Word: winner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bush prevails, he will be the winner by a technicality--a badly designed ballot in Palm Beach County--and, perhaps, the first President in 112 years to gain office despite losing the popular vote. All his talk about gliding into Washington on the wings of a popular mandate--"a messenger of the people," as he once said--will be forgotten. If the Florida recount swings to Gore, he will have earned whisper-thin popular and electoral victories and the undying suspicion of millions of Bush supporters--people who absorbed the inaccurate Tuesday-night news reports that Bush...
...capital, a month or so after Election Day and actually cast votes. They have carried out that task with admirably robotic precision: only nine have ever failed to vote as they pledged. But they could make mischief in circumstances such as the ones we face today, in which the winner of the popular vote may narrowly lose the electoral vote...
Consider what would happen if the electoral votes were automatically cast: the winner would be settled as soon as the popular votes were counted and certified. With humans involved, however, another huge cloud of uncertainty may envelop the process--especially if the margin of electoral victory is as thin as this year's. There might be public pressure on electors to cast their votes on behalf of the winner of the national popular vote. Imagine the din from radio talk shows, the threats and promises aimed at these electors. A few might withhold their votes unless their candidate agrees...
...Senators and members of Congress. The rest was left to Congress and the states, and when the national party systems took shape in the 1820s, the states began to have voters choose party slates of electors when they voted for President. Most electoral-vote results became winner-take-all outcomes, which they remain...
Therein lies the problem, that presidential elections wound up with two measurements: one, with no legal standing, was the national total of popular votes; the second involved the voters' choice of electors from each state. Most of the time, the popular-vote winner also got a majority of the Electoral College...