Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2012-01-08 03:42 pm
silveradept) wrote2012-01-08 03:42 pm
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Shadow Idol, Prompt 9: The convoluted path, not the direct one
What happened to the topic before, according to official LJ Idol chronology? Well, it was a traveling travesty all by itself, and didn't need much for elaborating on. Besides, I've already talked about things like the Tea Party Express before.
And thus, we move on to the next topic, by giving spring and summer a miss and moving straight into fall.
The United States does not directly elect its President. This will become important this year, as there are candidates vying for the highest office in the land.
Did we mention that the salary of the President of the United States is $200,000 USD / year? For comparison, Johnny Depp, of Pirates of the Carribean, Alice in Wonderland, and other Hollywood movies, is estimated to have made $100 million USD in 2010. That's approximately 500 times the amount of money the President makes. For a large part of the country, that would be a step up in salary. However, to get that $200,000 USD, each of these candidates will spend several millions USD, plus will have several hundreds of millions of USD spent on their behalf by organizations that are theoretically dedicated to "issues" campaigning, bankrolled by rich individuals and corporate coffers...all without anyone having to admit that they've spent that kind of money.
Okay, so what everyone thinks of as Election Day in the United States is not actually a direct election of the President.
At this point, by the way, we've gone through caucuses (where people gather in specific places to talk about whom they want to nominate for their party's platform), primaries (formal votes to decide who gets the nomination for the party platform in their state), and the grist of finding scandals, endorsements, mudslinging, negative campaigning, and an endless parade of advertisements.
So, yeah. The votes that are cast on Election Day are not a direct democracy, but could very well be considered a national opinion poll. A body called the Electoral College casts their votes for President and Vice-President. At best, the votes of the people are tied, by law or by contract, to determine from which party the electors sent to the Electoral College will come.
The electors themselves are usually tied by contract to vote for the party they represent, but there's always the possibility that the electors will choose not to vote with the popular opinion and elect someone else. Generally speaking, the only situation that would happen in is if there were someone who had giant popular appeal, promising impossible things to a vulnerable populace, and that would have obvious negative consequences to the country.
Which has a lot of people saying, "Well, excepting for that highly-improbable scenario, why don't we just do away with the Electoral College and just directly elect the President?" That would be the intuitive way to do things...
...except that even in a first-past-the-post system with a very winner-take-all flavor to it, like the U.S. system is, the Electoral College actally allows for subtlety. (Admittedly, it's a very Jaegermonster-type subtlety, but subtle nonetheless) Not all states are winner-take-all from their elections or electoral colleges. Some of them prefer to deal out their electors according to the percentage of the vote received in their opinion polling, which makes some states important to campaign in, even if one might not win the state.
And that's the big stuff. At your own election site, of course, it could be a church, despite it being a secular election.
It's a wonderfully convoluted process for something that should be fairly straightforward, and thus, we think that it fits nicely in the definitions of "counterintuitive."
And thus, we move on to the next topic, by giving spring and summer a miss and moving straight into fall.
The United States does not directly elect its President. This will become important this year, as there are candidates vying for the highest office in the land.
Did we mention that the salary of the President of the United States is $200,000 USD / year? For comparison, Johnny Depp, of Pirates of the Carribean, Alice in Wonderland, and other Hollywood movies, is estimated to have made $100 million USD in 2010. That's approximately 500 times the amount of money the President makes. For a large part of the country, that would be a step up in salary. However, to get that $200,000 USD, each of these candidates will spend several millions USD, plus will have several hundreds of millions of USD spent on their behalf by organizations that are theoretically dedicated to "issues" campaigning, bankrolled by rich individuals and corporate coffers...all without anyone having to admit that they've spent that kind of money.
Okay, so what everyone thinks of as Election Day in the United States is not actually a direct election of the President.
At this point, by the way, we've gone through caucuses (where people gather in specific places to talk about whom they want to nominate for their party's platform), primaries (formal votes to decide who gets the nomination for the party platform in their state), and the grist of finding scandals, endorsements, mudslinging, negative campaigning, and an endless parade of advertisements.
So, yeah. The votes that are cast on Election Day are not a direct democracy, but could very well be considered a national opinion poll. A body called the Electoral College casts their votes for President and Vice-President. At best, the votes of the people are tied, by law or by contract, to determine from which party the electors sent to the Electoral College will come.
The electors themselves are usually tied by contract to vote for the party they represent, but there's always the possibility that the electors will choose not to vote with the popular opinion and elect someone else. Generally speaking, the only situation that would happen in is if there were someone who had giant popular appeal, promising impossible things to a vulnerable populace, and that would have obvious negative consequences to the country.
Which has a lot of people saying, "Well, excepting for that highly-improbable scenario, why don't we just do away with the Electoral College and just directly elect the President?" That would be the intuitive way to do things...
...except that even in a first-past-the-post system with a very winner-take-all flavor to it, like the U.S. system is, the Electoral College actally allows for subtlety. (Admittedly, it's a very Jaegermonster-type subtlety, but subtle nonetheless) Not all states are winner-take-all from their elections or electoral colleges. Some of them prefer to deal out their electors according to the percentage of the vote received in their opinion polling, which makes some states important to campaign in, even if one might not win the state.
And that's the big stuff. At your own election site, of course, it could be a church, despite it being a secular election.
It's a wonderfully convoluted process for something that should be fairly straightforward, and thus, we think that it fits nicely in the definitions of "counterintuitive."