Popular Vote

WASHINGTON --Much is being made in the Republican camp of a review by the Miami Herald and the Knight-Ridder chain, which owns the Herald, of 10,644 previously unexamined "undervotes" in the presidential election in Florida's Miami-Dade County. Supporters of Democratic nominee Al Gore claimed after the election that they would have made him the winner. It turns out, though, that Mr. Gore would have picked up a net of only 49 votes had they been hand counted -- far short of the 537-vote Florida margin for George W. Bush in the official certification.

ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Parliament approved yesterday a constitutional amendment to elect Turkey's president by a popular vote, giving even greater weight to midsummer elections that are shaping up as a divisive referendum on the role of Islam in government. The 376-1 vote by lawmakers opens the door to holding presidential and parliamentary elections simultaneously, on July 22. However, the package of electoral reforms could still be blocked by a veto from the country's resolutely secular president, with whom the ruling party is at odds.

TEXAS Gov. George W. Bush hopes to become the second man in history to follow his father into the presidency. But here's the irony: Circumstances that helped to elect the other son of a president, John Quincy Adams, could undermine Mr. Bush's bid.As one who knows his history, surely Mr. Bush felt a surge of despair recently when Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire abandoned the GOP to seek the presidency on a yet-unnamed third-party ticket. The governor knows that third-party candidates always introduce an element of uncertainty and as often as not wind up tilting the election in ways they neither intended nor preferred.

TEXAS Gov. George W. Bush hopes to become the second man in history to follow his father into the presidency. But here's the irony: circumstances that helped to elect the other son of a president, John Quincy Adams, could undermine Mr. Bush's bid.As one who knows his history, surely Mr. Bush felt a surge of despair recently when Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire abandoned the Republican Party to seek the presidency on a yet-unnamed third-party ticket....

A FUNERAL oration for Barry Goldwater:Friends, Arizonans, countrymen, listen up and listen good. He was a flop as a senator and a flop as a presidential candidate, the defining essentials of his career. He was one of the least successful senators ever to serve so long. If you seek his monument, don't bother to look in the U.S. Code or U.S. Senate histories.Part of the reason for that is that he was in the minority for 22 of his 30 Senate years. The Senate is a body in which chairmen of committees and subcommittees produce most of the results and get most of the credit.

Paris. -- The public attention accorded Sen. Bill Bradley's retirement from the Senate and availability as an independent presidential candidate is both justified and a warning of just how ''broken'' (to use the senator's word) the American political system is.It would be near-miracle for an independent candidate next year actually to win. If it did happen, would it make any difference? Mr. Bradley put it very well. The system is broken. Unless you fix it, electing an independent will change nothing.

"DISILLUSIONED with President Clinton and uncertain about the Republican Party, Americans increasingly say they are willing to support a new third party." -- L.A. Times.Get outta here! This is a two-party nation and always will be.Lots of voters like to say they are willing to support a third party, but on Election Day, the overwhelming majority of them still pull a "Democratic" or "Republican" lever.In the last presidential election, for example, Ross Perot ran the -- best financed third party campaign ever.

In recent days, five potential candidates for president in 1996 have hinted of their ambitions. And that's just among the Democrats. There are 19 -- count 'em -- 19 Republicans mentioned as possible presidential nominees in the next election.It's clear why Democrats are so restless and Republicans so eager. President Clinton, who in 1992 got the smallest share (43 percent) of the popular vote of any successful Democratic presidential candidate in 80 years, has now led his party through an election in which its candidates for Congress got the smallest share of the popular vote (49 percent)

This is the 52nd presidential election.The 32nd was held in 1912. For the first time, preferential primaries were a feature of presidential elections. Progressive Republicans, upset with the conservatism of President William Howard Taft, urged former President Theodore Roosevelt to challenge his protege.TR was eager to. He won nine state primaries to Taft's one, but the incumbent president controlled the party regulars and was easily nominated at the tightly controlled convention. Later TR was nominated as the candidate of the Progressive Party.

H. Ross Perot's withdrawal from the presidential raceoccasioned a sudden hush in the speculation about Electoral College backfire. Gone is the talk about the election being thrown into a politically splintered and confused House of Representatives -- the specter Mr. Perot himself raised as he exited the contest.Absent too is the fanciful press speculation about a stalemate so prolonged that the next chief executive might be the vice president chosen by the Senate.But we'd best not be fooled.

