Presidential Election: 2012

  • Thread starter Omnis
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At my polling place they were very busy in the morning when people with jobs voted before work. Then the jobless voted at their leisure throughout the day, followed by the working voting in the afternoon and evening on their way home.

We'll see how it turns out...
 
Not much of a surprise right now. All those states ate either pretty reliably Republican or Democrat in Presidential elections.
 
I'm using RCP to follow what is happening - until my bedtime of course, which is fast approaching... if it wasn't for an obscenely dull training course first thing tomorrow morning, I'd stay up and watch the election until some of the bigger results have come in - although it's possible/likely that the most crucial results will not be known before most people in the UK will have given up on the live coverage...

Here's a few useful links...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ - (currently has 'live' counts from every state)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map.html - (shows which states are projected for whom - highlights the main states to watch)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/2008_elections_electoral_college_map.html - (2008 results)
 
To be sure, having too many candidates is also not a very good situation because it ends in a deadlocked House/Senate/Parliament and the government/person leading the nation has no real power to affect any change.
Deadlocked government is a good thing. It prevents bad policy from running rampant and guarantees what does pass was done so with consensus. A single group with full control is very dangerous.

Is it possible for us citizens outside the u.s. to vote? The german news channel im following right now said 160000 us citizen in germany could vote
It is called absentee voting. They can get a mail-in ballot online. It just needs to be received by a specific date. It is done to allow soldiers deployed overseas or others who have to work overseas to vote.


I voted after picking my daughter up from daycare. I let her push all the buttons for me and the guy with the "I voted" stickers gave her one.
 
Or the elderly who can't travel to a poll, is another way absentee votes were taught to me.
 
CAM
Or the elderly who can't travel to a poll, is another way absentee votes were taught to me.

I saw a guy bringing an elderly woman in today. I overheard him saying she was his third trip to the polling place.
 
That's a nice guy. I know my great grandmother did absentee ballots before her mind went.

This just reminds me how dumb the electoral college is. A country painted in red with smatterings of blue around metropolitan areas needs a better system.
 
It blows me away that a guy can be winning the popular vote by almost a half a percent of the entire US population and have no shot of winning. The electoral college was made in a time when the electorate was almost entirely illiterate and information traveled so slowly that no citizen could be properly informed. This needs change.
 
It's been an interesting past few hours watching it all unfold - CNN must have an army of people crunching numbers to present all the info they do. I find it fascinating to compare and contrast the American system to the Canadian one as it goes along.

Gotta love US presidential carnivals politics, warts and all. :D
 
True. It's just not right, it allows candidates to focus on minute factions of people that aren't representative of the entire population because of their geographical value. If Hamilton County, Ohio were on the other side of the border we wouldn't be exposed to it in the press because it wouldn't be in a swing state, which makes it useless to a presidential candidate.
 
Yeah, that's one different point to notice. Attention is (roughly) more evenly distributed up here when it comes to campaigning. One interesting thing I also notice is that Americans constantly mention how important it is to get the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the white vote, etc., etc. In Canada no one talks about voters in terms of race for the most part - it seems to be far more ingrained and prevalent in the US than up here.
 
Bias (at least where I live) is much more prevalent. If you go up to a normal white guy, he will say he's voting for Romney but not have a great reason why, for the most part. If you go up to a minority, they will start spewing off praise of Obama, and if you ask them the first question about his policy they draw a blank. It's just a societal thing that all races are guilty of, at least here.

And that was a wide generalization of the people I come in contact with, which unfortunately are not the most intelligent bunch.
 
CNN are almost convinced that it is over for Romney, as Ohio and Florida seem to go to Obama.

Four more years Obama. You heard it here first.
 
In Canada no one talks about voters in terms of race for the most part - it seems to be far more ingrained and prevalent in the US than up here.

Probably because Canada is something like 80% white.
 
We knew Obama was going to win going in. Sandy, as much as one hates to say it this way, buttered up the electorate with cross-party cooperation pictures and other emotional attractants, which blots out the memory of 4 years of political stagnancy for many.

Joey D
Probably because Canada is something like 80% white.

:lol:
 
Probably because Canada is something like 80% white.

Hehe, we might have been at one point, but we are now the self-styled 'cultural mosaic' of the world! We've got a very diverse mix of people up here, and at least at my university, white people aren't in the majority alot of the time.

It was actually a real culture shock my first year - learning about multiculturalism in school just doesn't compare to experiencing it day-to-day in the flesh.
 
Hehe, we might have been at one point, but we are now the self-styled 'cultural mosaic' of the world! We've got a very diverse mix of people up here, and at least at my university, white people aren't in the majority alot of the time.

It was actually a real culture shock my first year - learning about multiculturalism in school just doesn't compare to experiencing it day-to-day in the flesh.


I've heard that Vancouver has a large Asian population.
 
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