Let's solve this whole Electoral College thing...if it needs to be.

[prizrak]

close? HRC has 600k+ votes, you're leaving the margin of error at that point. Some project that it will swell over a lead of 2 million.

600k out of what 120 million or so? So 0.5% difference, hell even 2mil is only 1.6% that's a pretty damn small lead if you ask me... Not that it matters, since popular vote is only kind of there.

 

[NecroJoe]

California and Washington combine for a still--as-yet uncounted 4.7 million absentee ballots, which allow votes to be counted as long as they are post-marked by election day. In both of those, demographics swing towards Clinton. Not that either of those matter because of the way the states went in the EC, but it will likely increase that popular vote margin.

 

[Cellos88GT]

600k out of what 120 million or so? So 0.5% difference, hell even 2mil is only 1.6% that's a pretty damn small lead if you ask me... Not that it matters, since popular vote is only kind of there.

We're now nearing just under a million vote lead for Clinton...

As the final votes are being counted for the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton could end up with a healthy victory in the popular vote. As of this writing, Clinton has earned 61,845,761 votes (47.8%) to Donald Trump?s 60,882,946 (47.0%). It is already the largest discrepancy in American history between the popular vote and the electoral college, but this figures to only become clearer over the coming days and weeks.

To compare, when George W. Bush narrowly won the presidency in 2000, he did so while losing the popular vote by 543,895. A Trump popular vote deficit of nearly double that margin is sure to cause more division between Trump and Clinton voters, particularly since Trump likely won 306 electoral votes (including Michigan?s 16, which are still being accounted for), while Bush won only 271 votes in the electoral college.

This result will likely embolden the very same progressives who were upset with the 2000 election. In the meantime, however, it exemplifies the sharp divide in the country between the politics of rural and urban areas. A large reason as to why Clinton will prevail in the popular vote is due to ?running up? the totals in safe Democratic areas like California and New York.

http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/clinton-million-vote-popular-vote/

 

[prizrak]

So it seems like EC has done exactly what it was designed to do, which is not allow bigger states to bully smaller states. Think of it this way more states voted for Trump than did for Clinton, had we gone with a popular election than the few states that go more blue would have put a candidate that majority of the states didn't want.

 

[narf]

So it seems like EC has done exactly what it was designed to do, which is not allow bigger states to bully smaller states. Think of it this way more states voted for Trump than did for Clinton, had we gone with a popular election than the few states that go more blue would have put a candidate that majority of the states didn't want.

Think of it this way more people voted for Clinton than did for Trump... we hold these thruths to be self-evident, yada yada...

 

[NecroJoe]

Alaska gets 3 electoral votes. They have a populaiton of 737,000. So that's roughly 245,667 people per electoral vote.

California gets 55 votes, but with a population of 38.8m. That means there is essentially 705,455 people per electoral vote.

The idea is that the higher your population goes, the harder it is to get additional votes: a sliding scale.

Are there any other methodologies to distributing power?

 

[narf]

Are there any other methodologies to distributing power?

How 'bout this radical concept: One vote per eligible voter, the candidate with the most votes wins.

As it sits now, one Alaskan, Wyomingite, etc. is worth roughly three Californians, Texans, etc. - in my mind a direct contradiction to all humans being created equal.



Before anyone says "but then the large states will outvote the small states", that's already possible if for example 50%+1 of voters in each of the 11 largest states agree on a presidential candidate.

 

[Cellos88GT]

which is not allow bigger states to bully smaller states.

so instead we get a David v. Goliath situation where the small states get to bully the big states...

 

[TC]

so instead we get a David v. Goliath situation where the small states get to bully the big states...

The overwhelming vast majority of the time the Electoral College goes the same direction as the popular vote. But one of the biggest reasons why the USA is not a true democracy is because we have this silly little notion about protecting the minority from the majority. Stupid, right? I know.

 

[NecroJoe]

Interesting to me that this difference between popular vote and EC didn't occur in the entire 20th century. Twice since 2000, and 3 times in the 1800s.

 

[NecroJoe]

Barbara Boxer is pushing for getting rid of the EC.

An interesting quote from the article:

Trump had called the Electoral College ?a disaster for democracy? in response to President Obama?s 2012 reelection, at a time when Trump believed Obama would lose the popular vote. In a ?60 Minutes? interview that aired Sunday, Trump said his opinion hadn?t changed, despite the results of the current election.

