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Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't the president decided by the percentage of votes? Seems to me, there are a lot voters whose vote essentially are useless?

I kind of understand the house and senate being more regional representation, but the president kind of represents all Americans, no?

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The United States is/was a collection of independent state governments. At one point, many state governments selected the electoral college representatives from their states. Until it was amended, states governments chose their senators.

There are political and historical reasons for having the system work this way, much like how the ordering of primaries is a contentious and complicated arrangement.

It was originally designed to stop stupid people from throwing the election. We'll see tonight if it still works.

Which stupid people are you referring to?

Intelligence isn't the deciding factor. Rather people judged by the electoral college to be unfit to serve as President.

Whoever's against me.

Wouldn't we not know until the Electoral College meets?

No, it was originally a compromise between having congress pick the president and a pure popular vote.

You are not alone; many Americans have the same question.

And the answer can be easily found in e.g. Federalist papers and even Wikipedia.

I would also hope (I would write 'expect', but I am a bit cynical about the quality of US education) this was taught in elementary school.

People are also inclined to forget things they don't like.

Forget or deny to know? For people living in the USA, forgetting that must be quite a challenge; every four years, there's half a year of real reality tv, extensively covered all over the news, to remind them of it.

If the answer is so obvious then just post it

It's not obvious by any means, that's why I pointed to the reference work on that topic. There are reasons the electoral college was implemented, whether they are still valid of not is a different question entirely.

Furthermore, it's not even clear what the question is. Why it's not elected by the US populous? Because it's the President of the United States being elected, not the President of the people of the United States. Why is it not a direct vote? In part, to make the system resilient to the tyranny of majority which was feared by Founding Fathers.

There is extensive literature on that topic by the designers of the system itself and one cannot summarize it in a HN comment. So if the the Americans the parent was referring to are indeed puzzled by that question there are answers to be found.

Yes, we can find the answer as to why they were originally implemented.

However, my interpretation of the original question was that of "why are they still in existence?".

Because you won't convince 3/4 of states to change it. And it's not worth a new constitutional convention over that issue.

We actually only need to convince another 105 electoral votes worth of states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

I feel the original question was more in the line of "Why are US presidential election are not like elections in the many other democratic countries?" and is a huge trivialization of a complicated issue.

Yeah, the entire system is screwed up by this insane electoral college. But majority-rule is insane even on a popular vote. The only good way to elect consensus candidates who serve everyone well is to implement score voting http://scorevoting.net/

Several systems work well for electing a good consensus candidate in a single-winner election, including Condorcet, Approval, and various forms of range voting.

Score voting is just another term for range voting. Approval is just score voting with the lowest resolution, effectively. Condorcet can elect a consensus candidate but inherently is worse at this than score/range/approval.

Condorcet is a rank system so Arrow's Impossibility Theorem applies. Also, being a rank system, there will always be arguments about interpretation where people can hand-wring over how the outcome would be different with Borda or IRV or another way to determine the results of a rank-vote election. Finally, Condorcet always supports tyranny-of-the-majority rather than consensus. A polarizing candidate with 51% support and 49% strong disapproval will always win any rank vote, while a consenus candidate everyone likes can win a score or approval vote.

Effectively, score is range is approval, same basic idea, and ONLY that idea is simple, clear, zero argument about interpreting results and none of the pathologies of rank voting. And no, rank voting is NOT able to elect consensus candidates over polarizing ones in the way score voting does.

I'm not sure it's the only way. There are ranked-ballot systems that are good too, like Single Transferable Vote.

The point is, first-past-the-post has almost every possible flaw you can have in a voting system.

Nope STV is not so good, it still falls to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem which applies to every single rank voting system.

Sure, first-past-the-post is horrid, but if you expend political will, time, power, energy, money to reform the voting system, it's a tragedy to replace a horrible system with a bad one when we actually know of a good one. We will not get infinite, costless resources and chances for voting reform.

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