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Comment by j_bond | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a lot of focus on the popular vote and the fact that Clinton won the popular vote but lost the presidency. But is it really useful to look at the popular vote for a close elections like this? I feel like people's behavior would change if the metric to elect the president was solely based on the popular vote. Many people that live in very red or very blue states feel like their vote "doesn't matter" and are not enthusiastic to vote. Not to mention campaigning strategies would be very different. We don't really know how the election would go under a popular vote scenario. It seem kind of disingenuous - like focusing on strikes out in a baseball game instead of the score.

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I think the focus is on the popular vote because,

a) There is a structural imbalance in how the electorate is represented, especially considering congressional district gerrymandering (not directly related to the race for President, I know, and ...

b) People are in shock that a racist and a demagogue has been elected as President and searching for confirmation that a majority of our fellow citizens do not in fact believe in the reprehensible and Un-American values which Donald Trump and his rise to power represent.

I would also add c) Many people feel that the popular vote is what should be important. For example, polls in the media almost always report the popular vote tallies and nothing deeper, with the assumption that the Electoral College result will follow. Historically, this has been true the vast majority of the time. The Electoral College has only gone against the popular vote five times, and before Bush 43, the last time it happened was all the way back in 1888.

The more the Electoral College diverges from the popular vote, the better case you can make for changing the system. And on the other side, if somehow the counts were wrong and the popular vote did favor Trump, that would greatly undermine the argument for reform.

Also, going with the electoral college suppresses overall voter turnout in states that are "locks" like California, New York, Oklahoma, etc.

If I live in California, I'm less incentivized to show up for the election because I think of it as a lock. Obviously I should still show up to vote elsewhere on the ballot, but I may not because I won't influence the election.

If we were measuring by popular vote, turnout would be a lot higher and the outcome would, likely, be a better representation of the country.

Turnout would certainly be higher, but it's not clear that it would be a "better" representation of the country.

The electoral college distribute power, to some degree, based on geography. Geography is correlated with a large number of other "diversities" of American culture, from race, population density, to industry, to global warming risk, etc... Switching it to a straight majority would take power away from all of these subsets of society.

This election, it seems, it was "white rust belt" Americans that decided the election. In Gore vs Bush, it was Florida. Next time, it will be something else. It's all highly imperfect and somewhat random, but I see danger in solidifying power in what essentially will be people who live in cities.

As it stands, power is solidified in a dozen or so swing states, which make up about 20% of the country's population and aren't particularly representative. The electoral college isn't distributing power, it's concentrating power in a few fairly arbitrary places.

  In Gore vs Bush, it was Florida.

No, it was any state that Bush won. For example, had Gore won his own home state of TN, FL wouldn't have mattered. But any state shifting to Gore would have been enough.

People need to understand that the electoral college is working as designed.

The US was created to be something like the EU: a confederation of states.

Everyone intuitively understands that Luxembourg and Malta need to have protections in the EU so that Germany and France don't always get their way. The only way to achieve this is to have some disproportionate representation for the smaller member states.

In the US we have become much more centralized since WWII and FDR and now we seem more like a regular country with a unified power structure. But the system we're built upon is still designed for a group of largely autonomous states.

> People need to understand that the electoral college is working as designed.

The electoral college was indeed intended to ensure representation for all of the states, but it is definitely not working the way it was originally designed.

The original design assumed that the voters would vote for electors by name (i.e. the electors' names would be on the ballot, not the candidates' names), and the chosen electors would exercise independent judgment and vote for the candidate they thought would be the best president. We know this is the original intention, because the people who designed the electoral college wrote about this at length.

When some states started putting the names of the presidential candidates on the ballots instead of the names of the electors, James Madison and the other people who designed the electoral college were very unhappy about it. They felt so strongly about it that they proposed amending the constitution to require that ballots contain the electors' names rather than the candidates' names.

When electors are bound to vote for a certain candidate, it's clear that the electoral college is not working as it was originally designed.

> People need to understand that the electoral college is working as designed.

Well, as much as is possible given the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 24th Amendments. But they also need to understand that the Electoral College was designed to reward disenfranchisement (which it still does) and protect slavery (which, at least in formal terms, it no longer does.)

