🚀 go-pugleaf

Rick Bowen wrote:
> 
> Artie_Turner wrote:
> >
> > Ernie Englehart wrote:
> >
> > >It's time to do away with the electoral college and elect the
> > >President based on popular vote.  Then the power to elect will be
> > >placed back into the hands of the voters, who could write in the
> > >man that they REALLY want to be their President.
> >
> >Just for the record, Einstein, no President has ever been elected by > >the electoral college that didn't win the majority of the popular
> >vote.
> 
> Uh, Einstein, Slick got 43%. Majority = 50.1% or above.
> Rick

Rick:

Way to go, but kinda cruel to point out that Mr. Turner can't even
recognize the significance of a four year old historcal occurance to his
argument :)

Getting back to Mr. Engelhart's plan to raise the cost of having
elections by hundreds of millions of dollars (if not billions), I hope
he is planning to pay for it himself--rather than passing the cost of
his idea onto the American taxpayers.

And I assume when the person who has the most votes only receives one
million votes (because, after all, we are all able to express our
personal choice) the election of a president by less that 1% of the
population will be considered by Mr. Engelhart to be placing control
back into the hands of the voters.

By the way, under the current procurement procedures of the federal
government, how long would it take, and how much do you think it would
cost, to get a compuer system and programs sufficient the tabulate the
individual choices of 150 million or so voters?  I guess the cheapest
way would be to have a database large enough to put every American born
person's name into it with his SSN and address and require every person
voting to provide the same information on his ballot so that we could be
sure that all the votes for me would not go to the other Robert C.
Aldrich's in the US.  Think we should limit the voter's right to vote by
requiring him to get the SSN of his candidate himself, or should the
federal government just publish everyone's SSN and address before the
election.  The latter would have a lot of benefits; e.g. I could look at
my friends' checkbooks to get their account numbers and then get their
SSNs from the federal governemnt and by able to use the phone to call
their banks and get their checking and savings balances.  This would
help me know who I could borrow money from when in need. And if I didn't
like them, I could transfer their funds from their account.  And at
banks like mine that only allow transfers by phone within accounts held
by the same people, I could transfer all their money to their savings
and at least bounce their checks.

Or maybe, so as not to invade the privacy of citizens as much, the
government could print a ballot with 150 million names and addresses and
let the voter choose the one he wants.  NO, I guess that wouldn't
work...we'd have to cut down too many trees to make the 88 Billion Miles
of ballots necessary to hold the election.


Rob