For those of you who don’t know, the Electoral College votes given to each state are based on the number of Representatives plus the 2 Senators.

What this means is that smaller states actually have a disproportionate amount of power in electing the President. Now this may have been the intention of the Founding Fathers, it might not, but it did make me wonder. What would the results be like if we removed 2 EV’s from each state to make it more proportional?

Well in 2004 Bush would have won the election 224 to 212, but only by 2.8% instead of the 6.8% according to the current system.

Whats really interesting is that Gore would have won handily in 2000 with a total of 239 to 197, a victory of 9.6% rather than the .8% he lost by.

Now I don’t want anyone to think this means George W. Bush stole the election in 2000, he did not. He won according to the system. But it would certainly make it much harder to win without having the plurality of the popular vote if we went to a more proportional system. Whether that is better or worse or simply different, well, I’d love to hear the BrendanLoy.com community chime in.

Reflecting his stronger-than-2000 support in “red states” nationwide, George W. Bush won the battle for Saint Joseph County by a comfortable 2,617-vote (2.4%) margin, 55,254 (50.9%) to 52,637 (48.5%). In 2000, Al Gore won the county by 122 votes (0.1%), 47,703 to 47,581.

Libertarian Michael Badnarik received 659 votes in the county (0.6%). Write-in votes, including Dmytro’s choice of Ralph Nader, have not been tabulated yet, according to the official returns. Nader received 905 votes (0.9%) as a write-in candidate in 2000, finishing ahead of two minor-party candidates who were on the ballot.

Democratic U.S. Senator Evan Bayh, who was re-elected with 62% of the vote statewide, did even better in Saint Joseph County, winning 70% here. Republican Governor-elect Mitch Daniels received 53.7% in the county, slightly better than his 53.3% across the state.

Finally, Notre Dame Law School graduate and Democratic congressional challenger Joe Donnelly, who lost 54% to 45% across District 2 in his attempt to unseat incumbent Republican Chris Chocola, won a narrow, 621-vote victory in Saint Joseph County, 53,904 to 53,283. He lost nearly all the other counties in the district, however, many by wide margins.

Drudge: Attorney General John Ashcroft ‘plans to submit his resignation to Bush in the next several days’…

YAAAAY!

Running against otherwise unopposed State Rep. Sandy Nafis (D), Assembly District 27 Working Families Party candidate Susan Sand Burdelski, as predicted by BrendanLoy.com election analyst Joe Loy :), quintupled the vote needed to confer office-&-district minor-party ballot status upon the WFP: Nafis 8,462 (94.9%), Burdelski 463 (5.1%).

:)

In only slightly-less-significant news, State Senator Biagio “Billy” Ciotto (D) trounced lying scumbag Ralph Capenera (R) in Senatorial District 9 by 27,423 to 17,594 (60.9% to 39.1%). The egregious Capenera lost Newington 62.4% to 37.6% and lost his home town of Rocky Hill 56.6% to 43.4%. (The linked SD 9 SOTS returns are Incomplete because semi-Official. We get it Late to get it Right. :) Read all about it here. Money Quote:

Ciotto beat Republican Ralph Capenera, a thrashing he said proved that people did not buy the “despicable” accusations made by his Rocky Hill opponent.

“Look at those numbers, people aren’t stupid and he couldn’t convince them that his lies were true,” Ciotto said, referring to Capenera’s advertising blitz that challenged Ciotto’s votes and his ties to former Gov. John G. Rowland and the Tomasso family, both involved in the federal investigation into state bid rigging.

The Associated Press has called New Mexico for President Bush, making it the second state to switch parties from the 2000 results and putting Mike Wiser one state away from a perfect 51-for-51 sweep in his Electoral College predictions.

Mike predicted that undecided Iowa would vote for Bush as well. Currently, Bush leads in Iowa by just over 13,000 votes, but it is still considered “too close to call.”

Mike will win the BrendanLoy.com Electoral College Contest regardless of the outcome of Iowa, but he would finish with 517 points instead of a perfect 538, and would be ten points behind the hypothetical contestant picking all the same results from 2000.

I will post a fuller update once Iowa is called. For now, here are the standings with 49 out of 50 states (plus D.C.) decided:

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In what has to be one hell of a come-down, it’s back to the Senate for John Kerry. Does anyone know who was the last major-party presidential nominee to go back to the U.S. Senate after losing the election? I can think of plenty of vice-presidential nominees (Lieberman, Bentsen) and presidential-primary candidates (Lieberman again, McCain, etc.) who have done so, but presidential nominees? Bob Dole quit the Senate during the campaign… and I can’t remember who was the last presidential loser from the Senate before him. Anyone know the answer?

Adrienne, BrendanLoy.com’s favorite grad student in communications, wants y’all to take this survey! As do I… and what I say goes! :)

Sick of all the politics? Well, here’s a cool picture that I took on campus in the wee hours of Tuesday morning:

You can see the Golden Dome being lit up by two spotlights, which cast an eerie green glow on the surrounding fog. Pretty neat, eh?

Early yesterday morning, the Center for Social Concerns sent out an e-mail to all Notre Dame students stating, “On-campus students should vote in the Joyce Center (JACC).” The only problem with this nifty bit of helpful information is that it was not true. By Notre Dame definitions, students who live in the Fischer-O’Hara Grace graduate residences are considered “on-campus,” yet our polling place was a church off campus, not the JACC.