?I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes, and somebody else gets 90 million votes, and you win,? he told CBS News? Lesley Stahl.

But Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday to declare the Electoral College ?actually genius? and to declare that he would have ?won even bigger and more easily? if the presidency had been determined by the popular vote.

 

[TC]

I mentioned it in the other thread, but there are a lot of people who live in dark blue or dark red states who vote very differently, since they know their state is a foregone conclusion. I have family in California, for example, who are republican, but didn't bother voting because it "was pointless" and they didn't really like Trump anyway. Had we announced this election would be based on the popular vote, they would have gone to the polls last Tuesday. And so would many more. I imagine voter turnout would be dramatically higher if we ditched the electoral college, making everyone's vote actually "count".

Which is why I find these popular vote stats interesting, but ultimately flawed on a fundamental level.

 

[NecroJoe]

There are even "vote trading" websites where people who lived in swing states could "trade" a vote for a 3rd party candidate to someone in California where their vote wasn't quite as vital. So someone in Florida could vote for Clinton knowing that someone in California could vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein on their behalf...the total votes end up the same.

 

[prizrak]

How 'bout this radical concept: One vote per eligible voter, the candidate with the most votes wins.

As it sits now, one Alaskan, Wyomingite, etc. is worth roughly three Californians, Texans, etc. - in my mind a direct contradiction to all humans being created equal.

Keep in mind that US is a lot more like EU than say Germany, each state is semi-independent, the idea was always the citizens of each state vote for their representatives to the federal gov't and then those representatives and state governments take care of their citizens.

Before anyone says "but then the large states will outvote the small states", that's already possible if for example 50%+1 of voters in each of the 11 largest states agree on a presidential candidate.

Because states also have a specific demographics, CA, OR, NY tend to be pretty liberal and also quite populous.

- - - Updated - - -

There are even "vote trading" websites where people who lived in swing states could "trade" a vote for a 3rd party candidate to someone in California where their vote wasn't quite as vital. So someone in Florida could vote for Clinton knowing that someone in California could vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein on their behalf...the total votes end up the same.

That's another thing, if we went to straight popular vote we would likely get many more 3rd party votes since it would no longer be about "throwing votes out"

 

[PelicanHazard]

Because states also have a specific demographics, CA, OR, NY tend to be pretty liberal and also quite populous.

Let's go back to this:

Think of it this way more states voted for Trump than did for Clinton, had we gone with a popular election than the few states that go more blue would have put a candidate that majority of the states didn't want.

I have a problem with this line of thinking, and it's because it's shorthand that can mask the issue. Oregon isn't wholly liberal, Portland and Eugene are. New York isn't wholly liberal, it's NYC and Albany and Rochester and Syracuse and yougetthepoint. Even California, which has one of the bluest election maps I've seen, isn't wholly blue; most of the inland counties voted red.

We can say states vote blue or red because in terms of the Electoral College, that's all that matters: did State X* produce more red or blue votes? Then it's that color and its EC votes go to that candidate. (*Except Nebraska and Maine thanks to their proportional allocation.) Because the electors are completely determined by the intrastate popular vote winner, the votes of the minority in each state are "wasted" and you get a situation like TC's California family. Why bother voting, they ask, because the blue counties are far more populous than the red ones and thus our votes won't matter? Even if they voluntarily choose not to vote, it is driven by the belief that the cards are stacked against them and they cannot change the outcome. It sounds like a very passive, very implicit kind of disenfrachisement.

For another example, look at your own New York. The state counts as blue for the electoral college, but break it out by county and only 16 (if I counted right) of the state's 62 counties are blue. So why is the state as a whole blue? Because the total blue votes outnumbered the red votes. And that means we have an insane double system where within each state, what matters is the popular vote, but amongst the states we have abstracted it into electors that give undue power to certain states over others.

It's also not how the electoral college always behaved. I know, wikipedia disclaimer and bad stuff and all that, but it makes for one concise kind of summary while providing some sources and phrases to conduct your own search.

In short, yes more states voted Trump, but states are a shorthand that may have been necessary in the time of the founding fathers, but aren't what should matter in a modern nominal democracy, and isn't what matters when you look at each state individually. Switching to a national popular vote is not going to swing the country completely to the left because the states that go blue aren't completely blue; it would, however, enfranchise the minority voters in each state.

