Surprisingly, the Presidential election is still undecided. With Bush and Gore each having 49% of the popular vote and splitting the electoral college, only two states, Oregon and Florida, are still undecided. Florida is the deciding state, winning it would give Bush 271 votes and Gore 285 votes. But the voting there was too close (within a couple thousand votes out of six million cast), so according to Florida law the votes must be recounted.

I have a few observations. For one, there were several close races so for the 50% of the people who didn't vote, your vote would have counted. It's amazing to think that if only one percent more people voted for a candidate (a matter of a few thousand votes in some states) they would have won the state instead of their opponent. Correspondingly, the votes cast for Ralph Nader did cost Gore a few states.

Nader only got about 3% of the popular vote, failing to reach his goal of 5% But it may have cost Gore the election. And that's the way it should be. Obviously Gore was not appealing the section of voters that voted for Nader, and he might have gotten those votes by supporting some of Nader's Green Party issues. That's how politics work, even minorities can have a certain amount of power. Of course, if Bush does win it's sort of like cutting off your nose to spite your face, since Bush is much less "Green" than Gore.

We can also look at the Reform Party candidate, Pat Buchanan, who received less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the popular vote. This is the party that Ross Perot founded, the party that garnered 20% of the popular vote a couple of elections ago. Now, with Perot ousted and a decidely more radical approach, the Reform Party once again returns to the slimy muck that mires all political third parties in the US.

If Bush does win Florida, he will be elected without having the popular vote. As I was watching the election coverage some analyst commented that this would be another strike against the electoral college and that it should be deleted from the process as an anachronism. I don't agree. Even if Bush doesn't get the popular vote, he still has a heck of a lot of votes. It's not as if getting another couple hundred thousand votes pushes you suddenly from not having the popular vote to having a "mandate from the people". A mandate from the people is if you win 60% of the popular vote and capture every electoral vote.

As for the electoral college itself, I do not want to see it go away. If the Presidential Election is solely based on a popular vote, it really makes the states much less relevant. Right now, with most states awarding electoral votes based on a winner-takes-all principle, states have more political clout as a state. Realize that I come from California, which has 54 electoral votes, more than New York (33) or Texas (32) or any two other states in the Union. Winning California is a big deal, and it means that candidates have to placate us a bit. I guess with the current system, it is the states, not the people, who elect the President. Going to a popular vote would destroy most of that influence.

As for the local elections, looks like Measure K and L both lost. Measure K was a bond measure for improving the Contra Costa Community Colleges while Measure L was a tax increase to support Contra Costa Libraries. They needed 2/3ths of the vote and both were narrowly defeated, with K getting 63.0% and L getting 65.8% of the votes. At least for K, Prop 39 passed so next time such a measure will only need 55% of the votes.

For the state propositions, half of them passed or failed decisively, implying a mandate from the voters. Prop 33 allowing Legislators to participate in the state government retirement fund didn't pass with a 61.1% of No votes. Prop 38, school vouchers, also failed decisively with 70.7% No votes. Prop 36, which prescribes drug treatment instead of incarceration, passed with 60.8% of the votes. Prop 32, the Veteran's Bond Act, also passed with 67.2% of the votes.