That's right folks. It's time to rehash the
2000 presidential election results
(cue dramatic music).
"Aw, christ. Not this again."
Remember - "primate...rants". I be the primate, and I gots the complaints.
First off, this particular diatribe is not really about who won or lost. I'm absolutely not a fan of our current Commander in Chief, but that's another entry entirely. I wasn't a particular fan of the "losing" party nor any of the "non-mainstream" contestants either. As a matter of fact, I was not, and am not currently, a fan of any politico in any arena. I have yet to run across a politician that a) has the same views and beliefs that I find admirable; and b) refuses to back down on those views and beliefs when confronted by "the party".
Instead, I'm going to rail against a 200+ year old anachronism we affectionately refer to as The Electoral College. Additionally I'm going to take some potshots at the illusion of "every vote counts".
I won't go into the whole history of the college. Wikipedia does it much better than I could hope to. By way of a recap, though, when Joe & Jane Citizen go to the polling booths in America's quadrennial game, they aren't voting for who they want to run our country. Instead they cast their vote for an anonymous "somebody" who will in turn (hopefully) vote for the candidate they checked off on their ballot. That's even more condensed than Cliff's Notes©, but that's pretty much the way it takes place.
Most of the time this particular method of electing our all-powerful head-of-state works as expected. The plurality of the popular vote is in concordance with the vote that counts, and the evening news doesn't have to give civics lessons for the next 6 weeks. However, there have been 3 times in our exalted history where this has not been the case: 1876, 1888, and 2000. Furthermore, since one of these events has been in my lifetime, I get to vent. Feel free to look up the other two and create your own rants.
My basic beef with the way the system operates is that the whole idea of "every vote counts" is pretty much bullshit. Your vote only counts if you happen to agree with the majority of the voters in your state who actually get out and do their thing. Let's say, for example, that you are a "Blue" voter who lives in a very "Red" state (I find it interesting that the GOP seems to have conveniently forgotten the formerly derogatory equation of "red" with "communist"). Furthermore, let's say for the sake of argument that your state has somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million voters doing the polling station/absentee ballot mambo on or around election day. Since you're a Red state that guarantees that between 51 and 68 percent of your fellow yahoos will be voting against your candidate (there's another complaint - once, just once, I'd like to be able to vote for somebody instead of against somebody else). Since 51% is the majority, that means that even if you convince all of your fellow Blues to vote for a single candidate, as opposed to voting for any number of the other horses just because they're not Red, you're still going to come up short. Not only is your candidate going to finish in second place (or worse), since it's your state's votes that count (i.e., the electors your state selects), you and your fellow Blue's votes count for less than a piss in the wilderness.
Now, let me take this a step or three further. First, the end result of the 2000 elections was as follows (experimenting with tables - cut me some slack, please):
| Candidate | Popular | | Electoral Vote |
| Buchanan | 448,895 | 0.4% | 0 |
| Bush | 50,456,002 | 47.9% | 271 |
| Gore | 50,999,897 | 48.4% | 266 |
| Nader | 2,882,955 | 2.7% | 0 |
| Other | 617,351 | 0.6% | 0 |
| Ttl | 105,405,100 | 100.0% | 537 |
Note, as we all remember, Mr. Gore received a plurality of the popular vote. According to the people, he "won" by over half a million votes. And yet, after endless debates on dimples, chads, and other irregularities he went home the loser. Why? Because he won the wrong states. If even one of the 3- or 4-electoral vote states had gone a different direction (New Hampshire being the closest race) I wouldn't be having this little snit right now. Instead, the race came down to a 536 vote difference in Florida.
Now, some extrapolation. Granted, this is extreme and would never happen in real life </sarcasm>. Pretend for a moment that we could convince every voter in a state to vote for the same candidate. Since, statistically, those "other guys" aren't really counting, let's even cut the slate of candidates down to two. Hey - better than some countries, right? Now, to continue this statistical exercise, let's use the 2000 election results and count all the votes in each state towards the candidate who actually won that state. For instance, in Alabama there were 1,666,272 votes cast and Bush won that state, so instead of a roughly 56 to 44 percent split in the popular vote, Bush gets all 1.6 million votes, Gore gets zero. Conversely, in Connecticut there were 1,459,525 votes which all go for Gore, Bush gets zero. Finally (gettin' there - promise), let's propagate that through all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Remember, we're not changing the outcome one whit - wherever the candidate won we're awarding the exact same number of electoral votes (i.e., "the only votes that really count") to that candidate. End result? Gore walks away with 3,147,656 more votes, and a second place finish. 3.1 million more votes - and he still would have lost. Are you still going to try to convince me that every vote counts? The voters of Maine, New York, Massachusetts, California, and 17 other states could have voted their little titties off, and would have had all the influence of a fart in a hurricane.
Don't take this the wrong way. As I said earlier, this is not sour grapes because "my" candidate lost any more than I'm pissing and moaning becuase "their" candidate won. I'm not enthused about the way the country has been run for the last 7 years, 7 months, 18 days (but who's counting?), but I don't view the prior administration as much better. Come to think of it, ever since I reached voting age, I can't think of an administration I have admired.
The above is an extreme case - I'll give you that. Even Grumpy C. Primate ("C" for "Cynical") doesn't actually think that this particular situation could ever transpire.
One last anecdote. This actually took place where I was working back in late 2000. I was contracting at the time and so tried to keep from foisting my opinion upon the company's personnel lest it somehow be taken as my employer's position - something my employer greatly frowned upon. However, one young man, very intelligent, quite knowledgeable in the ways of political science, and enthusiastic about the whole civic process (his first election, and all), was espousing how the system worked, and explaining in great detail to his co-workers about the difference between popular and electoral votes (nice people, but not the sharpest knives in their respective drawers). All the little sheep seemed to accept his little lesson. As the group started to disperse it was just he and I sitting in the lunch room. Despite my best attempts to steer the conversation elsewhere, he was pretty adamant about continuing the prior topic, even as we left the lunch room and headed back to cubeville. I was trying to make subtle points that maybe the system was not as perfect as he made it out to be when he said something like "of course every vote counts, this is AMERICA!" Well, shit, I thought, that's basically a double-dog-dare. When we got back to his cube I had him search out some basic election results and copy them into Excel, then showed him how to create formulas that describe what I did above, and left. Never heard him doing Civics lessons at work after that.
And that's the name of that tune.
Grumpy Primate (ook, ook)
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