The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.
The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.
The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.____________________________________________________________
This amendment lays out the process of electing the president and the vice president. It also explains how the president and vice president are elected by the electoral college. Members of the electoral college vote for the person who gets majority vote by their state. It also goes on to say that is there happens to be a tie for president that the house of representatives choose who becomes president. It also explains how if the electoral college do not agree on president, how the president is chosen. Any person running for vice president must also be eligible to be president.
____________________________________________________________
10/12/2009
Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
Posted Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in "tinfoil hats," while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as "conspiracy theories1," and The New York Times declared that "there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale2.
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad3 never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote4 — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations5. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states6, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations7. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes8, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots9. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast10.
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count11.
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. "We didn't have one election for president in 2004," says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. "We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities."
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 200412 — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes13. (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots14. And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House15.
"It was terrible," says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. "People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct — it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened."
Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. "Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen," Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. "You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb."
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
Thoughts:
Although the electoral college might have been a good idea at the time, I do not believe that it is efficient for today's world. The electoral college causes problems like during the 2004 election when peoples vote for president was not counted. It also causes problems in the states that have the "all or nothing" policy. I do not believe that if one candidate gets 55% of the votes for the state, he should get all the electoral college votes for the state, he should get 55% of them also. If the states would all switch to dividing the electoral college votes up, I would agree more with using it.
____________________________________________________________
10/26/2009
IF THERE'S one constitutional idea whose time has come and gone, it's the Electoral College.
That arrangement for electing a president is a throwback to a different age, designed as a solution to circumstances that no longer exist.
But the antique system continues to present problems of its own.
Consider just two:
First, it poses the regular danger of a president who wins the Electoral College but not the popular vote, depriving the country of a chief executive who is viewed as fully legitimate.
That, of course, happened in 2000, when Al Gore won the national vote, but George W. Bush eventually prevailed in the Electoral College.
But we've had three other elections in which candidates who didn't win the popular vote nevertheless ended up in the White House: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and Benjamin Harrison in 1888. In the last case, Harrison actually replaced a sitting president, Grover Cleveland; four years later, Cleveland won a rematch.
Second, the Electoral College lends disproportionate general election influence to a handful of swing states, which become pivotal in each and every close election, while much of the rest of the country is neglected.
But trying to amend the constitution is a Herculean task.
That's why the campaign for a national popular vote holds such promise. It's a way of sidestepping the Electoral College without amending the Constitution.
Here's how the plan would work. Individual states pass legislation to join an interstate compact, under which member states will award all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. When states representing 270 electoral votes — the number needed to become president — have signed on, the plan goes into effect. Thus it's in the power of state Legislatures and governors to catalyze the move.
So far, the bill has been introduced in 47 states. It has been passed into law in Illinois (21 electoral votes) New Jersey (15), Maryland (10 ), and, just last week, Hawaii (4), and is under active consideration in any number of others. In Massachusetts, the bill has a majority in both the House and the Senate, says Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause of Massachusetts.
If the plan goes into effect, it would change the nature of campaigns in a big way. Right now, it doesn't matter if a candidate wins a state by 10 votes or 10,000; once you have a majority, every additional vote is essentially wasted. Thus there's little point of campaigning in states that lean strongly for either party.
"Presidential campaigns do not visit, do not run ads, do not care about nonbattleground states, observes Barry Fadem, president of National Popular Vote, the nonprofit organization promoting the idea.
Indeed, according to that group, in the 2004 general election, 99 percent of all the advertisizing money expended on the presidential race was spent in 16 states — with two-thirds of it targeted for just five states.
But in a true national election, that wouldn't be the case. Each vote would count just as much as any other in determining the outcome. That means it would be just as important for a candidate to attract extra votes in a state he or she was already expected to win as it would be to concentrate on a swing state. That is, it would matter just as much for a Democrat or Republican to attract an extra 1,000 votes in Massachusetts, a predictably Democratic state, or in Texas, a predictably Republican state, as it would be to battle for extra votes in a swing state like Ohio.
"Neither political party is going to be able to say, as they have in every other election, we don't care about the following states," says Fadem.
By expanding the effective playing field, a direct national election would also probably change the mix of issues that candidates focus on, with national concerns taking clear precedence over matters dear to populations in the swing states but less vital to voters in other places.
Common Cause thinks a broader campaign would also have the effect of boosting political participation across the country.
Now, this obviously won't happen before the 2008 election, but Fadem's optimistic view is that enough states will join to put it into effect for 2012.
It's a big change, but an outdated arrangement shouldn't govern something as important as presidential elections. It's time we graduated from the Electoral College. This is an idea both Democrats and Republicans should get behind.
http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/pages/columns/bostonglobe_20080506.php
Thoughts:
I really agree with this article. I think that in the days when the constitution was first written the electoral college was a good thing to have, but today it is out of date. By the electoral college electing the president, "We the people", are not actually being heard.
____________________________________________________________
