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Comment by thewhitetulip | Hacker News Reader

I find the electoral system in US to be funny. When 47.7% people voted for Hillary and 47.5 voted from Donald, yet Donald won.

This is for the second time that Dems have lost this way, the last time was during Al Gore vs Bush

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It is a federation of States, not a single State. Each one has its weight as State relative to the federation. So it is not "the people" who vote for the president. It is the people who vote whom their State will vote as president.

It is possible to win an election with only 22% of the popular vote. Have you seen this: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/the-trouble-with-the-electoral-c...

Due to the way the electoral college gives small population states more electoral votes comparatively, votes in small population states have more weight.

Why do you ask him? YOu rehashed what he said, putting a negative spin on a very reasonable system. You can't have California drain the other states through economic superiority and then dictate political agenda on the population left in them. The political agenda benefiting California might not be suitable for Wisconsin.

Why not one person one vote? Are Californian voters less human than Rhode Island voters?

I already explained why. You just seem to refuse to see the reason.

Well, if the system is wrong how about we just change it so that each county in the country gets one vote? Win the county get the vote?

The country is mostly red. Even though Clinton got 200k more votes I'm sure you can see why the the electoral system is in place.

There is still 4 million votes that are being counted. Projection even from CNN is that Trump wins the popular vote.

[0] https://mishgea.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/geographic-lands.... [1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-10/trumps-geographic-l....

The system we have incentivizes campaigns to maximize their electoral college votes. So while we could switch to a popular vote for a future election, looking at the popular vote in an EC-based election doesn't necessarily tell us who would have won the popular vote if we'd changed the rules before this election.

The campaigns would have done things differently (like dems not ignore TX and repubs not ignore CA).

This is more explained more thoroughly and eloquently by Prof Adler: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

This has happened four times now. http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/the-trouble-with-the-electoral-c...

Considering the number of times the electoral college and the popular vote agreed then it would seem the system works fairly well. It's not like no one knows the rules going in, they've been in place for a while now.

And they had 8 years to fix it but I don't think I heard a peep from them about electoral reform.

They only had control of the House for two of those years, during which healthcare reform was the major priority. It also requires state level work, where the GOP holds 2/3 of the governorships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

Ratified by 10 blue states representing 165 electoral votes, and zero red states. Most of the bluest states (CA, MA, NY, RI, DC, WA) ratified it during the Obama administration.

The electors haven't voted yet...

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