are able to produce results that look wrong like this but conform to their system.

I think the reason America has this system of each State electing representatives to the electoral college, who then elect the president, is because of the significance of the (at least partial) independence of each State. If you take this independence as necessary, then:

1. Each State chooses how to elect its representatives, and they choose el presidente by a simple majority. That's why it not a simple majority vote for the whole country.

2. It's difficult to exactly decide the number of reps each State should have in the electoral college, if only because populations change quite a lot, even every 4 years (immigration, emmigration, birth and death rate changes etc.). This means that you won't get every State being exactly fairly represented in the electoral college, so it's difficult to ensure the result will be 'fair' if it's a close election like this time. When the difference is only about 100000 (or 2 or 6 or whatever) out of 100000000 (i.e. 0.1%, 0.2%, whatever), it's not surprising something like this happens.

The world would be better off without the USA, who here agrees?!?!?

That's impossible to say, it's like trying to fortell the future. If the USA was simply 'not there', who's to say Stalinist Russia wouldn't rule the world, or some other nastier superpower (even the Third Reich). Could be better, but no reason why necessarily. I do agree that the USA often abuses its power or doesn't deserve it, and is nowhere near as advanced or civilised as some of it thinks, but its inhabitants are only human after all... we know what that means... <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif"&gt;


[This message has been edited by JB (edited 16-12-2000).]

Former Member

The *real* travesty here is nothing to do with the slim margin in the count - it's that a politically appointed court got the final say. Even the USA's own constitution states that a government derives its power from the consent of the governed. If they're prepared to ride roughshod over that consent just because it's a close-run thing, they need to rethink what they stand for. Even if it took a month of Sundays, they should have counted every single vote by Mark One Eyeball. Yes, there's always uncertainty - when it's a close call, you shift to more certain, more time-consuming methods. For crying out loud, Uncle Sam, if you're going to do it, do it properly!

Former Member

When bush was head of texas or whatever you call it he gave the go on the death penalty fo rover 150 people and he thinks that makes him a hard man, well i hope for americas sake he is not so brutal on the whole country because it is possible to make mistakes and a lot of innocent people will be getting killed!