Voted

[dr_tectonic]

I voted! I am now officially excusing myself from being informed for the rest of the week (or as long as I can manage, anyway).

I found that the toughest question for me was actually about whether the mayor of Broomfield should break tie votes for the 10-member city council. As it's set up currently, ordinances can only pass by a 6-4 vote. So the question is basically, which do you value more: the local government being able to make decisions with relative ease and speed, or the local government needing to develop strong agreement before it can make changes? I ended up going with the status quo, but it was hard.

Comments

[dpolicar]

Well, you'll get no argument from me about the electoral college.

But I'm not quite I get the relationship. I mean, suppose everybody follows Colorado's lead... that replaces a system where the popular vote is sliced into 50 chunks (assuming faithful electors) with one where it's split into 538 chunks. I suppose there's a sense in which that's a step on the way to actually counting all 300,000,000 votes, but I don't quite see how.

And while I'll grant you that speeches are neither here nor there, it seems like a variation on voting blocks to me? Coloradians have more political power if they vote as a block, much like Jews or gays do, in that they will get more effectively pandered to by the candidates. But admittedly, if they don't have any issues they want to use that power for, or have been using it for today, then I guess there's no cost to giving it up.

Actually, if the goal is to switch to a direct popular vote, I would think it would be more effective for the Colorado electors hold off on voting until everyone else has, then calculate the prorated difference between the national vote and the electoral vote and split their votes to make up the difference, and ignore the Colorado popular vote altogether. But I suspect that wouldn't pass either.