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Obama: A people's champ?
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Global Electoral College Produced by The Economist gives worldview of candidates.
"The outcome of America's presidential election will have profound implications for the world. So what if every country could vote, with the result decided using an American-style electoral-college system?" is the question asked by the Economist, creators of the Global Electoral-College.
The Economist has redrawn the electoral map to give all 195 of the world's countries (including the United States) a say in the election's outcome. As in America, each country has been allocated a minimum of three electoral-college votes with extra votes allocated in proportion to population size. With over 6.5 billion people enfranchised, the result is a much larger electoral college of 9,875 votes. On the global map, a nation must have at least ten individual votes in order to have its electoral-college votes counted.
CURRENT RESULTS AND THE REALITY
As of today, with every country posting Senator John McCain has 3 electoral votes to Senator Barack Obama's 8,059.
"All democratic systems have their quirks, and America's is no exception. The (United States) electoral college is a 200-year-old institution," the Economist concedes.
How the system works is easy to explain--for many however, hard to digest.
The American public does not vote directly for their presidents. A ballot is cast to decide who wins their state's electoral-college votes. The number of votes are fixed by the number of people the state sends to Congress--which in turn, is based on the state's population. All states have a minimum of three votes and there are 538 electoral-college votes up for grabs in total. The presidential candidate who secures the most electoral-college votes ends up in the White House.
As in the 2000 presidential race, the electoral-college system can produce a president who has lost the popular vote (Pres. George Bush vs, Vice-President Al Gore). In addition, the winner-takes-all system employed by most states, leads candidates to focus on a small number of "swing states" and ignore more fail-safe allied ones. The Economist says there have been more than 700 attempts to reform the electoral-college system.
As for current opinions, an instant telephone poll by CNN and Opinion Research Corp. after the Sept. 26 presidential debate 524 observers, overwhelmingly decided for the Illinois senator. Asked who did the better job, 51 percent said Obama and 38 percent said McCain. On the question of handling the economy, 58-37 percent Obama over McCain and a narrower edge of 52-47 percent favoring the democrat on the Iraq war, said pollsters.
To view the Global Electoral-College Initiative, click here.
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