N
NYgymfan
My school has a weird grading scale...its from 0 to 14, with 14 being an A+, 12 being an A, 10 B+, 8 B, etc. AP and honors classes are weighted 1.5 on that scale, and Accelerated HS classes taken in 8th grade or freshman year are weighted 1.3. So an A+ in an AP class is 21 out of 14, and that pushes your GPA up bigtime. Mine is well into the 16 range, and the conversion to the 4.0 scale (which is what my school district does for college applications) is approximate.
And yes, we weren't old enough to vote in 2000 or 2004. And most of us still not in 2008!
History lesson for the non-Americans here: Bush got less votes than Al Gore in 2000. About 540,000 less to be exact, and the closeness of that election was within 1%. But we don't elect our president here in the USA by the "popular vote" of the people, we have this thing called the Electoral College, where pretty much the States elect the president. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes, which is equal to the number of congressional representatives that the state has. So every state has 2 Senators, and then the Representatives are based on the population of the state. So the smallest state (Wyoming) has 3 electoral votes (2 Senators + 1 Representative), and the largest state (California) has 55 electoral votes. Washington DC is a special case...they get 3 electoral votes. They don't have any Representatives or Senators (since it is the Federal City), but a Constitutional Amendment gives them however many electoral votes they would be entitled to if they were a state, but not more than the smallest state. Thus, with a population just a little bigger then Wyomning, it gets 3 votes.
So each state has its own Presidential election, but people aren't voting for the President, they are voting for the Electors that will represent the state in the Electoral College. All except 2 states have a winner takes all system, where whoever wins that state gets all the electoral votes for the state. Maine and Nebraska have a system where there are 2 at-large votes and then 1 vote goes to whoever wins each Congressional district. If I'm not mistaken, Nebraska gave 1 electoral vote to Obama and 4 to McCain in this recent election. So anyway, for someone to become President, they have to get the majority of the electoral votes, which is 270 or more. So technically, Obama was not officially elected president by the Electoral College until last week. But since most states have laws requiring the Electors to vote for who they say they will vote for, and because the media can tally things up really quick, we knew he would win since Election Day.
Now usually whoever wins the most votes overall wins the Electoral vote. But this was not the case in 2000. Gore won the large states by a lot, but Bush won a lot of the smaller states by just a little bit. Then there was the whole deal about Florida...their election got screwed up, and unfortunately neither Bush or Gore had 270 electoral votes without Florida. So we were in limbo for weeks while they argued over how many times to re-count, until finally the Supreme Court stepped in in the infamous Bush v. Gore case and stopped the re-count with Bush ahead, so he became the president.
And yes, we weren't old enough to vote in 2000 or 2004. And most of us still not in 2008!
History lesson for the non-Americans here: Bush got less votes than Al Gore in 2000. About 540,000 less to be exact, and the closeness of that election was within 1%. But we don't elect our president here in the USA by the "popular vote" of the people, we have this thing called the Electoral College, where pretty much the States elect the president. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes, which is equal to the number of congressional representatives that the state has. So every state has 2 Senators, and then the Representatives are based on the population of the state. So the smallest state (Wyoming) has 3 electoral votes (2 Senators + 1 Representative), and the largest state (California) has 55 electoral votes. Washington DC is a special case...they get 3 electoral votes. They don't have any Representatives or Senators (since it is the Federal City), but a Constitutional Amendment gives them however many electoral votes they would be entitled to if they were a state, but not more than the smallest state. Thus, with a population just a little bigger then Wyomning, it gets 3 votes.
So each state has its own Presidential election, but people aren't voting for the President, they are voting for the Electors that will represent the state in the Electoral College. All except 2 states have a winner takes all system, where whoever wins that state gets all the electoral votes for the state. Maine and Nebraska have a system where there are 2 at-large votes and then 1 vote goes to whoever wins each Congressional district. If I'm not mistaken, Nebraska gave 1 electoral vote to Obama and 4 to McCain in this recent election. So anyway, for someone to become President, they have to get the majority of the electoral votes, which is 270 or more. So technically, Obama was not officially elected president by the Electoral College until last week. But since most states have laws requiring the Electors to vote for who they say they will vote for, and because the media can tally things up really quick, we knew he would win since Election Day.
Now usually whoever wins the most votes overall wins the Electoral vote. But this was not the case in 2000. Gore won the large states by a lot, but Bush won a lot of the smaller states by just a little bit. Then there was the whole deal about Florida...their election got screwed up, and unfortunately neither Bush or Gore had 270 electoral votes without Florida. So we were in limbo for weeks while they argued over how many times to re-count, until finally the Supreme Court stepped in in the infamous Bush v. Gore case and stopped the re-count with Bush ahead, so he became the president.