Charlie's Thoughts

Also known as how I passed Popular Vote without a constitutional amendment.
Very interesting story about how we could be using national popular vote in the 2012 election. As well as some interesting thoughts on the current election. Read on! ...

Follow up:

Anyways, I was photographing a panel Wednesday night talking about politics in the media when an interesting topic came up. It is widely known that one major flaw in the "democratic" process is the electoral college which gives unequal representation to various people in various states. Generally, people also know that direct popular vote is the most truly democratic way to vote. However, it is widely believed that this would require a constitutional amendment to change. NOT TRUE.

The speaker described a workaround to implementing national popular vote. Here's how it works:

How a state chooses to allocate its electoral votes is based on state rules. So a state can use whichever method it chooses. So under this new system every state would pass an inter-state compact agreeing to the following:
Once the sum of the electoral votes possessed by states in this compact exceeds 270 (the number needed for election), the states in the compact agree that they will cast all their votes to the winner of the popular vote within those states. Why does this work? Simple, obviously once 270 electoral votes join the compact, every other state has no bearing on the election and will thus be forced to join the compact. So once the total exceeds 270, we will in effect have national popular elections. Cool huh?

As I understand it, there are a couple states or so in the compact right now totaling about 50 electoral votes. California passed the measure in both houses but the Terminatior terminated it. So clearly this is something that may or may not amount to anything, but rest assured that if a big ticket state like California passes it you will hear about it in the media.

As for the election at hand, the talk inevitably steered towards racism and sexism. Almost everyone agreed that with the polls the way they are right now, Obama will win. There's almost no way he will lose. (Yale students elected Obama 82% vs 12% in a campus-wide poll by the YDN (that's right I cite my sources)) Double parenthesis by the way.

I was struck by how soon the elections are today, less than a week! My how time flies at college. Happy Halloween, 9 weeks officially down!