Interesting how long the bike lasted after the lock got stolen.

Oh my. That is crazy in every sense of the word.

Just...wow.

I liked the Vin Scully. Morgan Freeman surprised me too.

But shouldn't John Wayne be retired from impersonation repertoires by now? It's like doing Richard Nixon. We get it, he has jowls.

Yikes! *timeshift

The punchline SLAYED me. Still wiping away the tears.

I would've gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling physics.

The police car didn't turn his siren on until one second before attempting to pass. He had his flashers on, but it's easy to go a few seconds before noticing those.

>> ^Asmo:

I don't decide, the abstainer decides... Whether it's apathy (my vote doesn't make a difference), indifference (don't care either way) or a genuine protest about a paucity of good candidates, the abstainer chooses (democratically) not to participate. They lose the right to complain (although most will still do so) about who they wind up with, but it's not like they were disqualified against their wishes...

Here's our disagreement in a nutshell:

You claim the most pure form of democracy represents the majority of voters. I claim the most pure form of democracy represents the majority of people. If your aim is a more pure democracy, which is more desirable?

And your last paragraph simply isn't supported. In a direct election, a candidate must appeal to exactly 50.1% of the electorate, and there is no compulsion to distribute that appeal either demographically or geographically. The college at least forces the candidates to broaden their reach. Look at some of the swing states fought over in the past election: Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Missouri, Nevada. There's a lot of diversity represented there, both geographically and demographically. IMO that's the way it should be in a union of states.

>> ^Asmo:
Btw, a person who chooses not to vote does in fact cast a vote, a vote to abstain. Because they choose to exclude themselves from the process does not mean they weren't given their democratic right to have their say.
I'm sorry to be pedantic here, but I don't see why you get to decide what an abstainer thinks. I think they don't like any of the candidates, so I say they're casting a vote for "none of the above". However you want to count them, the 69 million popular votes cast for Obama in 2008 represents about 23% of the 300 million residents. It's simply not the will of the majority. It's not even the will of a representative sample, being that it excludes everyone under 18 and everyone not a citizen.

In a country where people seem reasonably satisfied with two senators per state, unelected judges, and all kinds of other "transgressions" against one-person-one-vote that occur in a republic, I just think it's misguided to believe that the electoral college is some huge injustice. The US is called the United States for a reason; it's not conceived to work purely as a direct democracy on the federal level, and there's no prior reason to believe that's a more effective form of governance at that scale.

Also, some of his numbers are way off. According to the US Census (see #29), 79% of the population was urban in 2000, not ~20% as he claims.

For a breakdown of metro areas by population, look at #21 at the US Census link, "Metropolitan Statistical Areas--Population by Age". There were 131 million votes cast for president in 2008. If you want to arbitrarily define urban as 1 million people or more, there are 126.4 million voting-age people living in metropolitan areas.

Sliced a different way, according to the US Census, a presidential candidate can get to 50% of that if they take the voting age populations of just the top 12 metropolitan areas:

New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA
Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX
Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD
Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV
Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA
Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA
Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI

I don't know where he gets his numbers--maybe by using strict city limits?--but they're not even close to reality. According to the facts, in a pure popularity vote, a presidential candidate can safely ignore the rural areas and still win an election.

The electoral college is imperfect, but whatever you want to replace it with should do a better job of representing a diversity of interests--geographic, demographic, and politic--than a direct popular vote.

>> ^Asmo:


Umm, isn't that the very definition of democracy? Getting the most votes, one person one vote.
So is the UK not a democracy? Canada? Australia? Germany? France? All have a head of government who is not elected by one person, one vote. In any of those cases, it's quite possible to choose a prime minister not favored by a majority. There are different flavors of democracy, some of them pre-dating the US, many of which do not directly elect their executives by one-person, one-vote.

The philosophical point of democracy is to best represent the will of the majority. In the US, we have the additional task of doing so while protecting the rights of the minority. The best way to do that is not always one-person, one-vote.

And like I said: even if you abolish the electoral college you still don't get the will of the majority, since there are many people who cannot legally vote and many others who choose not to.

>> ^marbles:

Well you got it mostly right, the fact is we're not suppose to be a democracy. We are suppose to be constitutional republic of individual sovereign states with democratic checks and balances. Democracy ≠ freedom.

Exactly. The premise of the video, that 5% of the time the "loser" won the election, is only true if you define "winner" as the candidate with the most popular votes. In fact that's a pretty arbitrary definition, even in a democracy. Even if you abolish the electoral college, you'll find all kinds of strains on fairness.


Continue the thought experiment: you'll probably want to start by wiping out the Senate, since it grossly overrepresents the vote of a Hawaiian relative to a New Yorker. Next, onto the Supreme Court. A whole *branch* of government unelected! Where's the democracy?

Now that we're casting our votes for Scalia or Kagan, there's a thorny problem with the numbers. Somehow, even with the electoral college gone, we're still ignoring the will of the 24% of the population under the age of 18. Don't forget the 20 million immigrants living legally in the United States. What happened to one person, one vote? Under what definition of "fair" do only adults and citizens get to determine their own destiny democratically?

After you've rectified that "indefensible" affront to democracy, you'll still find that, because of the typical ~55% turnout, 51% of the popular vote really only wins about 28% of the population. Why should that candidate be president, they don't even represent the will of the majority! How is that democratic?

Don't assume that electing the president by popular vote is somehow more fair. It's not, it's just more direct, and a different set of arbitrary rules. What we should really be concerned about is the same thing the Founding Fathers were thinking about: coming up with the most *effective* system of government within the framework of a constitutional republic. That may not be the Electoral College, but directly electing the president doesn't necessarily make anything better, or more fair.

Just came across this, the best remix. Deserves a *promote.

There are few things truer in life than happy dancing.