I dunno if it's actually working as designed, if only because it doesn't seem like it will step in and prevent Trump from being US president, which I believe is the stated purpose of the electoral college, based on contemporary writings.

If the elecrotates choose Trump, the electoral college will have failed its final test.

It is important to look at it to get a sense of how strong of a mandate the party in power should claim. Given the current statistics, it's clear Trump's mandate is particularly weak; if he oversteps his bounds, it's likely to bite him hard in his 2020 reelection bid.

> I feel like people's behavior would change if the metric to elect the president was solely based on the popular vote.

Agreed. For most of us who wish to change or abolish the electoral college, the fact that people feel (mostly accurately) that their vote doesn't matter, and therefore don't participate in the electoral process, is the primary problem we would like to address.

I think it's somewhat ironic that usually the people complaining about their vote not mattering come from states like CA or NY that are guaranteed to go to one party, and they complain that the only votes that matter are in swing states.

To me, it seems that the people that should be pissed are the ones in swing states, since the winner-take-all nature of the EC means half of those states are completely un-represented.

Agreed, it doesn't matter whether you're in the majority or the minority, everything above the 50% line is ignored. In fact, if there's a third party in play, more than half of the votes are ignored.

No one is saying that campaigns and voting behavior wouldn't change. Just that the electoral college is a ridiculous system in the first place and should be gotten rid of.

> Just that the electoral college is a ridiculous system in the first place and should be gotten rid of.

Chesterton's fence strikes again.[0]

The electoral college addresses a real issue, and "the electoral college is a ridiculous system" is not an argument for removing/replacing it.

If you want to see the electoral college replaced or reformed, you need to at least demonstrate that you understand why it exists in the first place.

Hint: it's not because they weren't aware of the simpler "winner takes all" approach with the popular vote.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

> The electoral college addresses a real issue

The real issue it (along with the 3/5 compromise, the structure of the Senate, and the limited term explicit protection of the slave trade in the original Constitution) addressed is that, in the early US, slavery wasn't all that popular in the states that were more urbanized and had economies and value systems that supported growth in the enfranchised population, so the system had to be skewed to protect the masters in the disenfranchising states for theme to feel secure in their "peculiar institution", even if that meant sacrificing the ideal of equality even among the enfranchised citizenry.

The electoral college had literally nothing to do with slavery, and everything to do with balancing population-based governance and state-based governance (i.e. the reason we have both a House and Senate).

The 3/5 compromise was used to calculate the population-based component of governance, and at any rate, is no longer used so completely irrelevant today.

I gave more details is this response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12969671

Nice low-effort comment punk.

The electoral college was created as a part of the three fifths compromise. In order to get southern states on board, the framers needed to find a clever way to count slaves as population without letting them vote. Three-fifths plus the electoral college let them do that. It's an ugly hack that should be patched.

And don't give me any of that "republic" crap. As if anyone has any idea who their electors are, or cares. No voter honestly thinks they are selecting an elector qualified to relay popular opinion to the government. They're voting for the president.

The EC was imagined in an era where people thought the government would be more a federation of states than a central government. That is not what we have today. The system does not make sense in the current context.

Maybe you'll play the "regional interests" card. Sure. Is it any more fair that a minority candidate can be elected by the less populous states, rather than having a majority candidate elected by the more populous states? No. It's a facile argument that falls apart with any examination.

Given the poor modern justification for the EC, and all of the negative externalities it causes (election of less popular candidates, voter suppression and apathy in partisan states, etc.), it deserves to be abolished.

The problem with abandoning the electoral college is that it would violate the original principle[0], namely that the President should be elected by both a population-based and state-based mechanism. So unless we want to repudiate that founding principle, the electoral college is still the way to achieve that balance (then and now).

The electoral college is not racist, either. The 3/5 compromise of course came into any situation where population was considered (including the electoral college), as the country still had slavery at the time. We no longer have that compromise: blacks, women, men without land, etc. can all vote in 2016.

Abandoning the electoral college would just weaken the States, and if that's the plan, we might as well abolish the Senate too—it exists because of the exact same principle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...

> In Federalist No. 39, Madison argued the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. Congress would have two houses: the state-based Senate and the population-based House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the president would be elected by a mixture of the two modes.

