I have been resisting writing anything about these USA elections, but I can't resist any longer.
At the moment that I am writing this "Musings," the arithmetic situation of the USA Presidential elections is as follow:
National:
Candidate
Total Votes
Vote %
States Won
Electoral Votes (EV)
Gore
49,921,267
49%
19
255
Bush
49,658,276
48%
29
246
Nader
2,756,008
3%
0
0
Buchanan
447,927
0%
0
0
Needed to Win...............................270
Undeclared States
Electoral Votes
Gore
Bush
Florida
25
2,910,942
2,911,872
New Mexico
5
286,558 *
286,077
Oregon
7
718,291*
711,533
(* advantage - Both New Mexico & Oregon are really in Gore column)
Florida:
:
Old Totals
Overseas Ballots
New Total
Re-counts
New New Totals
Bush
2,910,492
1,380
2,911,872
?
?
Gore
2,910,192
750
2,910,942
?
?
Advantage
Bush 300
Bush 630
Bush 930
?
?
Thus the stakes are as follows:
Gore EV
Bush EV
Who wins presidency?
If Gore wins Florida
292
246
Gore by 22 EV
If Bush wins Florida
267
271
Bush by 1 EV
It is as simple as that!
You can see why there is a dog-fight going on! It is conceivable that if Bush wins Florida, Gore, the popular vote winner, can still "persuade" - bribe? - 3 Bush electors to defect to his side. But this is not Nigeria! :-)
Oops - politically incorrect! Delete that from memory.
Well - I am not predicting yet, but I have this hunch that Gore will win this presidency by just one vote after scraping the barrel of chads for votes:-) I also suspect that in Heaven, our Lord Almighty is having some fun that in his Domain, there is no voting, and now we all humans know why!
But I get ahead of myself.....
What other country could this be happening, where the combination of the above factors hold:
100 million people vote, and candidate Gore wins 200,000 more popular votes than candidate Bush - and he is not declared president yet?
Candidate Gore currently has 267 electoral votes to candidate Bush's 246 electoral votes, and the deciding state with 25 electoral votes to put either candidate over the 271 electoral votes is in Florida - the state of junior brother Governor Jeb Bush - and there is no riot on the streets, or soldiers/police (called out by Governor Bush or Vice-President Gore, for their own reasons) called out to way a decision?
The chief electoral officer of that state is one Ms. Kathleen Harris, co-campaign manager of Bush; and the Supreme Court justices of the state are unanimously Democrats - and there is no riot on the streets? Kathleen the Great is not even hiding her bias anymore, smartly passing decisions up to the (potentially equally biased) justices.
The local government (called counties in Florida) are so powerful that they can design their own PRESIDENTIAL BALLOT - a most confusing butterfly ballot in the case of one of the counties (Palm Beach.)
Lord knows that I wish that this event occurred BEFORE the Falae/Obasanjo fiasco when Nigerians, ever ready to copy America, would have URGED Falae to go all the way to....well as far as Gore/Lieberman are still prepared to go.
I have been watching with trepidation, because the fate of electoral democracy hangs in the balance. If America cannot go all the way to the Supreme court, then which weaker democracy can, without crumbling under the fear of a coup d'etat or some other form of instability? That will be an eternal excuse for rigging in the future in weaker democracies.
And I am sure that President Obasanjo is hoping that Gore wins so that he too can say "There you go - even the President of the USA did not win his own state - so I too dey kampe for not winning Ogun State!"
And Nigerians will be making a big mistake if rather than learning a good lesson from this experience, we gloat at the debacle - it is a civic lesson in civility.
But I get ahead of myself....
So what are my recommendations?
The US electoral college - it is similar to the feudal system employed by the NPC during the 1959 elections in Nigeria in choosing its national candidates - should be abolished.
It should be replaced by a system like Nigeria that guarantees that a reasonable number of states ALSO be won by the winning candidate. The stipulation should not be some arbitrary number like "two-third of 50". Since there are 50 states and 538 electoral votes, that makes an average of 10.8 electoral votes per state.
Dividing 135 (half of 270) by 10.8 means that a winning candiate must win at least 13 states, failing which:
the third winningest candidate chooses which candidate to throw ALL his votes to or
there is a run off between the top two candidates two weeks later, with only the candidate with the more popular votes being the determinant.
Much as as I am an unrepentant federalist, this is "true federalism" run riot where a county can just determine its own federal-post ballot! There should be one design for federal posts in the country, one design for state positions within a state, and the local governments can then choose their own designs for their own local elections.
But all of this should be implemented after Gore has won by one vote.
After all, I voted for him on Tuesday, November 7 - for him because of Clinton, and against Bush because of Bush. And my friend's vote would have made him president.
But the vulture is a patient bird, and I am prepared to wait until all the chads come home....and recounting done until Gore wins by my Florida friend's vote.
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