HUSSEIN vs WILLARD: Rumble in the Electoral College

State-by-State Results:
Indiana (11): Romney
Kentucky (8 ): Romney
Vermont (3): Obama
West Virginia (5): Romney
South Carolina (9): Romney
Oklahoma (7): Romney
Maine (4): Obama
Massachusetts (11): Obama
Rhode Island (4): Obama
Maryland (10): Obama
Delaware (3): Obama
District of Columbia (3): Obama
Illinois (20): Obama
Connecticut (7): Obama
Tennessee (11): Romney
New Jersey (14): Obama
Georgia (16): Romney
Alabama (9): Romney
Mississippi (6): Romney
Arkansas (6): Romney
Michigan (16): Obama
Texas (38): Romney
New York (29): Obama
Louisiana (8 ): Romney
Kansas (6): Romney
Nebraska (5): Romney
North Dakota (3): Romney
South Dakota (3): Romney
Wyoming (3): Romney
Pennsylvania (20): Obama
New Hampshire (4): Obama
Wisconsin (10): Romney
Minnesota (10): Obama
Montana (3): Romney
Utah (6): Romney
New Mexico (5): Obama
Arizona (11): Romney
Missouri (10): Romney
Washington (12): Obama
California (55): Obama
North Carolina (15): Romney
Hawaii (4): Obama
Idaho (4): Romney
Iowa (6): Obama
Oregon (7): Obama
Ohio (18): Obama*
Colorado (9): Obama
Nevada (6): Obama
Alaska (3): Romney
Virginia (13): Obama
Florida (29): Obama

*Provided the decisive electoral vote

Learn more about the electoral college:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)

Follow Nate Silver's political forecast:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

Create your own electoral map showing results:

http://www.270towin.com/

Nate Silver's projection from a day out:



CNN's projection from a day out:

For those who don't understand the electoral college ... welcome to the club. It's not generally a very well-understood institution. The short version is that the Constitution does not say that the President is elected by the people of the United States. Rather, each state is given a number of electoral votes equal to the combined total of their Senators and Representatives in Congress, and each state allocates their votes in a manner of its own choosing. In this day and age that is done through state-wide elections.

Each state (plus the District of Columbia, where the U.S. Capitol is) casts all its electoral votes for the candidate with a simple majority in that state, except for Nebraska and Maine, which have hybrid systems. The candidate with a simple majority of electoral votes, currently 270 out of a possible 538, wins the election. This is true even if that candidate did not receive a majority (or even a plurality) of the national popular vote. That is why state-by-state polling is more important than nationwide polling when trying to predict the President.

You can follow the links above for more information, or if you have any questions I'll do my best to answer them. I'll try to keep the electoral map in the OP updated throughout tomorrow night. I hope this post makes sense.

yeah, it makes sense I think ..

I'm glad you think so.

Here's a map of poll closing times. Usually the first results and estimations are reported within minutes, though official confirmation times are highly variable. The times are all Eastern, so add five hours for GMT. (From Politico.)

Been following this story on and off for a while. Ohio is one of the most crucial swing states this election and its Secretary of State, Jon Husted (a Republican) has been hard at work trying to duplicate Florida in the 2000 election.

Four Ways Ohio's GOP Secretary of State Is Trying To Swing The Election For Mitt Romney - ThinkProgress

My gut feeling is that this won't swing the election but it's definitely worth keeping an eye on. There have been similar reports in other swing states, especially Pennsylvania, but Ohio is as far as I can tell the most egregious.

This whole electoral college thing seems a bit mad- in a first past the post system would it not be fairer and simpler if everyone casts their vote, then count all the votes and see who won?
I think I must be missing what the point of it is.

Is it true Romney is against tampons? Lmaooo like come on

Well its still better than Prince Charles comparing himself to one when 'sex chatting' with Camilla!!

Pettytyrant101 wrote:This whole electoral college thing seems a bit mad- in a first past the post system would it not be fairer and simpler if everyone casts their vote, then count all the votes and see who won?
I think I must be missing what the point of it is.

One can't understand the electoral college by trying to figure out what the point is. You have to try to understand what the point was in 1788 when the framers of the Constitution came up with the damn thing. Basically, the framers didn't trust democracy, so they didn't want to leave the decision of who should lead the Republic in the hands of the common people. In theory the electoral college was supposed to be a group of the most qualified and respected people in each state gathering separately in each state capital to discuss and ultimately cast their votes on who should be President. That's why each state chose electors rather than directly voting for President.

