Electoral College; Yes or No?
- Thread starter sbk1234
- Start date
Apparently they were behind all XLVI Super Bowls too. I certainly felt like going all Brutus on that ass after the Super Bowl this year.
Don't like that many votes are disincentivized and essentially discounted but I do like the flipside, that the national election is centered around moderate voters. The electoral vote differing from the popular vote does seem unjust but given the rarity of that circumstance and how people reacted it seems not quite worth a constitutional amendment campaign.
^Yes but if it's a rare occurance that the winner of the college vote vote loses the popular vote as you say. That means most of the time the winning candidate wins both.
So by switching to a popualr vote all that happens is that they'll be a rare occasion when the winner of the popular vote lost the college vote.
So if the usual outcome is a candidate wins both, switching to a popular vote wouldn't change the outcome the majority of the time. So why not change?
If polls are to be believed (60% of US citizens in favour of the popular vote) it is a situation that most Americans can live with.
So by switching to a popualr vote all that happens is that they'll be a rare occasion when the winner of the popular vote lost the college vote.
So if the usual outcome is a candidate wins both, switching to a popular vote wouldn't change the outcome the majority of the time. So why not change?
If polls are to be believed (60% of US citizens in favour of the popular vote) it is a situation that most Americans can live with.
Yes.
*All* elections can be said to be decided by moderates, largely because the press is much more interested in reporting on them than on the equally (if not more) important task of ensuring the base turns out. So not only is this statement insubstantial, it ignores the pronounced rural/right-wing bias inherent in the College's basic math.
As I poined out way back on page one, this point is misleading at best and deliberately deceitful at worst, because the existence of the Electoral College considerably impacts campaigns, voter turnout and even general civic engagement, so saying "the system almost always produces the same result" is simply not a useful observation.
Understanding viewpoints is good but it doesn't change the fact that the 1861-1865 war was a civil war by any reasonable definition. When was the treaty ratified to end the war between the CSA and the USA? There was none, it was not necessary because the CSA did not have legal standing as a nation, despite what it chose to call itself.
Justin
No, the definition is broader than that and appropriate here.
The CSA didn't have legal standing as a nation after it was invaded, conquered, and reabsorbed, but during their brief time as a semi-cohesive entity they did, engaging in treaties and dabbling in diplomacy.
When a country gets conquered militarily, a peace treaty is meaningless (compared to a surrender document, usually the last act of an existing govenrment) until the conquering country agrees to let a new, independent government be set up, which it then has to recognize.
To Southerners, they seceded and set up their own independent nation, which then got invaded and conquered, and were never again allowed to be an independent country, kind of like Germany invading the Alsace-Lorraine. Any peace treaty they'd have signed would've been with France, not Alsace.
The peace treaty between the Allies and Germany was signed on September 12, 1990. Our war with Nazi Germany had ended decades earlier, around 1955, although we'd declared an end to the fighting in 1949. We didn't sign a peace treaty with Japan until 1951.
And of course Jefferson Davis wasn't captured for weeks after the Confederate armies had surrendered. Wearing a dress and trying to escape to Mexico, he was tossed in a jail cell for a couple of years, so what would his signature on a document have been worth to anyone?
The ending of the war is more ignominious than anything. "You guys stack your guns and go on home, and we'll pretend your pathetic little rebellion never happened." So they all went home and bitched about the War of Northern Aggression, even though they'd been calling it a civil war from the start, and then later they denied it had anything to do with human slavery because that would besmirch the nobility of a lost cause.
Well, the only way the definition could be broader is if it also included those who are allowed to vote, in which case they're not disenfranchised, or perhaps those who aren't a "those", like maybe squirrels and deer, and of course the dead. (Most of the undead can still vote because they usually lack a death certificate.)
Nope. You are spouting nonsense wrapped in fraudulent history and political partisanship. Not all opinions are equal: as the good ol' Asimov said, democracy does not mean "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge".
Yup.
My, we are getting a little far afield here, aren't we? My question regarding voter laws is a play on the old "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent be convicted" thing. How many non-felonious citizens over 18 are you prepared to stop from voting to keep one felon or alien from voting?
Look at activities in Florida, pre 2000. Attempts to keep felons from voting were used to purge the rolls of anybody who had the same name as a convicted felon. (Tough luck, Willie Johnson.)
Seniors who have relinquished their driving privledges have had similar problems despite having an expired DL that clearly showed their picture.
Look at activities in Florida, pre 2000. Attempts to keep felons from voting were used to purge the rolls of anybody who had the same name as a convicted felon. (Tough luck, Willie Johnson.)
Seniors who have relinquished their driving privledges have had similar problems despite having an expired DL that clearly showed their picture.