I knew where I was supposed to vote, because I saw it on my voter-registration card. So, as soon as I got the misleading message telling me to vote at the whole place, I sent an e-mail to the rector of Fischer-O’Hara Grace (a.k.a. FOG) stating:

I just wanted to suggest that you might want to consider sending an e-mail to the FOG listserv about FOG’s polling place, lest residents be confused by the IrishLink listserv’s statement that “On-campus students should vote in the Joyce Center (JACC)”

According to my information, our polling place is:

Little Flower Church Hall
54191 N Ironwood Road

The rector replied, “FOG residents are considered ‘on-campus’ and therefore should vote at the Joyce Center.  Did you think FOG residents should vote at Little Flower Church because FOG is considered ‘off-campus’?” I responded and explained that, no, I thought FOG residents should vote at Little Flower Church because that’s what my voter-registration card said. He wrote back, “This information surprises me because everyone I’ve spoken to on campus has said that FOG residents should go to the JACC.”

That was the end of our correspondence (though we spoke about it more in person later in the afternoon, and by then he seemed to have come to conclusion that I must be right), and neither the rector or anyone else ever sent out a corrective e-mail to FOG residents. I went to the correct polling place, of course, because I knew my voter-registration card was right.

Well, anyway, today the Observer reports:

Adding to the confusion, some students living off campus thought they could vote at Notre Dame when they needed to vote in other South Bend or Mishawaka precincts.

Poll workers mentioned that some Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s students seemed confused by e-mails sent about voting at the Joyce Center.

However, voters could also cast provisional ballots that would be reviewed later on by election officials to assess their validity, according to [precinct sheriff Donna] King.

“People are going to determine whether those are counted,” she said.

Of course, those votes almost certainly will not be counted, given the recent court rulings — which, granted, do not apply specifically to Indiana, but certainly do represent persausive authority — that provisional ballots only count if they are cast in the correct precinct.

So basically, Notre Dame officials unwittingly disenfranchised Notre Dame students by carelessly giving out incorrect information about voting locations.

I suspect the precinct boundaries have probably changed since previous elections, and this is why the rector’s contact on campus “said that FOG residents should go to the JACC.” Either way, Notre Dame officials need to realize that, regardless of whether they consider FOG “on campus” or not, they don’t set the boundaries of voting precincts — municipal or county officials do — and they need, in the future, to make absolutely that they are correct before giving students authoritative-sounding advice about where to go.

In addition, the officials at the polling place really should be more up on the recent big-news developments about provisional ballots, and should be able to advise students that their votes probably won’t count if they casting a provisional ballot in the wrong polling place.

Granted, none of the races in Indiana were close enough that this problem affects any election result. But I’d be mighty pissed off if I were one of the students who got disenfranchised because my own university’s administration carelessly misled me.

This is the follow-up to the article below…

BUN DEMANDS “FULL RECOUNT” BUT WILL NOT SUE

President Bun said Wednesday that he would not concede the presidential election until a “full recount” was conducted in the disputed state of Kitchen, but pledged to “accept the result of that recount as final, provided of course that it is conducted in a fair and legal manner.” He said he would not sue over alleged voting irregularities in the state if he still trails after the recount is concluded.

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I forgot to post this last night…

ELECTION TOO CLOSE TO CALL; RESULT HINGES ON KITCHEN

The winner of the 2004 Adollyan presidential election hinges on a recount and possible legal battle in the razor-close battleground state of Kitchen, unofficial results indicated Tuesday night.

Napoleon Piggywig, the nominee of the Unity Party and the Dollycratic Party, won the national popular vote by roughly nine-tenths of a percent, and he told his supporters Tuesday night that “it appears we are on the cusp of a great victory.” But Napoleon is eleven votes shy of the required Electoral College majority.

Incumbent President Bun, the Republidolly nominee, is slightly ahead of Napoleon in the electoral count, but is also just shy — by six electoral votes — of an Electoral College majority.

That leaves Kitchen, with 16 electoral votes, as the decisive state. But with all precincts reporting, the state was still too close to call; unofficial results showed Napoleon leading by three votes statewide, but a recount is inevitable, and legal challenges are also possible.

“This election is not over,” declared Madereine Rue, Bun’s vice-presidential runningmate and top adviser. “We must let the process take its course until a winner is legitimately determined.”

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Here’s the front page of today’s USC Daily Trojan:

Looks good. (Since when does the DT have access to AP photos?! I could used that when I was designing the 2000 election front page…) But read closely the deck, just below the banner headline:

Heh.

It seems there were some long lines and provisional-ballot problems on USC’s campus.

In a way, it’s fitting that Iowa is one of the last undecided states, and one of the closest in the country — and that it’s voting, narrowly, for Bush. This whole thing is Iowa’s fault, after all. If the Democrats there had picked Edwards or Gephardt on Jan. 19, George W. Bush would probably be packing his bags right now.

Oct. 27: The Red Sox win the World Series.
Oct. 31: The Patriots’ record 21-game winning streak is snapped.
Nov. 2: John Kerry loses the presidential election.

Oh, well. You can’t have it all, I guess.

Incidentally, Kerry got 62% of the vote in Massachusetts. That’s only two percent better than the 60% that Al Gore — a Southerner from Tennessee! — got there in 2000. Not very impressive, says I.