The editorial "Flunking Electoral College" (Dec. 16) suggests that the Electoral College should be abolished because "the system disenfranchises many voters and sometimes results in the candidate who wins the popular vote losing the presidency." The editorial then cites the law Gov. Martin O'Malley signed that "would award Maryland's electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of who wins in this state." My question is: Who is disenfranchised if this law takes effect?

Yesterday in Annapolis, 10 electors representing Maryland in the Electoral College cast their ballots for Barack Obama. The Electoral College is an institution enshrined in the Constitution. It also is an archaic threat to our democracy because the system disenfranchises many voters and sometimes results in the candidate who wins the most votes losing the presidency. Just ask Al Gore; he won the popular vote but lost the White House because his electoral vote tally fell short. In many states, the Electoral College discourages potential voters who know the candidate they favor is likely to lose in a winner-take-all state election.

As the second-smallest county geographically in Maryland, Howard generally doesn't have the political heft of the state's biggest jurisdictions. But when the real presidential election is held in Annapolis on Dec. 15, two of the 10 Maryland electors casting ballots for Barack Obama are to be Howard Dels. Guy Guzzone and Elizabeth Bobo, both Democrats. Neither knows why they were selected by the state party, they said. Despite the popular vote nationally, the Electoral College, under the law, elects the president, a fact that upset those same Democrats in 2000, when George W. Bush lost the national popular vote but won the electoral tally.

Given the bitterness of so many Hillary Clinton supporters that the woman they thought would be America's first female president will not be, the more they hear the suggestion that Sen. Barack Obama's win is illegitimate, the more likely they are to bolt. If Senator Clinton's voters embrace the story that "a man took it away from a woman," denying her a victory she deserved, they're at risk of staying home come November, or holding back from the volunteering and get-out-the-vote efforts necessary for the Democrats to prevail.

Gov. Martin O'Malley isn't wavering from his support for Sen. Hillary Clinton, but he's not toeing the party line on how superdelegates should vote or on the idea of her fighting all the way to the Democratic National Convention. In an interview yesterday with The Sun's editorial board, O'Malley - one of the first governors to endorse Clinton's bid for president - said he agrees with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that it would be dangerous for superdelegates to overturn the popular vote of Democratic primary voters.

It is fitting that Maryland is pioneering the effort to create a multistate compact to ensure that the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote wins the White House. After all, it was Maryland's electoral college system for electing state senators, first established in 1776, that the U.S. Constitution's drafters later used as a model for creating the Electoral College as we know it today. Last year, Sen. Jamie Raskin of Montgomery County spearheaded the successful campaign to get the General Assembly to become the first signatory on what's known as the National Popular Vote plan.

For voters, it had come down to the confident, crowd-pleasing man and the intense, details-oriented woman. After months of back-and-forth wins and losses -- he's up, no, now she's up -- after millions of words blogged, spun and otherwise spilled in analyzing the matchup, it finally was settled this week. The dude wins! Oh, not Obama. Christian. When the week began, America's two running dramas were headed toward resolution, but only Project Runway managed to wrap it up and crown a winner.

With all the talk this year of how close races - such as the Democratic presidential contest - will be decided by who wins the most delegates, it's not surprising that some voters were confused yesterday when they saw the Maryland ballot. They were asked to vote both for president and for delegates to their party's convention, and under each delegate's name was the name of the candidate they supported. So which vote counts? What if, say, you voted for John McCain for president but for all of Mike Huckabee's delegates?

ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Parliament approved yesterday a constitutional amendment to elect Turkey's president by a popular vote, giving even greater weight to midsummer elections that are shaping up as a divisive referendum on the role of Islam in government. The 376-1 vote by lawmakers opens the door to holding presidential and parliamentary elections simultaneously, on July 22. However, the package of electoral reforms could still be blocked by a veto from the country's resolutely secular president, with whom the ruling party is at odds.

Constitution allows electoral reform bill There is certainly legitimate disagreement about whether the recently passed bill to award Maryland's presidential electoral votes to the national popular vote winner is a good idea. But Alan Natapoff's assertion that this is unconstitutional is ridiculous ("Stop plan to diminish Marylanders' voting power," Opinion * Commentary, April 5). Maryland will not be "deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate without its consent" -- we will still have two U.S. senators, and we will still have our two "senatorial" electoral votes as well.