They didn't have that standing before or during, either, except in their own minds. What foreign nation gave the Confederacy diplomatic recognition? I'll save you the trouble: None. The international community recognized it for what it was, a sectional armed insurrection.
Rebellions can call themselves all sorts of things and make all sorts of claims, that doesn't make it so.
That's obfuscating. The time frame of a peace treaty is immaterial, the fact is those wars were ended with treaties because they were between belligerent nations, unlike the American Civil War. Likewise, what Jeff Davis was doing had nothing to do with ending the war, the president simply declared that the insurrection had been suppressed and that order had been restored in the secessionist states, and that was that. I know there are some who think the ACW never ended legally; most people regard them as kooks.
Justin
Actually, they were recognized by a German Duchy and 16 Indian tribes (nations), and to top it off, Pope Pius IX addressed a letter to Jefferson Davis as "Honorable President of the Confederate States of America." You can't go any higher than that, because Popes can create countries on a whim.
The European powers didn't want to go to war with the North (defending Canada was unworkable), and could look at the industry and troop numbers and know how the war would likely turn out, too. Most new countries aren't formally recognized until they survive their foundation war, unless they happen to be a creation of the country recognizing them (usually being carved out of a competing country's claims)
They'd have gotten diplomatic recognition if their rebellion had succeeded, perhaps by having generals who weren't strategically inept (Every major battle the South won brought the North closer to victory, so the only winning strategy was to avoid major battles and be a pain in the a** until the Yankees got bored, frustrated, and gave up, similar to the French naval strategy of maintaining a fleet-in-being and avoiding decisive fleet action with the British Navy).
So West Germany wasn't really a country until 1990? Until then there was no peace treaty and perhaps never would be, so how could they know whether they were a country or not?
"Civil war" is objective because the US was a single country. "War of Northern Aggression" is tendentious because every attempt at citing the aggression depends on assuming the conclusion, that the South was in some mystical sense "sovereign." If the South had won and become a genuine sovereign state, it still would have been a civil war. The American Revolution could be, and has been, called a civil war by historians. Properly so, for it was a civil war. Calling it a mere war for independence, or revolution of one nation against another is actually a good example of tendentious naming, by those who dislike the origin of democracy in social and political revolution.
As for treaties, peace or otherwise, the relevant issue is what treaties the South, or indeed any part of it, signed before the Civil War.
As for treaties, peace or otherwise, the relevant issue is what treaties the South, or indeed any part of it, signed before the Civil War.
Well, the suggestion to call it "The War of the Surprise Southern Attack on a Federal Fort to Preserve Perpetual Race-Based Human Slavery" was voted down at the first meeting of the Daughters of the Confederacy, so they went with Betty Sue's suggestion to call it "The War of Northern Aggression", after rejecting several possible names involving shoes and colors, such as "The War Against People Who Wore Blue After Labor Day."
Actually the Revolution was the second in a series of three, fought largely with the same sides. You might enjoy The Cousin's Wars (Amazon link).
Had the South won, they'd have probably called it the "Southern Revolution" (ironically an anti-revolution to maintain their status quo), which probably would've been followed by chaos as all the different Southern states got swallowed up by alliances with rival European powers, perhaps finally realizing that Sherman was a gentleman and things could get much, much worse, as America, Spain, England, Germany, Mexico, and France hosted a come-as-you-are military free-for-all in whatever Southern state was on the menu that month.
The South was thinking that European dependence on cotton would assure their independence. Nobody actually likes cotton that much. They should've tried growing crack or something.
Actually, they were recognized by a German Duchy and 16 Indian tribes (nations), and to top it off, Pope Pius IX addressed a letter to Jefferson Davis as "Honorable President of the Confederate States of America." You can't go any higher than that, because Popes can create countries on a whim.
Pretty debatable points to hang a claim of diplomatic recognition on. The consul from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is the strongest and could be seen as a first step, but still a ways from full diplomatic recognition which would be on the ambassadorial level.
Agreed, if they'd won things would be different, but it would still be a post-civil war situation and different from an international war.
Noooo... Negotiations did not proceed because there was a fairly serious falling-out between the Allies over, among other things, the post-war status of Germany. Not comparable to the Confederacy situation, where there were not even pending negotiations.
Justin
Yes, that was a huge, huge part of it. The South also sent diplomatic representatives that history does not remember fondly. A better name for the conflict would be "The War of Ill Conceived Staggering Ineptitude"
As for the ending not requiring a peace treaty, the North's offer was for all their soldiers to go home and the status quo ante would be restored, along with the restoration of their votes in the electoral college.
To me the big mystery is why the Democratic Party didn't die along with the South. The Republican Party went from nothing to become a national competitor in just a cuople of years, and given that the Democratic Party had bet everything on slavery and lost, why didn't they re-form under a new name in both the North and the South?