So.. what say ye? For you non-us-types, the electoral college info can be found here.

What do you propose instead? Direct democracy?

No. I propose an oligarchy, composed solely of philosopher-kings me, myself and I.

Long live the Lecteruian Triumvirate!

I say keep it but follow the Maine plan. It's a fair compromise.

For thos who don't know, Maine (along with one or two other states) awards it's electoral votes by districts won. So the state could very well be split between two candidates.

I say embed everyone with a chip and allow a computer to elect the president, like in Asimov's short story. (I think it was called "Election Day")

that was an early asimov short story in the multivac series. people weren't implanted with chips though.

the computer ran all sorts of statistical models and only required one additional variable it could not provide for itself: the human factor.

so instead of determining itself who the next president would be selected, it would find the one person who'd make the only vote.

the story evolves around the poor chap who got selected. as he makes his way towards the poll booth, all eyes, cameras are on him as he apprehend his ultimate choice and fears any backslash.

Oh yeah, that's right.

Does he fear ordinary slashes, too?

Ok, I'm probs going to pour cold water on a thread, but what the hell, it might turn into an interesting debate.

The biggest problem with the electoral college is that it removes the actual election from the hands of the people. If you read that wikipedia entry you will see that there is historical precedent for faithless votes, but only 24 states have legislation to punish electoral college members who vote against their pledge.

In effect, the entire system of having an electoral college makes the USAs claim to democracy a sad joke. That might not be a terribly popular statement, but its one I am prepared to accept flames for.

My personal belief is that any system of voting which is based around electing a person rather than a party with established policies is flawed at its very heart. You can say 'but we don't, we elect a democrat or a republican' and to an extent thats true, but when a man is elected to presidency, he is no longer a member of either party. He can't be. His vow is to honour, protect and defend the constitution and in no place in the vow is there room for party policies.

Having a system which basically discards the results from the popular vote and instead has a group of 'picked' voters to elect the president and vice president is prone to corruption and flawed at its very heart.

Running a nation is nothing like winning a popularity contest and unfortunately, that is what US politics has devolved to. US politics is a strange combination of corruption, money and charisma. Ask yourself whether that is where you want the leaders of your countries to come from.

I'm Australian and if you ask me, I will say yes, I do think our system is better. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_Australia for a bit more information and just for free I'll throw in another useful bit of info (and a bit of a hint as to why I think the Australian system is better) I'll tell you this: Voting is compulsory in Australia.

Oh and could someone please tell me how to embed a link into text on this forum? I've been trying to work it out but everything I have tried so far just ends up as plain text.

Making voting compulsory does not solve the problem. Neither do I think that any government is free of corruption, and adapting a holier-than-thou attitude will not help things, much less a pissing contest about concepts of government (that's how I perceived your post. please correct me if I'm wrong).

I am not against the electoral system as a concept. Nor am I against voting for a person, rather than a party, or vice versa. Every system has its flaws and advantages. But I'm far out of my depth when talking about politics (not being a politologist), local or global, so I can only voice opinions.

My being a Swiss citizen definitely gives me a bias on this topic, but I still think that the concept of the electoral system is sound. However, it might not be suited for the current state the people it is intended for are in.

the syntax is (without the spaces between the square brackets):
[ url=http://www.myurl.com ]This is where you place your overlay text.[ /url ]

It will look like this:

This is how it looks.

Other useable tags, all with square brackets around the opening and closing tags:

b /b -> bold
i /i -> italics
u /u -> underlined

exceptions (again, without spaces, this time between preceding text and underscore or circumflex, and the curly braces):
superscript: x ^ {2} -> x²
subscript: F _ {N} -> F_N

If I omitted any, I'm sorry.

Ok, I apologise if it sounded a bit holier than thou, which on second reading it probably did. It was intended to provoke a discussion about different political systems. I'm also not denying that the Australian political system is subject to corruption. Of course it is, if we needed proof, we would only have to look at a gentleman called Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson and we would have all the confirmation we needed.

And without starting a pissing contest (because that wasn't my intention either) I am saying that the Australian system is less likely to collapse the way the electoral system has so often proved to do.

Compulsory voting doesn't solve the problem completely, but it goes a hell of a long way towards putting the power of government into the hands of the people.

People are basically cheapskates. They won't give anything away for free, even something so nebulous and conceptual as a vote.

If they are forced to vote, then their basic instinct is to make sure that vote goes where they want it to. In order to do that, they begin to pay attention to politics and in doing so, start to make informed decisions about the policies and politicians they are watching.

They might not necessarily be educated decisions, but they are informed decisions.

With non-compulsory voting though - and as any political scientist will tell you - you have about forty per cent of the population voting. eighty per cent of those voters are generally voting the party line, and normally are split fairly evenly between the two opposing parties.

Political scientists know therefore that the people they need to convince are the 'swingers'. Those are people who vote with their conscience - which makes up the majority of these voters - and the rest are activists of one sort or another. These people will vote for whichever party has promised to support whatever these people happen to be pushing.

All this basically means that politicians in non-compulsory voting countries know that all they have to do is convince about five (5) per cent of the population to support them and they will end up in power.

