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Us Presidential Race


Amadeus

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I have to say that the BBC coverage this evening was good in illustrating what a bunch of dim witted racist bastards the average southern American is.

 

One fat ugly bitch was quoted as saying "I think 75% of Americans wouldn't vote for a black man"

 

Sadly she's probably right. But then again he can probably read and take a shit without passing a small child and a motor cycle and sidecar combination.

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This is where the maths can be complicated. To quote from the Telegraph:

 

It sounds simple: one person, one vote and the best man wins — the candidate with most votes gets the presidency. That is, needless to say, quite untrue: in 2000, half a million more people voted for Gore than for Bush, but Gore lost. Defeat was made more bitter by a third contender who scored only a couple of million votes but, had he stood down, would have guaranteed a Gore victory.

 

We cannot crow, either, for in no British election since 1945 has the winning party had an overall majority of votes cast — and in 2005 Labour got only one voter in three.

The US Constitution established the Electoral College, with each state having a number of votes equal to its count of Senators and Congressmen. It causes what chemists call a phase transition: a shift from one configuration to other — gas to liquid to solid, for example — when a critical point is reached. Positive feedback is built in, for what may be a tiny margin in the popular vote within a state is transformed into a large one in the College, where all the state’s electors vote the same way.

 

The number of electors turns on the state’s whole population, not just its electorate. The latter excludes children, aliens and, in many states, those behind bars or with a criminal record (not to speak of the many denied a vote by political chicanery). So great is that distortion that in Vermont, there are 10 voters for every 12 people — but in California, the figure is 10 for 16. All told, the delegates from Vermont each speak for 166,000 eligible voters, and Californians for 410,000. A demographer from the University of California at Berkeley has worked out that with a certain (admittedly unlikely) combination of college votes, a candidate could win today with support from just a sixth of the population, and rejection by five times as many.

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You've got to hand it to Obama, even his school photo was cool...

 

HAWAII-SCHOOL_1106781i.jpg

 

When I was at Primary School we used to sing hippy songs about the ink being black and the page being white and how, together, we could learn to read and write. We may have sung it but I bet those guys lived it.

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