Fancy Store-Bought Dirt

Never cared that Gore won the Popular Vote. Those are the rules, and they're not -that- absurd.

Agree with M.S. Those are the rules of the game -- you play by them, and don't whine if you lose by them. (If you think the premises are flawed, then you should put in bills to fix them -- but don't call it thievery when you know the process going in.) On a related note, one of the reasons I respect Obama is that his campaign spent a lot of effort to understand the nomination rules (compared to Hillary, who had no strategy after Super Tuesday), and it paid off.

Al Gore is completely irrelevant to me although I have some Gore-supporter friends who were naturally disgusted by it. But the Founding Fathers deliberately did not want popular vote of the people to decide the presidency. Maybe their reasons aren't as meaningful now given that states are less politically powerful (because of the Civil War), but I think most people are brainwashed into believing "democracy = one true way" in school when we don't even have a democracy (for good reasons).

Just FYI, at least on my browser, everything after the link disappears because you used a single quote instead of a double quote to end the link.

Let's stipulate that there's a reasonable fear that the vote-gathering apparatus in a state is corrupt and will unfairly skew the vote count, whether by outright fraud or by more subtle measures of voter discouragement.

A good feature of the electoral college is that at least there's a firewall around each state. Corrupt state bosses can deliver all of their state's electoral votes, but that's it. If the election was decided by popular vote, a corrupt state could also magnify its impact by reporting a monster turnout and landslide victory for one candidate.

On the other hand, because an electoral college election is decided in a few battleground states, just a little corruption can still swing the election if it happens in the right state.

Intuitively, one might think that purple battleground states would have fairer elections, because the state Democrats and Republicans would each be numerous enough to keep each other honest. But events in Ohio and Florida don't give me confidence that that is the case.

Strictly speaking, I don't care that Al Gore won the popular vote, but I do enjoy Monkey Bowl's song, "Al Gore."

More than one post at FiveThirtyEight.com indirectly suggests the possibility that John McCain might win the 2008 popular vote but lose the election.

The 538ers currently give this a 7.83% chance of happening. The opposite, a "replay of 2000", is only given a 1.25% chance.

Heaven help us all if the 0.91% chance of a tie occurs...

My opinion of the 2000 election has nothing to do with Gore winning the popular vote, and everything to do with him possibly winning the electoral vote. Of course after 2004 my opinion was rendered moot(er).

Clinton won the popular vote handily twice, but that didn't stop people from claiming his win was illegitimate because Perot stole votes from Bush or he was under 50% etc. The fact is that people like to complain, and sometimes the only proper response is to not pay it more attention than it merits. Gore winning the PV is not why people believed he should have been President. Essentially, it was just a way to gripe about Bush's claim of a mandate.