BBC

[den]

I can't help feeling the BBC has jumped the gun. Is this a projection or has counting actually finished?


2PM AEST

Comments

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

What they said. They're still counting the votes. The short version, though, is that the President wins not through popular votes, but by electoral votes that go by states. In some of the states it's pretty obvious to anyone, not just a pollster with reams of statistical analysis, that the state is going to go one way or another. So in those cases it's easy to project which way the state is going to go even with most of the votes as yet uncounted.

Interesting and frustrating thing, the Electoral College. Each state gets a number of votes equal to its combined number of legislators- two for the two Senators each state gets regardless, and then more equal to the number in the House of Representatives, which are divided up according to the population of the states (except each state gets at least one). Plus the District of Columbia, the DC of Washington DC, which isn't a state at all, gets some.

So it's quite easy, mathematically, for the President to win while losing the popular vote. If for example he won by one vote in each state he won and got no votes at all in the states he lost, he could end up having about 3/4 of the voters against him.

There have been two Presidents who won in the Electoral College but lost the popular vote: Grover Cleveland, and our own beloved George W. Bush. Dubya lost the popular vote in his first election. He won the popular vote in his second election-- if there was no significant vote fraud involved. (whistles innocently)

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I think I prefer our Westminster system. Everyone votes for the member in their electorate. The party with the most members voter in goes into power, and the leader of that party becomes Prime Minister.

When we become a Republic the president will either be a political appointee by Parliament, or someone voted in by popular vote, or the office of Prime Minister will be re-named President. Whatever method is chosen, we will maintain a healthy disrespect for the leader.

[pure-agnostic.livejournal.com]

There have been two Presidents who won in the Electoral College but lost the popular vote: Grover Cleveland, and our own beloved George W. Bush.

Ah, don't forget Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular vote in 1876 but still got into the Whitehouse. The 1876 vote was a fiasco worse than the mess in Florida 8 years back. 3 states (Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina) could not declare a victor even though polls predicted wins in all 3 for the Democratic party. A commission of mostly Republican party hacks gave all the disputed electoral votes to Hayes. Oh, and this election had ballot problems akin to those in Florida in 2000 whereby the Democratic ballot was made to look like a Republican ballot. (Some states had separate ballots for each party then.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

When you untie the statistical fraud (which is easy enough to do, and has been done), Bush lost the popular vote in 2004, too. And, of course, he ALSO would have lost the electoral vote - making him the second person to lose *both* and still occupy the office.