Remember November

3 11 2004

Well, it’s over. I can’t say that I’m terribly suprised by the outcome, but
again I am amazed with the piss-poor implementation of democracy in America. The
system is bloated, disorganized, and increasingly geared toward uncertainty,
infammatory remarks and up-to-the-minute media coverage.

It’s disgusting.

We say that “every vote counts” but in reality, it’s just not so. Thousands of
votes from citizens of all states have not and will never be counted because
“they don’t appear to affect final counts.” Counting processes are ridden with
opportunity for human and machine error (some say the MoE’s as high as 3% – that
could have swung a couple states last night…)

I think we need to get over this “must know now” attitude FAST and develop a
more accurate system. It may take a week to know who won. Sure. But I would
rather be more confident in the end. Definately not feeling it right now.

Only 10% of voters between 18 and 24 voted yesterday.
The same percentage
as last year.

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2 responses to “Remember November”

5 11 2004
Erin (10:40:15) :

its sad but true. we have a stupid broken system in place now. i don’t think
there is a big threat any more of a bich duke/lord from europe coming over and
“buying” the presidency, so we need to ditch the electoral college.

5 11 2004
Kyle (16:28:21) :

Actually, the votes are being counted, and they will be counted in the official
results that are released (for most states) later in November. If one candidate
simply has a margin that cannot be overcome by the other candidate, then the
news networks declare that state for one side or the other.

There will definitely be error in any project as large as counting and sorting
115,000,000 votes in an election like this. It’s important that we work to
minimize this error, and you’re right, not enough has been done to effect that
change.

As for the electoral system, I’d prefer that we just switch over to a popular
vote system, too. Then candidates’ platforms wouldn’t be affected or biased
towards states with a lot of electoral votes, and their time might be more
evenly divided among the population–they might not spend 98% of their time in
the same 4 states in the last 2 weeks.