Comment by mhurron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhurron | Hacker News Reader

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Numbers:

Trump : 60,834,437 votes Hillary : 61,782,016 votes

Popular Vote result ( as in your vote counts the same as everyone elses ) President Hillary. US System ( the weight of your vote depends on what state you live in ) President Trump.

If you want to break it down further than that, well there is no reason to analyze anything ever because it's always a completely different situation.

People were blindsided because in any measure people consider fair and democratic, Trump would not be president. Trump was president once Ohio, NC and Florida were called for him. The rest of the country didn't matter except for counting exactly how many electoral college votes he was going to get, but we could have stopped counting votes by about 11pm EST on November 8. For the presidential election, it was just a formality after that.

Your argument is completely fallacious. The contest from the beginning was to get the most electoral votes. The candidates campaigned with that in mind. In many one-sided states like California and Utah, voters voted with that in mind, i.e., Republicans stay home in CA and Democrats stay home in UT. If the election had been about the popular vote, the candidates would have used radically different strategies and the voters in heavy red and blue states would have voted. None of this is controversial.

People forget why the electoral college was created. Every state gets 3 votes for free. More votes added based on population. That's by design, because it props up the small states.

The Constitution intentionally gave disproportionate power to small states to prevent the large states from being able to ignore them entirely. That was a condition that the small states demanded for joining the union.

This election worked exactly as it was intended. The small states preferred Trump, and their constitutionally granted power was sufficient to overule the authority of the larger states.

I agree with you, but I believe all states should be required to adopt a policy similar to Maine and Nebraska where the voting district gets an electoral representative based on the local vote rather than an "all or nothing" win of the state. This would encourage voters to vote because their local vote in the presidential election would actually matter.

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