furtive explorations

Actually, the choice was between Congress (no check and balance that way), Vote by State (Govenor or State House? worse you have people who you may no longer like picking higher ups, dangerous!), and Vote by Landholder (Populous States could control the presidency even though most States weren't represented at all.)

The compromise was to have States cast as many votes as they had seats in the combined houses, giving a slight proportional edge to small states and taking away the direct vote which could have overwhelming single candidate votes.

The compromise of the Electoral College means you elect a group of people who promise to vote your way and tends to prevent a few states from dominating the country or a cult of personality in one region from overwhelming the popular vote. You must win a majority of the people in a majority of the states, even if only by the slightest margins.

The hidden danger/benefit of the Electoral College is that in all but 2 States, they aren't REQUIRED to vote for the candidate they promised to vote for. The reasoning at the time was that men of conscience would be able to pick a new choice if the original choice died or proved to be a criminal or was shown to be lying about his campaign promises or was disqualified after the popular election but before assuming office. Thus, by placing the final power to select the President in the hands of these representatives we assure the smooth transition of power without having to involve the rather partisan and potentially in need of checks and balances House/Senate.

The system just seems really interesting when one candidate wins a few large states and the other wins a lot of small states. Then a few medium sized states winds up picking. Or even just one. =)

The nice thing about the Electoral College system is that it is only confused when the people are. The bad thing is that the ignorant masses that the founders feared almost as much as a Monarchy might keep getting confused and start believing we live in a Democracy rather than a Representative Republic. =P

I'm telling you, I'm on to something here. This could be it. Really, the only thing the White House is missing is a wacky neighbor, or a kookie Secret Service guy who's hot for Tipper, or the "Joint" Chiefs-of-Staff for the military or something. It'll work, get Hollywood on the phone, see what it's worth!

I'm telling ya, this is the ticket!!!

First off, there is little chance of them getting a constitutional amendment through a split congress and even less chance of them getting 34 states to ratify it.

The deal with the college is this: our founding fathers had a nasty choice in front of them. They were uniting a group of 13 independent states. Each one was effectively a country and each was organised slightly differently. When it came to choosing an executive three basic plans were fronted. They had rejected having the congress elect a president as they needed the executive as a check on the congress. They had rejected having the govenors of the states select a chief as fraught with political danger and that it could delay the will of the people.

Their three choices were to have a pure democratic election with a direct vote, a state level election where you voted how your state would vote, and a "college" system where you vote for a representative who will vote his conscience.

The first system, the direct vote, had a nasty flaw in that Pennsylvania had a LOT more people than most of the other states. It was clear to them then that a politian could win most of PA and just one other state, like Virginia by a wide margin and wind up with 50% of the vote. And that with hardly any votes from other states. You could easily wind up with an executive that represented half the people but only 11 of the 13 states. (even today, give a cult of personality a 90% win in California and 15% of every other state and you could have around 50%!)

The second two systems, with basically 13 votes, allowed a candidate to win all the smallest states, garnering only about 25% of the popular vote and yet moving on to executive power over the largest states. Worse, you had in one case the state "voting" again and in the other you had each state electing all kinds of people who may or may not do what they say.

In sorting out these two nasty traps (both seeming fairly likely at the time) they found a compromise in which the college system would have as many votes as each state had in all of congress. Thus the smallest state got 3 votes minimum and the same census based solution they had found to the problem of the makeup of the senate and house could be used. (The senate basically having 2 votes per state and the house having a number of reps proportional to the population, if both systems agree on something, you can be pretty sure it represents the will of the nation as a whole). The states were left the task of how to pick and what rules to lay upon the college members.

Other checks were added like signatures from state executives and court oversight in districts but mostly that is how it came about. A compromise between the tyranny of the masses and the fear of disproportionate state populations.

If you look at how it works in various situations, you see the value of it. In a clear race with a majority of the country voting for one man, all the systems work. In a lop sided race with parts of the country diametrically opposed, the college delivers the person who pleases the most states, even if by a bare margin. In a close fought race in every state, the electoral college returns the candiate that pleased the most large states and in all but the wierdest of cases, the person who pleased the most states as well. Huge blowouts in a few states don't register but minor gains in all states can make a major difference.

When it comes down to it, the college system has "failed" to elect the popular candidate 4 (maybe 5 here soon?) times but in each of those cases the nation was so split that neither of the candidates was truely a clear victor and a great deal of people felt that both were capable. The college system may wobble a little in this case but the message from the people was clear, both candidates are capable (or useless, but let's not go there today), and we couldn't quite make up our minds.

Look at the numbers today: Gore has 21 "states", Bush has 29; Gore has the popular lead with about 190,000 more people out of about 97,00,000 voting; Gore has 267 electoral votes and Bush has 246. With the last state swinging on as few as 2,000 votes and having 25 college votes to throw, which system has it right?

In the end, the dithering of the people is reflected in the process. I think that is just the way it should work. =)

So I do a little one man play for my cow-orker: (hi devon!)

Redneck: Whoooo Whoooo!
Reporter: Sir, you seem excited at the election results so far.
Redneck: Aww yeah. This is great! (spitting chips) It's a heck of a race!
Reporter: Who are you cheering for?
Redneck: Bush, of course!
Reporter: You voted for Bush today?
Redneck: What? Nah, I didn't VOTE ta day, was busy.
Reporter: Oh. (turning away)
Redneck: What? I gotta vote for em to cheer for em? Heck I cheered at the SuperBowl
         and I never played no football.

My goodness. I mean. It's horrific. It's evil. It's...WRONG. But you still went through a few of them, didn't you? Huh? I knew you did.

mini-faq on this link:
Oh, not another politics article. Nope, well sorta...
Is the domain you are sending me to actually Seanbaby.com? Yeah, baby!
Is the article about Oregon, which I'm no where near geographically or emotionally? Fuk'n'a it is!
Why should I? For the kids, for the kids!
Are there pictures, cause you know I'm scared of plain text pages. Yes, hun, there are pictures, funny ones!
Is there a single quote that sums the entire article up, including the humor, the serious aspects and the quality writing. Nope, that is insane, if you could do that, why the fuck would you write a three page rant on something... Oh wait, maybe there is:

Explain to them that their parents and other voters are fucking crazy nazis, and they're more worried about who some stranger is laying than how much of a moron their kids will grow up to be.

Any more questions?

K, go here. Scroll to the bottom. Is it funny? The guy's name is Dick Weller, living proof that homosexuals do change. (just not their names, eh?)

Oops, reading the comments broke my cool:

I see a lot of complaining about the 70+ hour work week issue. I think most of the people here miss the point of what "great" programmer means. You can be one of the best writers in the world but if you write only a paragraph a day you'll never be "great". You may technically be one of the best artists of your era but if you don't immerse yourself in it day and night you'll never be "great".

Sorry, you may be a genius problem solver and coder but part of being a "great" is giving yourself over to the art. It DOES mean giving up your free time, it DOES mean maybe not having children, it DOES mean maybe burning out, it DOES mean sleepless nights telnet'ing in from home to work on the problem you just left. Being a programmer at the "great" level, building a major system with the purity of vision you need to be "great" means no distractions and getting the core of the code down before the "Man(ager) from Porlock" comes along to snatch your vision away.

Putting it more succintly, arsdigita gratia artdigitas =)

Now I need to decide what to do about it getting out of hand. =) And I'm still mulling over other comics and more fine ones appear every day so I'm clearly going to fall behind at some point. I should invest in some form magic to compress it or actually upgrade the server this runs on to the point where I could write CGI's for it. (A P133 with 32MB of memory drives this and 2 other sites. *snort*)