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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

And the weird way we pick the winner. I've now voted in five presidential elections, and in two of them the winner did not have the most votes.

I'm shocked that's not getting more discussion this time around. I seem to recall that it was a huge complaint for ages after it happened in 2000.

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It's so embedded in our Constitutional order, the great compromise that made it possible in the first place, the 2 Senators per state, and the 2 extra Electoral College votes each state gets, that it's not really "a huge complaint for ages", unless, of course, it's your side that lost. It's happened, what, 4 times now?

Note also that at least in this election the unofficial margin (at least per the AP, which hasn't called Michigan and New Hampshire yet) is rather small, and one also has to count 3rd parties.

Putting the shoe on the other foot, what do you have to say about both of Bill Clinton's elections, where Perot resulted in more people voting against than for him. For that matter, just checking now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...), every third party candidate but the Constitutional party's, and independent Evan McMullin, earned more votes than the margin between Hillary and Trump. So it's really hard when you look at those non-major party vote total to say that in any way she won the popular vote, especially if you claim this didn't matter for her husband in the '90s.

"A huge complaint for ages" was a reference to what I saw people talking about after the 2000 election. If you say that it's wrong based on how the Constitution came about in the 18th century, then you've completely misunderstood what I was saying there. I'm not saying that people have been complaining about it for hundreds of years, I'm saying that people were complaining about it for months (or years?) following the 2000 election.

2000 was the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in. I have voted in every presidential election (and every midterm and local one except when I was living overseas) since. Of the presidential elections I've voted in, the electoral college has flipped 40% of them. So don't try to dismiss my complaint on the basis that it's rare. Maybe it is throughout history, but it has become distressingly common lately.

And don't assume I'm complaining just because "my side" lost. I didn't vote for Gore in 2000. I did vote for Clinton in 2016, but I do not identify as a Democrat, and only voted for her because I believe Trump is a terrifying and dangerous choice. I was too young to vote for Bill Clinton in the 90s, and while I think he did a decent job, I think HW Bush and Dole would have too.

I don't really see how Bill Clinton is "putting the shoe on the other foot." My ideal system wouldn't be a simple first-past-the-post arrangement. I would like to have runoff elections or ranked-choice voting or something like that.

You seem to be imagining a whole slew of arguments on my behalf that I didn't make and don't believe. If you want to reply to me, please reply to what I'm saying, not whatever you imagine I must think.

OK, I suppose if I'm dismissing it because it's rare, it's due to our disparate histories, I'm much older, the first election I watched closely having come of political age intellectually was Nixon v. McGovern in 1972, and first voted in 1980 (Reagan v. Carter). So I personally have experienced it as much rarer an issue, and of course one in my favor (maybe, was W in office in 2001-4 a good thing? If the numbers hold true, will Trump be? ^_^).

But my bigger point are things that I think you must address, if you're to address my concerns, like how it will make half of the the Great Compromise non-operative, and change the election to a focus on 8-10 metro areas, none of which I or my family live in, even those in the Kansas City metro area (30th).

You feel disenfranchised in 2 out of your 5 presidential elections; do you think I want my family and myself to be disenfranchised in them forever?

See also how if the GOPe hadn't sabotaged the GOTV effort for Trump, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12932865

I don't care about the Great Compromise. I understand why it was necessary. The United States in the 18th century was a loose collection of mostly sovereign colonies, and there was the real possibility that the smaller ones would decide not to join up if they didn't get disproportionate power in the new nation.

It's a different country now. We have many more states, and the role of states has greatly diminished. Most Americans think of themselves as Americans first, and citizens of their state a distant second. Many aspects of our electoral system have changed. The idea of allowing an 18-year-old black woman who owns no property to vote would be as bizarre to the founders as the idea of directly electing the president.

I don't actually feel disenfranchised. I've always lived in swing states, so my vote counts for far more than most. My dislike of the electoral college is not rooted in the fact that I feel like I don't have a voice.

I don't understand this notion that you and your family would be disenfranchised in a system where the president is chosen directly. Your vote would count exactly as much as the vote of someone living in New York City. Sure, there are more people living in NYC than there are where you are, but there are far more Americans not living in NYC than living in NYC. A quick look at the popular vote totals will show you that the 10 biggest metro areas don't overwhelm everyone else.

Sure, a lot of attention would be given to big cities. I don't see what's wrong with that. A lot of people live there! But other places wouldn't be ignored, since every vote in every location would be just as important. Wyoming probably wouldn't get many visits from candidates, but how many do they get now?

As it stands, the swing states get all of the attention. Neither candidate cares much about what voters in California or Texas think, because their attention won't change anything. Democrats just need to not totally piss off California, and Republicans just need to not totally piss off Texas. If Californians have some important issue they'd like to see action on, nobody is going to care about it. That's 65 million people disenfranchised right there, just in those two states.

Why is it better to have the candidates care almost exclusively about the needs and desires of ~60 million Americans living in swing states, and completely ignore the other 260 million of us? You say that people in Kansas City would be disenfranchised with a direct vote. I say that they're disenfranchised now, because neither Kansas nor Missouri have the slightest chance of choosing Democratic electors. In a popular vote system, the candidates might care more about New Yorkers than Kansans, but at least they'd care some.

There are several million outstanding votes in CA. The popular vote margin is going to grow by quite a lot.

The power is anyway going to shift to cities. If it doesn't happen in the 2020 census, it will in the 2030 census.

And one response I have to that, developed from this conversation, is that this election is a turnout anomaly because the GOPe sabotaged the GOTV effort for Trump (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12932865 for a bit more on that).

And are you really sure about that? The AP, the "definitive" source I've been following through Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=election+results+2016+usa#eo...), says California reporting is 100%, and the nationwide margin is still about the same as it's been for some time, medium 6 figures.

~3 million absentee ballots are estimated to be outstanding.

http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/11/09/66046/california-la-coun...

Maybe that's a high estimate, I don't know. We'll know in a few weeks in any case.

Am I sure the demographic trend towards cities will continue? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. They may not continue to vote the way they do now, but they are going to decide presidential elections.

Yow. And that article, with a wild guess for the figure, is 2 days old. Just did a search, and the LA Times says the official figure is now 4,362,087 and may change (http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essentia...)

It's a huge complaint when it confronts people who didn't learn how the system works in civics class, I guess, but it's been the way that presidential voting has worked since before we were all born, so the outcry is sort of annoying at best.

Also, as the only groups legally able to propose a change to this system are right now benefiting from it, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Why is outcry annoying just because it's about something old? And why do you assume people complaining about it are ignorant?

Sure, I don't think that it'll ever change. But that doesn't mean people can't complain.

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