[OFB Cafe] Bio Fuels

[Derek Broughton]

On July 22, 2008 02:12:30 Timothy Butler wrote:
> >> I'm glad you pointed that out.  Shrub lost the popular vote to
> >> ALGOR by over a half million votes and became the first candidate
> >> since Benjamin Harrison to lose the election and still make it to
> >> the Oval Office.  What a frickin' disaster that turned out to be.
>
> 	Actually he did not lose the election. 

Harrison may not have lost the election.  It's hard to see how Bush didn't.

> 	The popular vote has always 
> been meaningless. We are a federal republic, made of individual states
> that send electors to chose a president. Of course, since most people
> cannot understand the premises behind this form of government, it
> isn't surprising the popular vote attracts so much attention.

Even if one _can_ understand the premises, that doesn't invalidate the 
attention paid to the popular vote.  It's pretty reasonable to say that if 
most of the population doesn't support the person who gets elected, it's not 
a fair vote.  However, I don't think half a million people in the entire 
voting population of the US (200 million?) is enough to call the election 
unfair on those grounds alone (and I note, Chris didn't say that anyway).  
Certainly more people simply failed to exercise their franchise than the 
difference in the popular vote.
-- 
derek