Here's to Colly, historian

[Pure]

Congratulations,

The numbers tonight, as well as the so called 'pundits' are echoing what you've been explaining in this forum for some time.

The values of Americans, by and large, are not reflected in the socalled 'liberals' worldview. Some, one may find narrow, as in gay/lesbian issues, but it's important to keep an eye to _reality_. What most believe, not what we, the supposedly enlightened think they should believe.

The Dems have lost the South almost by design, for the last 20 or 30 years, with the odd exception. The Dems are losing hold of the Hispanic voters, on cultural issues, as well, etc. There is a kind of arrogance about 'progressive values' and positions. (If the others _don't_ hold them, they should!)

All in all, you've served as an excellent educator, a rare conservative with mastery of the facts and the ability to look reality in the face.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Congratulations,

The numbers tonight, as well as the so called 'pundits' are echoing what you've been explaining in this forum for some time.

The values of Americans, by and large, are not reflected in the socalled 'liberals' worldview. Some, one may find narrow, as in gay/lesbian issues, but it's important to keep an eye to _reality_. What most believe, not what we, the supposedly enlightened think they should believe.

The Dems have lost the South almost by design, for the last 20 or 30 years, with the odd exception. The Dems are losing hold of the Hispanic voters, on cultural issues, as well, etc. There is a kind of arrogance about 'progressive values' and positions. (If the others _don't_ hold them, they should!)

All in all, you've served as an excellent educator, a rare conservative with mastery of the facts and the ability to look reality in the face.

Thank you J. I often feel like the roman soldier, bringing Nero news of another defeat. Knowing that killing the messenger is in vogue.

Kerry did loose the south, his ploy to take the south west failed. If he wins, he will do so with far fewer states than Bush won. It's great to walk in knowing you will take NY and and California. But that alone isn't going to insure victory.

I still hold out the hope he will take Ohio. It isn't much hope, as he is loosing by over 100k votes with 97% reporting, but it's possible.

If he does loose, I wonder what all those voters in the Northeast, who said electability was their prime reason for choosing him will think? I think we all wear blinders to some degree, but I have to wonder if what hard core democrats or republicans see as electable bears any resemblance to what the moderates in both parites and independants see?

-Colly

 

[Pure]

It's possible Kerry will eke out something in the electoral college, but as several commentators have observed, Bush's *popular margin*, in excess of 3 mill (about 3.5 mill, iirc) makes a divergent college outcome pretty unlikely.

Were the shoe on the other foot, the Dems would hate the college, call it an affront to democracy, and scream so loud Osama could hear it without his BBC hookup.

There are a couple sites that attempted to predict outcome and *voter turnout. The (predictions of) latter--esp. when done by Dems-- was often inflated it seems. The young did NOT flock to the polls. Further, the Rove-rousted turnout of evangelicals played a huge role, so that the increase did not work so much against Republicans as feared.

PS. There is indeed a problem with what 'hard core' Dems (the bosses) think is electable. Further, as several commentators stated, Kerry chose to *downplay many liberal positions, e.g, around abortion. He didn't talk that much of it. Clinton said, he thought that abortion should be legal, but 'rare.' IOW Kerry was NOT going to be much respected by independents who differed.

 

[Liar]

Can someone explain this to me...

I never quite understood this confusion you ppl seems to have regarding voting registration. Interim ballots (was that the word?, disputed registration procedures and all that jazz. Here in Sweden, all adult citizens are automatically registered to vote. You get a voting certificate by mail about a month before the election. Even homeless people do, as they all have a registered adress och contact proxy somewhere, often a post office box provided by organisations like the salvation army. You show up, identify yourself, and vote. Or send a representative if you're immobile.

It works, everyone finds their booths, lines are short, ballots are not disputed, no laywers goes bananas and everyone agrees that the election went down fairly. Of some five million votes in the last parlament election over here, a total of 321 votes were dispuited and discarded because of faulty voting registration. Most of them because the person had died, or changed citizenship between getting the voting card and election day, and someone tried to use it to vote twice.

How come it looks like minor anarchy over there to me? Is it just the way that media presents it?

#L

Edit: mebbe I posted this in the wrong thread, but there are so many of them running, I'm having a hard time keeping up.

 

[Weird Harold]

Here in Sweden, all adult citizens are automatically registered to vote. You get a voting certificate by mail about a month before the election.

Registration isn't automatic here and we have quaint custom clled "gerrymandering" that changes district boundaries with every census.

As a result of changes in district boundaries, the place you've gone for decade is suddenly no longer your polling place.

Since registration isn't automatic and the rules and procedures for registration are different in each state -- sometimes in each county -- if you move fo any reason you a) have to re-register and b) figure out where you precinct pollinglace is.

Most states send out a voter registration card to the last known address about six months before a general election and a sample ballot about 30 days before. Both show the polling place and precinct number but they get lost in themonth between arrival and the election.

The short answer is that most people don't take registration seriously enough to keep track of when and where to vote.

 

[Guest]

 

[Pure]

Hi Liar,

The answer to your question is that there is no reason for 'registration' or for making it complicated, except for screening of the notsobright, transients, non-white, and poor.

It could come with driver's licenses, for instance. It's true, as Lime says, there is state control, lack of uniformity; how much that could be regulated by congress, in the absence of an amendment, I don't know.

But there's no reason states need to make it hard.

