>The electoral college is a red herring here. The issue is the way these elections are managed at the county level, the old technology. It was bound to bite people in the ass someday. That day is here.

I still disagree. If elections were held perfectly, that would alleviate much of the problem, I agree. There still remains, in a close election, a high probablity that the popular winner will be the electoral loser under the current mathematically flawed system, that's still my point. This is a situation we should not have, it lends itself to disdain & disrespect of our system. We can and should improve this, it's not that difficult. Our current system is illogical and perceived as unfair, particularly in a "democracy" (or so we think of our system, whether is actually is or not), to have the loser win. It's also inconsistent with all the rest of our elections, from Senate on down to Dogcatcher.

>The whole thing is out of control. Republicans pointing fingers at Democrats - with all the rhetoric. A suspect Sec. of State. An equally antagonistic Attorney General.

Yes, it is a mess, due in large part to the very flaw I was addressing. I'd make a wager that the change I outlined would've preempted this problem, even with all the flaws in the current voting system. Gore would apparently have won electorally fairly easily (some people have now run statistics on this), using the CD/state-assigned electoral method I outlined. It's much more accurate than the current electoral assignment system. And to address Republican concerns, it *very* easily could've gone the other way with respect to winner/loser, as I'm sure everyone has figured out. We need to try to get the popular and electoral winner in sync.

Now, a caveat is that my plan only reduces the likelihood of split electoral/popular winners by a factor of perhaps 10, it does not entirely solve it - an extremely close popular vote (less than say 50,000 national votes) could still be capable of producing a split result - but the odds are much slimmer than the current system, at least.


>For sure, this is now a Florida issue as the federal courts have said thanks - but no thanks. My guess is that the FL Sup. Ct. is going to allow the manual counts to go through.

I'm leaning that way, too, why else would they have let the counts continue? I'm starting to wonder if a new FL statewide election might not be a bad idea at this messy point of charge-countercharge. A very simple new election - hand-counted, old-fashioned, pen-marked ballots, with only the 2 prex candidates on them, as simple as can be. The entire process might take less time and have a less-disputed result than all the current activities.