There's a very cool US map showing past election results from 1948 to 2000 at BBC NEWS. I've been looking for something like this for a while.

I find it interesting that the election of who many consider the greatest president of recent times, John F. Kennedy, was such a close one, and that the re-election of Richard "I am a crook" Nixon was such a landslide. This seems to show something terribly wrong with our electoral process. That and Al Gore won by 500,000 votes and he doesn't seem to be in the White House at the moment.

There's always talk of getting rid of the Electoral College and do direct elections but there is a flaw with that idea; you would marginalize the power of small state's votes. It gets into an issue of state's rights and I'm not totally clear how I feel about that yet.

I think a better idea is to let the states decide if they want to split up the electoral vote, which I believe is a much fairer system anyway. I've never liked the "winner take all" model because, frankly, I want to be in more control of my vote. If 45% of a state doesn't vote for someone, don't give all of the electoral votes to them. Colorado is thinking of this now and I hope they get away with it. I hope every state will try to get this going because, in my opinion, the pros outweigh the cons. The ability to make people see that votes count and more accurate representing the populous in the state far outweigh the potential for too close of an election (like 269-268). Maine and Nebraska are running with this system now based on congressional district, although with a small number of votes each, they have never split the votes between candidates. I don't like the congressional district idea because that will just lead to more evil gerrymandering, but sometimes it's the thought that counts.

If things don't happen soon in changing the Electoral College nationwide, I might have to think about getting something going here in Ohio to move toward proportional allocation of Electoral College votes.

Related posts:

1. Lisa Rein’s Report On Election 2004′s Ohio Recount and Voting Fraud Situation Here's a site with a round up of what's happening...
2. Ohio Elections Screwup (by Amy) I am so pissed off right now! My vote my...
3. “Kerry to Unconcede” Email a Hoax? I just got this email from a friend and I'm...

This entry was posted on Friday, October 22nd, 2004 at 11:09 pm by Joe and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.