How much better would it be if they needed to convince 70 per cent, or 80 per cent?

Oh and thanks for the info on the syntax, I don't understand what was going wrong there.

I see what you mean by compulsory voting, and during more radical moods, I'd be inclined to institute it.

I am aware that with non-compulsory voting, you have a terribly low percentage of the people actually voting (Switzerland is no exception to that rule), but I was largely unconscious of the concept of 'swingers', but it stands to reason, naturally.

On a sidenote: What are the penalties for not voting in Australia? I'm guessing that it's a fine, which would be the most sensible thing to do.

But I am also against voting only for a party, partially because no party can ever fully represent my political extensions to the last detail (and some are not just mere details). I am aware that at times, the smaller of two evils has to be chosen, but I detest having to make such a decision, knowing that no matter what or who I vote for, it will not yield a better result.
Sadly, only voting for a person will not solve the problem, either.

In my opinion, the Swiss system works very well in its natural environment, where you may at times vote either by political preference (socialist, bourgeois,...) or by personal preference (when there are individuals without a party backing them).
Also, in Switzerland, you may not vote people into the federal council (the highest level of decision, cf. the wikipedia article pertaining to teh Swiss democracy), but instead, you vote people into the national council, which isn't taht direct, either, but I think it works.

Then again, we have the low voter turnout, as well as other severely limiting factors, such as the federational system et al.

You can vote a straight party ticket in the US as well (Such as, All the republicans Running, or All the Democrats running, or all the Green party running, etc) But that's usually stupid because there are morons out there in all parties and I really hate supporting lazy or stupid political candidates.

I would love for voting to be mandatory. However, that would be hard to track since we can't even agree on requiring a photo ID to vote in this country.

Seriously, here in Wisconsin you can just show up to vote, claim to be someone else, and vote. No one checks ID's or anything. You just announce your "name" & address, the poll workers look it up, and give you a ballot. No questions asked. It's crazy.

But, perhaps if you're not on the voter rolls perhaps you don;t get any tax refunds due to you. Or perhaps there is a fine. I dunno, but making it mandatory for everyone to vote would be a great idea.

Everyone loves to complain about the government, when I hear someone complain, I ask them if they voted in the last election. If they didn't vote, I tend to berate them mercilessly and discount any political opinions they might hold.

At first glance, saying that its compulsory to vote can be something of a jagged little pill, especially when people are bleating about 'rights' and so on.

What a lot of people fail to see is that along with 'rights' comes another concept known as 'responsibility'. Which is why people like you and me, LeberMac, who pounce on non-voting whingers with derison when they complain about the government. I feel particularly justified in giving them a full force tongue lashing when I hear them do it, simply because if they have been stupid enough to not vote and make their opinion heard, then they have shown themselves to be willing to have what 'rights' they have taken from them.

The punishment for not voting in Australia is generally a fine, but in some cases it can be imprisonment. That's rare, but possible.

The very fact that voting can be so difficult is what makes it such a responsibility. You can't vote for Representative X because quite simply, his stance on green issues isn't tight enough, but Representative Y has a good stance on green issues, but he (or she) looks a bit dubious when it comes to the way large businesses and business taxes are concerned. Conversely, Representative A looks good in a lot of areas but somehow she looks a bit flaky and there was also that business a few years ago when she was in opposition and started making wild statements which she had no intention of following up on.

Who do you vote for?

To use the UK as an example, if Rep. X was a Labour Party rep, Y was a Conservative and A was a Liberal Democrat, then my personal choice would be Y. Simply because while each of these politicians as individuals will make stupid statements and have personal weaknesses, they belong to parties which on the whole, are democratically run. That means that - again on the whole - the policies they come up with generally reflect the current thinking within that party. Since those policies must be agreed with by the policies, it does no harm to get to know each party reasonably well before you vote.

Its a responsibility and its a damn big one. Unfortunately (to bring this back to topic), its a responsibility which is cleanly and graphically ignored by the concept of having an electoral college system of any kind. Who are these people to second guess the wants of the voting public? How dare they?

LeberMac, just to bring some additional craziness into your life, think about this.

I'm an Australian citizen living in the United Kingdom. Have been for nearly four years. I have permanent residency, but I am not a british citizen. I might be in the future, but at the moment, I'm a legal alien.

So long as I have a residence in the united kingdom, I am perfectly entitled to vote here. How crazy is that? There was a law passed in the early part of this century which allows me, a non-citizen, to vote. To have a hand in the direction the country will go in. Is it something I am going to exercise? Damn straight it is.

How bizarre is that? Does the USA allow people who hold a green card to vote? Not in a million, billion years.

Harsh words.

I completely agree with you that with rights (and freedom) comes just as much, or rather, more, responsibility to be exercised. I always vote, and not without informing myself to make an educated decision. But I still think that it does a great deal more to preserve representatives from 'strutting their stuff' if you have them elected not by the public, but by people you elected to do that duty for you.

If, for instance, the Swiss federal council were elected by the public, you'd have so many problems on your hands, you couldn't even run the country. I'm not joking here, and I'm not making this statement out of spite.

