Reggie Rivers' Take on 36

Reggie Rivers has this column on Amendment 36 in this morning's DP.

In this column, he states that:
"...your vote actually gets converted into an endorsement of the person you voted against."

He then goes onto give an example of a neighborhood barbeque in which food selections are based on a winner take all system.

Objections to this being an out-of-state attempt to garner a few extra electoral votes for Kerry aside and the fact that it would relegate Colorado's electoral status to that of Wyoming, here are my thoughts.

Since we're using simple analogies, I'd like to put another one out there for Reggie. I assume he'll understand this one:

In a normal NFL season, there are 16 games. In each game, the winner is determined by who scores the most points. Say your team wins 9 games and scores 20 points in each of those wins. In the 7 games that your team loses, you only score 10 points. At the end of the season, you've scored 250 points.

Another team wins 10 games and scores 7 points in each win, and loses 6 games and scores 3 points in each win. At the end of the season this team has scored 88 points.

Who goes to the playoffs? The team with the most wins, of course, even though they scored less points throughout the season.

Football and voting - not necessarily the same thing, but the point is that at the outset of the season, every player knew the rules and what it would take to make the playoffs. The rules didn't change during Week 7 of the season to give out proportionate wins and loses.

That's my main beef with Amendment 36: It changes the rules for electoral votes for an election that is already well underway.

Rivers' point is that if your candidate loses, your vote goes to the person you voted against. But that doesn't mean that your vote didn't count. It most certainly counted within your state. We do elections on a state by state basis because to do it using the popular vote on a national level would be a logistical nightmare, as described in this column by the WSJ Opinion Journal.

If every state in the U.S used the proportional system and the change came in a non-election year, I most certainly would agree to it, but for Colorado to make the change alone means that we'll be playing the game according to different rules than the rest of the country.

Cross-posted at TyroBlog