[hamburglar]

[QUOTE=Warfish;2802562]I think Paulie's POINT is a valid one.

While we in here like to think of ourselves as at least somewhat well-informed, there is a huge portion of our voting population who, if you really checked, is laughably, horrificly, stunningly UNINFORMED, almost to the level of abject ignorance.

No, of course they're not all Obama (or Democratic) voters. ****, go to any number of right-wing churches and you'll find the same.

[B]But for every one of them, they kill and make meaningless, YOUR vote or MY vote.[/B]
I'm not saying they shouldn't vote, or be allowed to vote or that there is any soultion to this issue.....but the point of how deeply dumb and abjectly uninformed a wide swatch of our population is, is in my opinion an unquestionable fact.[/QUOTE]

A valid point, what concerns me more is that the electoral system is structurally flawed in a way that more or less nullifies my vote completely (living in VA you qualify as a swing voter). My homestate of NJ, for example, has 1 EV for every 579,061 people. Among the 11 'big states' worth 15+ EV's, the average is 1 EV per 623,225 people. By contrast, the 12 states (and DC) that have 3 or 4 EV's average 269,991 people per EV, led by Wyoming with 174,277, meaning a vote in Wyoming counts 4X as much as one in Texas, Cali, or Fla. Not to be an urbanophile, but I have to imagine that, on average, voters in the big states (CA, TX, NY, FL, IL, PA, OH, MI, GA, NC, NJ) are more educated and better informed than the average voter in Alaska, Idaho, and North Dakota, which just exacerbates this injustice. The disenfranchisement is further piled on by the 'winner take all' policies of 48 of the 50 states, which means that my vote (liberal in NJ) is literally meaningless, since the outcome is already decided. Another way of looking at this is: 1 undecided voter in a small swing state (think WV) has the same electoral say as the approximately (conservatively) 300,000 democrats who will form Obamas margin of victory in NJ.

Before we fight for equality of information amongst potential voters we need to fight for the value of our votes themselves.