One reason, down south, in the past, was that 'literacy tests' were used to screen voters; made easy for whites, and difficult for blacks. You get the picture. In at least parts of the US, one doesn't WANT just ANYONE to vote. Historically, for instance, there were property requirements to weed out the 'undesirables.'

 

[Boxlicker101]

Can someone explain this to me...

I never quite understood this confusion you ppl seems to have regarding voting registration. Interim ballots (was that the word?, disputed registration procedures and all that jazz. Here in Sweden, all adult citizens are automatically registered to vote. You get a voting certificate by mail about a month before the election. Even homeless people do, as they all have a registered adress och contact proxy somewhere, often a post office box provided by organisations like the salvation army. You show up, identify yourself, and vote. Or send a representative if you're immobile.

It works, everyone finds their booths, lines are short, ballots are not disputed, no laywers goes bananas and everyone agrees that the election went down fairly. Of some five million votes in the last parlament election over here, a total of 321 votes were dispuited and discarded because of faulty voting registration. Most of them because the person had died, or changed citizenship between getting the voting card and election day, and someone tried to use it to vote twice.

How come it looks like minor anarchy over there to me? Is it just the way that media presents it?

#L

Edit: mebbe I posted this in the wrong thread, but there are so many of them running, I'm having a hard time keeping up.

There are several reasons for registration. One is to determine where a person should vote because voting is also done for many offices besides the presidency. It is also to keep persons from voting more than once. Registration is a simple process and anybody who wants to do so can register to vote.

A few weeks before the election, voters get a registration certificate, a sample ballot that includes the voting place, and a handbook describing what is on the ballot. The idea is to look over the handbook, mark the sample ballot and then copy the sample when the voter actually goes to vote. Those who cannot get to the polls, for whatever reason, vote by absentee ballot, mailing it to the appropriate place. There is no voting representative.

It works smoothly about 99% of the time but in the exceptions, where there is something wrong, it makes the news.

Pure, registering voters when issuing drivers' licenses wouldn't work because many people never have drivers' licenses and people move a lot. The supposed reason for the literacy test was that illiterate persons would not be aware of the issues so could not vote intelligently. There are many flaws in this idea and there were abuses so the test was eliminated.

A constitutional amendment is even harder than what Lime said. It would need to pass both houses with 2/3 of the vote and be endorsed by 3/4 of the state legislatures. I'm not sure what a presidential veto would mean but the veto could be overridden. It is hard to do and it was meant to be hard. The framers of the constitution didn't want a lot of tinkering.

Gerrymandering has been a problem because the party in power gets to redraw the various district boundaries every ten years after a census has been taken and they can do a lot to ensure they stay in power. Redrawing is necessary, though, with the mobility of the population and some cities and states growing rapidly and deserving more representation, and other cities and states shrinking and deserving less. The remedy is to have somebody other than politicians redraw the boundaries but for such a thing to happen, politicians would have to okay it so it will never happen.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Can someone explain this to me...

I never quite understood this confusion you ppl seems to have regarding voting registration. Interim ballots (was that the word?, disputed registration procedures and all that jazz. Here in Sweden, all adult citizens are automatically registered to vote. You get a voting certificate by mail about a month before the election. Even homeless people do, as they all have a registered adress och contact proxy somewhere, often a post office box provided by organisations like the salvation army. You show up, identify yourself, and vote. Or send a representative if you're immobile.

It works, everyone finds their booths, lines are short, ballots are not disputed, no laywers goes bananas and everyone agrees that the election went down fairly. Of some five million votes in the last parlament election over here, a total of 321 votes were dispuited and discarded because of faulty voting registration. Most of them because the person had died, or changed citizenship between getting the voting card and election day, and someone tried to use it to vote twice.

How come it looks like minor anarchy over there to me? Is it just the way that media presents it?

#L

Edit: mebbe I posted this in the wrong thread, but there are so many of them running, I'm having a hard time keeping up.

Your basic answer lies in the fact that running elections is not an enumerated power of the federal government. As such, the running of them falls to the states as a reserved power under amendment ten of the bill or rights.

Every state does it in the way that is most efficient for them, in this day and age you can probably read more economical there. Reguarless, you don't register on a national basis, but on a state basis. If you move to another state you have to reregister. If you move within the same state, you may or may not find yourself in another congressional, senatorial or municipal district. If you do, you have to go to a different polling place.

We do a lot of electing. I vote for President, Senator and representaive on the national level. Governor, senate and house on a state level, as well as supreme court justices, attorney general, comptroller etc. On a county level I get to vote for county commisioners. On a municipal level I vote for mayor, comptroller and school board members. Across all levels I can vote for various polices including amendments referendums and bond issues.

Where I live, determines who I can vote for. As you can see, the vast majority of my votes aren't on national bussiness, but on state or lower. Since we vote on so many things, it makes sense that there is no federal control of voting, but since that is the case, you get different systems in different places. In essence, the federal government hijacks the organs of state voting for national elections.

Now, If I move across the street, my polling place may change, but if I don't realize that, I might well go to the firehouse as I have for several years, rather than to the middle school. And that's where you get a lot of the cock ups, people just don't realize their polling place has changed or been changed by the government as is done often through redisticting.

Basically you have fifty states, with fifty different systems, multiple districts and many of them are fluid. The mass confusion is a symptom of the fact the national elextions done have their own machinery, but rely on the state's machinery which is already in place. The degree of confusion you see in any state, Florida in 2000 for example, is more a symptoom of florida's problems than the Us's. It just gets magnified many times when the office is that of president rather than town dog catcher.

-Colly