Original thread in my old forum
Here it comes, it is getting closer and closer. That’s right election time is wadling it way towards us. Moving fat and cumbersome on its weakening legs. I wonder how much longer it will be before its legs give out and it just stops even showing up?
Ok perhaps that is a bad analogy, but that is about how I feel when it comes to electing the “represenatives” for our goverment. That is also perhaps the loosest use of the word available. These people that are in office no more represent me than I represent gay, black, pregnant, women. The last statistic that I saw about it, said that over 60% of the people in the United States use the Internet. Which Democratic presidental candidate represents that? Which canidate represents the large majority that seem to want to download music, instead of buy it from the record conglomorates? Dean was perhaps the closest thing and he only paid it marginal lip-service to the digital age, by using it to collect money. Hey, republicans don’t get up on your high horse either, do you think the current president takes much time to surf ebay, even before he was president? No!! All of them are too busy making side-deals with companies and lobbyists to give much of a damn about what normal people are doing.
Lets start with the primaries. First, they hold a couple make believe elections called caucuses. No one normal even has a clue how those things work. So the media makes up a couple winners. Take a look at this years as an example. Dean was the popular favorite until the Iowa caucus. Then some people tell him that he lost and he gets kinda excited about it and yells and stuff, trying to get his people motivated. If a football coach had done that we would have said how great and motivational he was. Instead it was a chance for the news media to belittle and make fun of him. Why? Because he was attempting to work around them in general. He went by them and got his support from normal people. So they iced him by swaying public opinion away from him. Make no doubt about it the results of the primaries that followed were largely influenced by the fact that every media outlet in America was making fun of Dean for saying, “Whooo”. This develops a snowball effect. The more one person wins the more that one person is going to win, because the media will report that they won in other states and people will then decide to vote for them because there is no point in wasting their vote on someone else that isn’t going to win. Well trust me people there is no winning, no matter who you vote for you still lose.
Here is another interesting thing. To the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been a Kentucky primary that has been mass marketed by the media. As a matter of fact after the first 3 primaries most of the possible candidates dropped out. So after taking a sampling of 3/50th of the states in the US, any other state that wants to vote for one of the drop outs doesn’t have a chance. Why does New England’s opinion mean more than someone in Indiana? Why does Iowa have a chance to vote on 10 people, but people in Wisconson only get the choice of 3?
Then there are the elections themselves. Not only are you expected to vote on someone that means absolutely nothing to you and that couldn’t give a damn about you, but when you do no one even pays attention to your vote. You have to vote on two people that mostly likely you had absolutely no say in who they are. I know that when the election rolls around that anyone who voted for Gore in 2000 will now be voting between two people that they had no say in picking. Then when you become resigned to your fate and just accept that you have to vote for someone, you cast you vote only to find out that is got lost, or was counted wrong, or was wasted when the electronic voting machine was hacked, or didn’t count as much because 10,000 dead people voted, or was a waste because in your state the person you voted for only got 40% while the other person got 42%. That means the other person wins your state and gets it electoral votes, while in another state the person you voted for could get 98% of the votes and still only get the electoral votes for that state. What that means is that even though the person you voted for got more votes he still loses.
This is a great system we got going here and the really bad thing is that it is the best in existance. Why don’t we move on to a better system? Why don’t we move to a system that isn’t as easy to exploit? Why isn’t there more people involved in the people’s goverment? Because the fox are in control of the hen house. The people that are making the rules are the ones that are breaking the rules and the people’s trust.
It would be so easy to develop a better system, if for nothing else than the selection of the canidates. Make the discussion with them more open. How refreshing would it be to be able to go to www.potentialpresidentusa.gov and hit the forums and talk things out with the canidate? How better to get a peoples poll than to let the people speak about it. I don’t just mean let people rant about it on some website, but a place where there is a moderated dicussion between the people and their representatives.