Imagine the federal councillors having to cater to and convince the public opinion. Currently, there is one very demagogic person in it, and doing away with that barrier that is the Swiss national council, you would give many times more power to him, while another, who is doing perfectly well by his task, but who is rather introverted and with a mindset to solving problems rather than exacerbating them, would surely get shot down in the media crossfire. And you cannot possibly want that.

You seem to be trusting the ordinary citizen a bit too far; if anything, history has shown that usually, people bow to need or force and pretty promises. Look at ancient Athens, where they ousted the rightful government to appease a dictator who had been exiled beforehand and then returned with a large military force (the name escapes my memory at the moment); look at Germany, who elected Adolf Hitler in the belief that he would solve their problems.

Now without starting off a flame war about the nazis, if you look at some of the things Hitler did in Germany between 1933 and 1938, you will see he did a lot of good for Germany.

Unfortunately, paired with those actions were attitudes and policies which were completely beyond the pale and utterly inexcusable. To the point where it is difficult to believe that the events he precipitated actually occurred within a lifetime of where we are now. That they did is a matter of record.

However, between 1933 and 1938 Hitler managed to get the Germany economy moving and flourishing to the point where he could afford to start and fight an incredibly large and expensive war for over six years. That's a huge undertaking and if his energies had been directed towards good rather than the evil he produced, Hitler's leadership of Germany could well have been seen as enlightened and forward thinking. The tragedy is, that if Hitler had continued his good work and completely dropped the evil he did, that Germany would probably occupy a pre-eminent position in world politics now, which was Hitler's goal all along. They weren't though and he was a murderous prick, so to an extent, your point is proven.

You may be right that I am trusting the ordinary citizen too far, but I am thinking of majority rule rather than mob rule here.

Are you the only person who dislikes the demagogue in Swiss politics? Again, are you the only person who likes the introverted problem solver? Speaking for myself, I am generally impressed more by someone who gets his head down, his bum up and does the work that I am by someone who spends his time telling people to look at him. I don't think I'm alone in that either.

Unfortunately however, we live in an age where the celebrity cult rules. That means that the weak minded and impressionable are likely to be taken in by the demagogue and he will garner more votes than the problem solver. So whats the solution?

I'm afraid its what I've been pushing all along. Compulsory voting. There is a good sixty percent of the people out there who are perfectly capable forging an opinion, but for all sorts of reasons - including apathy directed at the politicians themselves - don't vote.

People on the whole are smart, mobs are foolish. But when they are standing alone in a polling booth, they are not part of a mob, they are individuals, expressing themselves to the government.

The athens example is a reasonably good one, however ancient athens didn't have the news gathering and dissemination skills available to us today. In addition, 21st century cynicism is elevated to an extreme degree compared to 2000 B.C.E, I think you would have to agree. People are more analytical and generally knowledgeable than they were back then. Also, I'm willing to bet that Athens didn't have universal suffrage.

If memory serves correctly, Hitler mostly pushed the weapon industry, thereby 'creating' jobs. I could be mistaken. The ultimate goal of the highways built was, naturally, a strategic one (just like the connection of Vienna's inner city to the railroad). But, we're veering off-topic.

I am not the only one who thinks that way about the demagogue, nor about the introverted problem solver, however there are far more people who think the other way round, being led on by thedemagogue, and if they were to obtain more power (by giving them direct control over who to vote into the federal council), Bad Things^TM would happen.

This far, we agree.

As for people being more reasonable alone in a voting booth... I don't know. Didn't they vote for a rather odd prime minister (this is open to debate...) in Australia, where, according to you, they are compelled to vote, and alone at that?

And as for them being more analytical and/or knowledgeable... I just do not share your view, I'm sorry. It just doesn't look to me like 'the people' are actually taking note of the different means of information available to them, and if they do, we have another problem in that these channels (internet, tv, radio, newspaper, discussions) are almost always necessarily biased, which does not help things any, either.

That said, I wouldn't be against voting being compulsory, but I am against too direct a democracy.

/me moves topic back to original subject

The problem with the Electoral College, more than faithless electors, is that it is largely a winner-take-all system that stymies the popular vote by giving disproportionate power to small states.

Yes, yes, I know why we have a bicameral legislature and how much good it is, but the fact is that Congress, unlike the Electoral College, can split down based on the opinions of individual members (whereas in the EC, the electors are usually just told to all vote for one candidate or another).

However, instituting a purely democratic Electoral College where the votes of each state are split based on voting percentages gives disproportional power to the large states. This is, naturally, squelches minority rights in favor a tyranny of the majority, instead of maintaining an unstable equilibrium between the faction of the majority and the faction of the minority. (I'm sure those of you who have read Madison's Federalist Papers know what I am getting at).

Instead I would propose to reform the system to better reflect our form of government. Senatorial Electors in the EC would continue with the 'winner-takes-all' system, but the Representative Electors would split their votes based on the percentage of votes each candidate attained within the state.

This would make the EC more democratic, whilst retaining the additional power granted to the less influential small states.