 

[narf]

But one of the biggest reasons why the USA is not a true democracy is because we have this silly little notion about protecting the minority from the majority. Stupid, right? I know.

This I don't understand. In every state but two, the minority vote is wholly discarded. If you're in the minority in your state, why bother even going to the polls?
Winner takes all by state is utterly flawed, it was introduced in the 1800s to further the influence by each state... And with all states following, the effect is gone but nobody can go back on their own. It's entirely not what the founding fathers intended.

Think of it this way, you're doing maths or accounting and round every intermediate result before proceeding. Yes, in many cases your end result will be mostly correctish, but the approach is ultimately flawed. Winner takes all is even worse.

 

[TC]

This I don't understand. In every state but two, the minority vote is wholly discarded. If you're in the minority in your state, why bother even going to the polls?
Winner takes all by state is utterly flawed, it was introduced in the 1800s to further the influence by each state... And with all states following, the effect is gone but nobody can go back on their own. It's entirely not what the founding fathers intended.

Think of it this way, you're doing maths or accounting and round every intermediate result before proceeding. Yes, in many cases your end result will be mostly correctish, but the approach is ultimately flawed. Winner takes all is even worse.

There is no such thing as a perfect system. Democracy is all about winner takes all. The minority, who are often about 45% of the population in our elections, are SOL.


I remember reading an old scifi novel that described a system where you need a 2/3 majority vote to pass a law. The logic being that if you cannot muster 2/3 support, than the law must not be that good or convincing. But if a law does get passed, you only need a 1/3 vote to repeal it. The logic being that if 1/3 feel so strongly as to mobilize to repeal it, then there must be something seriously wrong with the law.

 

[prizrak]

Let's go back to this:



I have a problem with this line of thinking, and it's because it's shorthand that can mask the issue. Oregon isn't wholly liberal, Portland and Eugene are. New York isn't wholly liberal, it's NYC and Albany and Rochester and Syracuse and yougetthepoint. Even California, which has one of the bluest election maps I've seen, isn't wholly blue; most of the inland counties voted red.

We can say states vote blue or red because in terms of the Electoral College, that's all that matters: did State X* produce more red or blue votes? Then it's that color and its EC votes go to that candidate. (*Except Nebraska and Maine thanks to their proportional allocation.) Because the electors are completely determined by the intrastate popular vote winner, the votes of the minority in each state are "wasted" and you get a situation like TC's California family. Why bother voting, they ask, because the blue counties are far more populous than the red ones and thus our votes won't matter? Even if they voluntarily choose not to vote, it is driven by the belief that the cards are stacked against them and they cannot change the outcome. It sounds like a very passive, very implicit kind of disenfrachisement.

For another example, look at your own New York. The state counts as blue for the electoral college, but break it out by county and only 16 (if I counted right) of the state's 62 counties are blue. So why is the state as a whole blue? Because the total blue votes outnumbered the red votes. And that means we have an insane double system where within each state, what matters is the popular vote, but amongst the states we have abstracted it into electors that give undue power to certain states over others.

It's also not how the electoral college always behaved. I know, wikipedia disclaimer and bad stuff and all that, but it makes for one concise kind of summary while providing some sources and phrases to conduct your own search.

In short, yes more states voted Trump, but states are a shorthand that may have been necessary in the time of the founding fathers, but aren't what should matter in a modern nominal democracy, and isn't what matters when you look at each state individually. Switching to a national popular vote is not going to swing the country completely to the left because the states that go blue aren't completely blue; it would, however, enfranchise the minority voters in each state.

Good post (no seriously it is) but here is how I see the idea behind the US ( I could be wrong ofc): People within states choose representatives then those representatives work on behalf of the people of the state. The Feds are only there to provide things that states cannot, standing army, intelligence services, interstate regulation and commerce, etc... Under this logic individuals within the state don't really matter when it comes to selecting POTUS because they would have already been represented by their state's delegates. What does matter is that the states themselves get a roughly equal say in the matter so that interests of say CA don't end up overriding those of RI.

 

[GRtak]

Why not issue the delegates from the EC proportionally?

As an example, let use Michigan. This election was a virtual dead heat(which is also why official results have not been released, I assume). The votes should be 8 for Clinton, 8 for Trump, 1 for Johnson. (that is assuming the voting stays as close as it looked election night)

 

[NecroJoe]

Two states do that. I feel like that's a good "upgrade" to the EC...at least in my head.