🚀 go-pugleaf

Rob Aldrich wrote:
> 
> 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.

I should probably ignore someone who can't even spell my name correctly
when it is right in front of him, but I never suggested any method of
paying for an election by popular vote.  Never thought about the cost.
Please justify your statement.  The popular votes are still counted.
Why would it cost so much more money?  I would think that if anything
it would cost less.
 
> 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.

If the power to elect was placed into the voter's hands, I'm confident
that you'd see a much larger turnout on Election Day.  Many people have
become apathetic over the whole process because they feel that their vote
is not significant.

> 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?

The popular votes are already being tabluated.  Don't you ever watch the
election results on TV?  All the major networks report the popular vote
totals.

> 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.

The government already has several databases that contain this information.
The Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service come
to mind immediately; there are probably others also.

> 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

It's people like this that are voting?  No wonder the Country has so many
problems.

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