We could use some of our Founding Fathers' wisdom in our Presidential campaigns today.
As I assume we are all aware, today Georgia's Republican electors cast their Electoral College ballots for President and Vice President, affirming the popular vote from the Nov. 2 general election.
There were 15 for President Bush and 15 for Dick Cheney for Vice President," Under the U.S. Constitution, the Electoral College ballot is the official tally, and the electors usually are pledged to follow the popular vote (but see below post for how this can be changed).
The states have one electoral vote for each member of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.
The 15 ballots cast today will sent to Washington for the Vice President to read before a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.
The reason I note the above is that I had several e-mails questioning the following statement that I wrote in a post yesterday:
"[C]urrently I am not in favor of doing away with the electoral college. It might need some revising, I really don't know; all I know about it is what I learned in college while minoring in political science and watching it every four years. Thus I am not an expert in the subject to say the least. But I do know that I don't want New York, California, Florida and Pennsylvania being the only states that determine who our president will be."
Give me a break I thought, I should have kept my post just on Democrat Danita Knowles, rather than drifting onto the topic of Echols County and the county-unit system.
As I noted in the above quote, I am not an expert on the Electoral College, and it won't do me nor my readers any good for me to pontificate and show my ignorance. I did do a post on how states can determine how their electors vote at the College though, hardly exhaustive, but accurate. It is in my 09-14-04 post entitled "The Electoral College 101 (with a little bit of 201 thrown in for good measure)."
In that post I did note something about how the Founding Fathers felt that I wish the Presidential candidates would follow. The design behind the College was to keep a simple majority for winning so Georgia and the South and Midwest would not be written off in 2004.
My post noted:
"The Electoral College was designed by the Founding Fathers to place a buffer between popular sentiment and the selection of a chief executive. It awards each state the number of electoral votes that corresponds to its number of seats in the House of Representatives plus two more, the latter an effort to augment the power of small states the way the composition of the U.S. Senate does.
"By requiring presidential aspirants to achieve a majority of electoral votes awarded by states, the founders believed, they would force candidates to amass a broad coalition and thus stitch together the young nation."
What ageless wisdom those fellows had. No wonder still over 200 years later America is the greatest country in the world.
God Bless America!!
There were 15 for President Bush and 15 for Dick Cheney for Vice President," Under the U.S. Constitution, the Electoral College ballot is the official tally, and the electors usually are pledged to follow the popular vote (but see below post for how this can be changed).
The states have one electoral vote for each member of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.
The 15 ballots cast today will sent to Washington for the Vice President to read before a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.
The reason I note the above is that I had several e-mails questioning the following statement that I wrote in a post yesterday:
"[C]urrently I am not in favor of doing away with the electoral college. It might need some revising, I really don't know; all I know about it is what I learned in college while minoring in political science and watching it every four years. Thus I am not an expert in the subject to say the least. But I do know that I don't want New York, California, Florida and Pennsylvania being the only states that determine who our president will be."
Give me a break I thought, I should have kept my post just on Democrat Danita Knowles, rather than drifting onto the topic of Echols County and the county-unit system.
As I noted in the above quote, I am not an expert on the Electoral College, and it won't do me nor my readers any good for me to pontificate and show my ignorance. I did do a post on how states can determine how their electors vote at the College though, hardly exhaustive, but accurate. It is in my 09-14-04 post entitled "The Electoral College 101 (with a little bit of 201 thrown in for good measure)."
In that post I did note something about how the Founding Fathers felt that I wish the Presidential candidates would follow. The design behind the College was to keep a simple majority for winning so Georgia and the South and Midwest would not be written off in 2004.
My post noted:
"The Electoral College was designed by the Founding Fathers to place a buffer between popular sentiment and the selection of a chief executive. It awards each state the number of electoral votes that corresponds to its number of seats in the House of Representatives plus two more, the latter an effort to augment the power of small states the way the composition of the U.S. Senate does.
"By requiring presidential aspirants to achieve a majority of electoral votes awarded by states, the founders believed, they would force candidates to amass a broad coalition and thus stitch together the young nation."
What ageless wisdom those fellows had. No wonder still over 200 years later America is the greatest country in the world.
God Bless America!!
posted by Sid Cottingham | 10:31 PM
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