However, the framers of the Constitution did not anticipate the development of political parties, even though it was many of the framers themselves who set up the first ones. By 1796, the first election in which George Washington did not run (and thus the first contested election) the nascent parties both selected blocs of electors pledged for their candidates to run in each state. It was coordinated nationwide and the electoral college became a rubber stamp. In fact, when one of the electors voted for someone other than who he had promised to, he was roundly criticized for it. A famous editorial called him out saying "I choose him to act, not to think." That's basically how it still is.

The electoral college system was revised by the 12th Amendment in 1804 to fix some of the problems that arose from the unexpected party system, but the fundamentals of it remained the same. There have been numerous proposals since then to reform the system or just do away with it entirely have a single national election, but it requires a constitutional amendment and those are really hard to do. Also, some people still like the electoral college. They're probably the same people who think the two-party system is preferable than a multi-party system (and there are a lot of people like this).

Carly Castle wrote:Is it true Romney is against tampons? Lmaooo like come on

No, that was from an Onion-esque satire site.

I think I must be misunderstanding you somewhere Eldo- because it sounds to me like you are saying that when you vote you are not voting for Obama or Romney, but for someone to vote for you? And that cant be right.

Yes, that's exactly how it is. I guess I should have explained this in more detail before since there are so many non-Americans reading this. That's my bad.

When someone votes for in the presidential election in America, they are voting for an elector or a bloc of electors from their state who will in turn cast a vote when all the electors in that state gather to cast their votes about six weeks later. Originally this was much clearer, but in this day and age most states have the names of the Presidential candidate on the ballot alongside or instead of the names of the electors.

I know I say it a lot, but the United States is not a democracy. It's a Republic with very deliberate gaps between the people and the most powerful political positions. The federal government has become considerably more democratic since its inception, but Senators weren't even elected by the people until 1913. Before that Senators were elected by their respective state legislatures and it took a constitutional amendment to change that.

Wow. I hadnt realised it worked that way.
Coming from a country where your vote is your own and you vote for the candidate of your choice voting for someone to (hopefully) vote the way you want seems quite odd. And slightly worrying. And you are right, its not democracy.
So how come the US claims to be the worlds greatest democracy then when it doesnt even have a democratic voting system?

Probably because most people use the terms democracy and republic interchangeably.

The system we have made a lot more sense when the country was still a small agrarian republic grappling with the question of whether or not the states were still each sovereign nations. And only white, property-owning males could vote. The constitutional system is hard to change though so we've only had slight adjustments over time and the current system is quite jury-rigged, though it's better than it was in the 1790s. Personally I think it would be better to just rewrite the rules from scratch to reflect the political reality of the past 200 years but sweeping changes to the constitution are almost always controversial.

See this is why I am against a written consituition in principle- nice idea but it leads to the problem of adapting it to changing circumstances and knowledge.
When things are set in stone no one seems to want to rewrite new stones!

I think the problem (if you see it that way) is more of political culture than the mere existence of a written constitution. There are constitutions out there that get amended and even entirely rewritten quite frequently. This is pretty common for state constitutions, which do not have the same sacrosanct reputation as the federal one.

Also, for what it's worth, pledged electors keep their promises 99.9% of the time and no faithless elector has ever swung an election against what the outcome was supposed to be. It is theoretically possible though and it's not clear what legal basis there would be to challenge that, if any exists at all. Many states have laws to punish faithless electors but those are of dubious constitutionality themselves.

A part of the problem with the US constituition it seems to me is that over the centuries all political parties have mytholigised it, and its creators to the point where it seems (to an outsider like me anyway) to be somehwat like a religion- and therefore any contesting of it is seen as something like a heresy.

I absolutely agree that the founding myth (and its subsequent cult) of the United States is detrimental to our political culture and by extension to a whole lot more.

Does high school education not go someway to debunking these myths howver- I mean at school I learnt about Robert the Bruce and we got the 'mytholigised version' only as a comparison to the histroical facts.
Is US history not taught in a similar fashion?

It depends on where you go to school, really. That said, and I admit to generalizing here, US history education is a joke. A whitewashed joke, making it doubly unfortunate. This is probably a topic for a different thread but poor history education is a big part of the problem too.

One of many articles about the problem, this one from the New York Times last year: Link

Thanks for the link Eldo- a great shame- I am a big believer that without a good education in history a person is adrfit in their own time. Not knowing why things are as they are and therefore less well equipped to understand or deal with current situations without simply repeating or compounding old mistakes.
And more worryingly it leaves people vulnerable to be manipulated by false versions of history. People can end up believing any old dangerous nonsense- like their race is superiour to others.

It's very possible that America mythologizes it's history more than any other country except China. It's only in the last few decades that a more skeptical approach has been taken, and the term 'revisionist' has become a bad word word in some circles, usually associated with 'atheist'.

Dammit Petty, what are you doing up at this hour? Clearly the sinful are too tormented to get any rest.