Uh OH!! Better have a re-vote!

[Tripleshot]

JellyBaby

I know. That hurt.

I did help get one candidate elected in my state,along with the help of a lot of republicans. The son of one of our democrat Governors won a senate seat Jim Matheson. I really feel good about this guy. He will do good for our state.

 

[JellyBaby]

Red,

Yet the captain must sink with his ship...but in the case of Gore I'm sure he has a Secret Jet Boat (powered by ethanol, tsk tsk) that he'll use to escape from the ship just before it lists. Evil World Ruler Types tend to have these things you know. I pity the poor squabbies on deck who are simply left to drown.

 

[chess9]

Red and Others:

If we go to the popular vote by doing away with the Electoral College, we will have to fix our flawed voting system first.

I propose that all voting be done electronically and that it be idiot proof. In other words, if someone fails to vote for a Presidential candidate, the machine says to them: "You didn't vote for a President. If you do not want to vote for a President press NO, if you want to vote for President, press YES." etc. Essentially, the Microsoft model, hopefully without the BSOD.

Current machine voting is archaic, clumsy, inaccurate, and should be replaced with suitably fast and accurate digital technology.

 

[DABANSHEE]

You don't need electronic polling Chess, all you need is for them to be simplified & done by hand in the 1st place.

Here in Australia ballot papers are heaps simpler, they just have a column with the list of candidates & the party they are from, & to the right of them is a column of boxes. One just ticks the box next to the candidate of their choice or numbers all the boxes in order of preference.

Then all ballots are counted by hand, with each counter having a scrutineer from both the Labour & conservative looking over his/her shoulders. A few years ago we had a court order recount in a Queenland seat & the recount was only 6 votes different from the original count (before the absentee military votes were added in, which was the whole point of the recount, they werent included in the 1st count because of some mistake or they were late or something). So its a pretty accurate method.

The problem is they forgot the KISS principle of 'Keep it simple stupid' when they designed that butterfly ballot & the silly punchole system (you can't beat simple ticks in boxes, with one & only one box next to each name). One has to remember when you design things like that they really only work if you design them for the lowest common denominator (ie make it idiot proof). The simple fact is manual counting wasnt replaced by machine counting in the US because its better it was done become its was much cheaper on man-power, both on election officials & party scrutineers.


Even their whole reasoning behing the butterfly ballot was flawed, because if it was just turned on its side (portrait as opposed to landscape format) there's plenty of room to have just one row of candidates with a single punchole next to each candidate, even using the same font.