Thread: Should The Candidate That Gains The "Popular Vote" Be President?

Should The Candidate That Gains The "Popular Vote" Be President?
After the world has had to endure 8 years of George Bush in the White House I was wondering whether it would be a better concept if the candidate who receives the "popular vote", like Al Gore did in 2000, gets elected President?

Shouldn't the will of the majority of voters, regardless of where they live, be what decides who gets to govern America as the next President?

Thanks.

(Imagine how different America and the world at large would now be had Al Gore been President the last 8 years...).

Originally Posted by Jaffas85

Shouldn't the will of the majority of voters, regardless of where they live, be what decides who gets to govern America as the next President?

Yes. There are many arguments to be made against allowing any one person to retain this order of power (President of the United States circa 2000), but since we're going with this particular "democratic" model the stupidest thing we could do would be to not at least follow the will of the majority. I move from Texas to Montana and my vote in a national election carries, what, 2.6x as much weight? What kind of stupid bullshit is this?
If state boundaries are to have a direct bearing on the course of a national election then I really don't see the point of preserving the power of a federal government (beyond the obvious).

The system we got now was created with the idea that it wouldn't matter that much. In any case, it is a lame split between giving the vote to the States of giving it proportionately to the People, which basically end up ensuring neither body has it in any sort of reasonable proportion. It should be either one state, one vote or by popular vote.

Which one, though, depends on whether you advocate big government or small government. If it's small government you want, giving the vote to the states can make it so that the executive branch and the popularly-elected legislature belong to different parties. The reason why the federal government can so easily result in deadlocks is because the Founders designed it that way. By general rule, the federal government was not supposed to take care of domestic affairs. States were. And the size and scope of the modern central government oversteps the bounds set by the Constitution.

If you want big government, however, the best path is a parliamentary system, on which the head of Government is elected by the legislative assembly, rather than directly by the people. This ensures that rather than the Executive being elected based on personality, he/she is fired if (s)he doesn't perform well, either by his/her party to protect themselves, or by the electorate by electing the opposition.

Originally Posted by Elvis

Yes. There are many arguments to be made against allowing any one person to retain this order of power (President of the United States circa 2000), but since we're going with this particular "democratic" model the stupidest thing we could do would be to not at least follow the will of the majority. I move from Texas to Montana and my vote in a national election carries, what, 2.6x as much weight? What kind of stupid bullshit is this?
If state boundaries are to have a direct bearing on the course of a national election then I really don't see the point of preserving the power of a federal government (beyond the obvious).

As I mentioned in the post above, the Federal government isn't supposed to have that much power. And your vote doesn't necessarily carry that much more weight in Montana than Texas because the votes in the electoral college are not weighted by state. What happens is that the votes of a state's majority are automatically given to the whole state, which means the total tally is completely unrepresentative of anything. If you are unlucky enough to be in the minority in a state, it goes on the record as though you had voted for the other guy and weighted accordingly.

Originally Posted by Jaffas85

Should The Candidate That Gains The "Popular Vote" Be President?
After the world has had to endure 8 years of George Bush in the White House I was wondering whether it would be a better concept if the candidate who receives the "popular vote", like Al Gore did in 2000, gets elected President?

Shouldn't the will of the majority of voters, regardless of where they live, be what decides who gets to govern America as the next President?

Thanks.

(Imagine how different America and the world at large would now be had Al Gore been President the last 8 years...).

Do you think he would have still made 'the inconvenient truth'?
I mean would he have had time?
Hey may not have won the noble prize then....the world would be completley different