Like the airlines say - "we recognize you have a choice when flying and thank you for flying Delta"...
That said I can still complain about the fact the my airline delayed the flight or I don't like their service or the website.
I'm probably the most disenchanted non-eligible voter in America this morning. It's not that Bush won. It is the fact that I disagree with the electoral process. I alluded to this fact earlier this morning when I presented an alternate method for assigning Electoral College votes.
Roughly speaking I'm proposing federally controlled elections and removing the electoral college system.
Electing the leader of the government in my mind is a federal issue and should be co-ordinated at a federal level with no state interference. If a state doesn't like the election procedure, secede! Dual federalism just seems unconstitutional when applied to the right to vote. Democracy should ensure that every vote counts.
Dual federalism has resulted in each state choosing it's own way to run elections instead of the government declaring that the elections should be performed in a specific way and the count should be returned by a specific time.
Not to mention the Electoral College system. Yesterday 55 EC votes were placed for Kerry despite the fact that he won only 54% of the vote. Surely the 55 EC votes should have split 29/26 instead. Yet last night, Colorado voters elected not to move to this system. Why? I would love to hear a well reasoned argument besides a 200 year old document outlining this supreme logic which arbitrarily rounds up from 54 out of 100 voters to give 100% backing to one candidate. We should be thankful the same math doesn't apply to our taxes or we'd all be rounding our annual contributions up to the nearest 10,000 dollars.
It wouldn't be right to finish without an honorable mention to Samuel J. Tilden who, despite beating Rutherford B. Hayes by a quarter of a million votes on the popular vote, was not elected as President in 1876. What is more interesting is that he lost on the electoral votes by a single vote 185 to 184. Why is this interesting? Rutherford B. Hayes received the Colorado electoral vote despite the fact that no-one voted there. At least Grover Cleveland was elected in the subsequent election after he won the popular vote by about 90,000 votes but lost on Electoral College votes by a margin of 233 to 168, hence electing Benjamin Harrison.
Finally we have the last election when Bush was elected over Gore despite losing the popular vote by 500,000 votes - the population of DC, Wyoming or Vermont. Hmm.
I'd like to see electoral reform and see the nation move to federally controlled elections where the popular vote is the only factor.
My last is how can a nation remain so divided yet continue to be ruled by someone so wrong for me and the rest of the upper midwest/ north east / north west? I thought the idea behind dual federalism was to ensure that non of the states with their local issues are imposed upon unfairly.
