In the United States, state and local authorities are in charge of
voting and the country uses more than a half dozen different voting technologies.
As a result, the country can't guarantee that it accurately counts national votes
in a timely fashion. This article discusses the problem and potential solutions to the U.S. voting dilemma.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2012-08-26
Also, most of the recounts (including a big one by multiple news organizations) found Bush did indeed win Florida.
Yes, and No.
http://www.factcheck.org/2008/01/the-florida-recount-of-2000/
Member since:2005-06-30
In that case, you are one step removed from just having the incoming House of Representatives decide the President.
Member since:2012-01-24
Not really. Under the congressional district system, the statewide winner gets the senatorial votes (so in a close election the winner should end up with more EC votes). The House votes by state (each state gets 1 vote). The vote is decided by that state's congressional delegation in the House.
Member since:2005-11-09
so... the gerrymandered all to hell districts will set who is president?
A popular vote would be better....every vote counts and candidates would work hard in all 50 states because you can't write off Nebraska as a Democrat since there are democrats who will vote for you, and California has value to Republicans, etc.
Member since:2006-07-04
I agree that using the gerrymandered congressional districts would be wrong. May as well go to a parlaimentary system instead (which I don't want). And it was shown in an article yesterday that Romney would've won under that system, despite losing the popular vote by three million votes (as I write this), since the current congressional districts were gerrymandered by the Republican party since they controlled the state legislatures at the time the most recent gerrymandering occurred (which is why the Republicans won the most House seats, despite losing the House popular vote).
As for a national popular vote for president, first here has to be a national ballot/voting mechanism. The moment you go to a national popular vote, you cannot have states using different voting systems (different numbers of hours of early voting, differences in allowing vote-by-mail, differences in voting stations per capita, etc), because the different voting systems of each state cause voting to be "easier" (i.e. more convenient) in some states than in others, so some states have a naturally higher voter participation, which would skew a national popular vote count.
I've actually come to like the electoral college, myself. But if we get rid of it, I'd rather go to popular vote than congressional district based voting, for the reasons stated above.
Member since:2012-01-24
I am going to paint the nightmare scenario for you. Every district has a few votes that never really get counted because...well, something was wrong with them and it doesn't matter because the election isn't close enough.
What if it was close enough? What if it was within a million votes? Can you imagine the lawsuits in every precinct in the country fishing for votes? The EC actually does serve a bit of a purpose.
I personally think the hand wringing over it is a tad much. It's mostly irrelevant, but it does help settle things when the election is close (Florida being the one exception and really is anyone shocked that happened in Florida?).
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Member since:
2012-01-24
If each state allocated their electors by congressional district (like Maine does), it would pretty much fix the major problem with the EC and would not require a constitutional fix. Winner take all is pretty silly.
Also, most of the recounts (including a big one by multiple news organizations) found Bush did indeed win Florida.
The EC has one big benefit. It typically makes individual voting issues irrelevant. 2000 being the big exception.