I feel like I'm in the minority these days, but I personally think the Electoral College is a clever system that should remain. As large, coastal cities like NYC & LA continue to grow, they risk becoming entirely self-serving at the expense of the rest of the US. Voters in fly-over states often deal with agricultural and manufacturing issues that aren't even on the radar for voters in urban centers, so it's important to ensure the voice of middle-America isn't totally drowned out.

Getting rid of the electoral college for the Presidential election would not affect representation in the House and Senate.

Wouldn't that be better served by reducing federal government's in favor of more local systems (like states, or even cities)?

Some argue that was the original intent of the Founding Fathers by including the 10th amendment.

    The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
    nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
    or to the people.

To what extent the Federal government has or has not encroached upon States' rights has become a partisan issue in its own right, these days.

The larger the effect of disenfranchisement via the electoral college is (and therefore, the less effective democratic participation is I resolving the concerns of the people it underrepresents), the greater the likelihood that it causes a crisis which gets resolved by means other than peaceful democratic participation.

Short answer: yes. We are a democratic republic but most people think of us as a direct democracy. At some point, we may decide to change how we vote for president. Thus, it is worth knowing what the majority actually voted for. No, it can't change the past, but yes, it can change the future.

> Short answer: yes. We are a democratic republic but most people think of us as a direct democracy.

Can someone point me out as why Americans differentiate republic from direct democracy? I reckon than in most of the world these words don't mean opposites. Republic means just "not a monarchy/aristocracy" where I live, and I reckon in most of the world.

(This is a genuine question, maybe there is a reason for the American usage of the term)

Generally it's called a republic if there is representative government, i.e. if you have a senate or a congress. Presumably by direct democracy people mean voting directly on issues, in which case I'm not sure there's any state of a significant size implementing that particular form of government.

> Generally it's called a republic if there is representative government

No, if there's an elected representative government, it's generally a representative democracy. Even when (as in the case of the UK) it's also a Constitutional monarchy, and so not a republic of any kind.

> We are a democratic republic but most people think of us as a direct democracy.

A direct democracy is one where voters vote directly on issues rather than representatives who make decisions on issues; basically no one thinks the US is like this, though many individual states in the US incorporate some degree of direct democracy via initiative and referendum.

I think it would be more accurate than your formulation to say "We are a federal republic with a very loose approximation of representative democracy, but most people think we are, or at least should be, a representative democracy (which would still be a federal republic, but also a democratic republic.)"

Guess which president got the lowest % of the popular vote?

Abraham Lincoln with 39.8%.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

It does matter when you claim you have a mandate when in fact, more people wanted the other person.

  > when in fact, more people wanted the other person

The whole point of the comment you replied to was that you don't know that - can't know that. People voted under the current system, we don't know what their voting behavior would have been if the voting system would have been based on popular votes! For example, those in states where the winner was always clear from the start might have gone voting instead of staying at home, or they might not have voted for a 3rd party. It's not like the popular vote is 70%/30%, the total difference is far less than a single percentage point.

And Trump does have a mandate. The system is at it is - it has been like that since the very beginning of this country. I may not agree personally, but he won, and I really don't see any positive point in attempts that try to reinterpret the result. Remember, some day the roles may be switched.

> The whole point of the comment you replied to was that you don't know that - can't know that. People voted under the current system, we don't know what their voting behavior would have been if the voting system would have been based on popular votes!

Obviously it's too late for any change to the electoral college to affect this election. But we could know this in the future. You make what you measure and we're measuring the wrong thing.

Not that this changes your argument in general, but the current difference is half (edit: not one, oops!) of a percentage point, and will likely be larger by the time all the counting is done.

(Right now when I'm writing this) ~660 thousand votes, or 0.5% difference, according to WP: https://www.washingtonpost.com/2016-election-results/us-pres...

Ahem, my brain did a thing. Edited.

It's a factual statement that more people voted for Clinton period. Whether that would have been different without the electoral college is conjecture.

Yes. It also is a factual statement to say that all those votes were made by people voting in the current system and with the current system in mind. All my points still stand.

Point taken.

If anything, I think the current system suppresses the vote. I'm in a red state so my vote never counts.

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