Republicans in Virginia, other states seeking electoral college changes

Democrats are good at stuffing ballot boxes in urban stronghold districts but not so much in evenly divided or Republican leaning districts. These changes would create firewalls around the districts preventing the vote stuffing in one area from changing the vote in the whole state. It would also have the positive benefit of getting candidates around more of the country instead of carpet bombing a few swing states.

“Would be a disaster. Would guarantee the death of Republicans since Dems know how to stuff ballot boxes and manipulate the numbers.”

You miss the point. They WILL stuff ballot boxes ONLY where they can. That is how you have 100%+ turnouts. But they have to control the territory where the voting takes place - and that is in the inner cities. So they stuff the crap out of Phili and Pitts, and wouldn’t you know it, all of PA is now a BLUE state.

With this, their victory strategy will have to change...they cannot march into a white precinct and simply take over the machines.

The pols focus on short-term advantage. But the consequences of this change could be extensive, and unintended:
1) Legislative districting/apportionment would become the real battleground for the Presidency, changing the timetable to ten-year cycles, and the focus to political insiders rather than the voters.
2) State politics would become extremely contentious, with even greater efforts to corrupt the re-apportionment process. This might, or might not, be a good thing, since apportionment now is rigged to create safe seats for incumbents, with slam-dunk majorities for one party or the other in each district. The change would encourage the minority party to risk making seats less safe in the hope of the national candidate pulling off a district upset.
3) Political parties would have increased say in Presidential elections.
4) Since apportionment would determine which party would win, the primaries would tend to decide the election. This could have the effect of reinvigorating the nominating conventions, if the states divide among various nominees, and further empower the national parties versus the individual campaigns.
5) National campaigns would then write off the states that used this system and whose results in the general election were thus already determined.
6) If all the states (VA, OH, FL) that formerly had a viable contest went to the district system, there would be no “battleground”, and thus little reason for a general election campaign. Presidential candidates need not run ads, explain their policies, have “debates”. Interest and turnout will plumet, effecting local and state elections.

The main ideas are that my vote stays on my computer or some computer I have access to so that I can ascertain that it didn’t just fall into some bit bucket, and ANYBODY can do tallies the same way you go out over BitTorrent or Kwazaa looking for a copy of “You aint nothin but a hound dog”, i.e. issue a p2p call, and all tallies should produce the same number. Votes in response to the call would have to include a thumbprint scan which should match a national database and anybody doing a tally could also use statistical checks on validity.

I didn't catch the implications of the p2p piece of that puzzle. That makes it make even more sense. The only issue I foresee is with those who don't have computers, or turn them off, or perhaps with firewalls with high security settings.

I do like the statistical validity checks, although there again, the Stalin quote of "It's not who votes, it's who counts the votes that matters" comes to mind when we start talking about who does the statistical validity checks. DU was posting article after article in 2004 about how (liberal) statisticians "proved" that the Ohio exit polling data couldn't have been that far off, and John Kerry really won the election.

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