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Comment by mordocai | Hacker News Reader

Representative Democracy yeah. The people voted in Trump who now gets to appoint those positions.

Well they need to be let in by congress, who the public also voted for...

>The people voted in Trump

Well no. The people voted in Clinton, and the Electoral College upweighted some votes and downweighted others in a way that favors Trump. The EC once had a distinct purpose, but right now just seems to give Republicans a structural advantage, to the ultimate detriment of Democrats and Democrat-leaners in small or rural states.

That how our Representative Democracy works. Each system has its own way of voting and counting; that's ours.

And if it creates a de facto one-party state?

I didn't hear a lot of Democrats complaining about a "de facto one-party state" when they were chirping excitedly about gaining a permanent demographic majority a few months back, so forgive me if this sudden concern over the topic does not come off as entirely sincere.

No, they really didn't. The Electoral College is not some sort of state secret. Presidential elections have worked that way for over two hundred years. Complaining about the winner in the EC becoming President is like complaining that if we'd counted score by the number of strikeouts instead of runs, the Indians would have won the World Series. True, but so what? We don't count by strikeouts, we never have, and if the rules changed the teams would have played differently so you can't draw a useful parallel anyway.

A whole bunch of states turned on a few hundred thousand votes. It's hard to sell that as a structural advantage. The Republicans have probably paid more attention to the dynamics of it.

I agree that it is not healthy that ~10-12 states have higher importance in the presidential election, but it would be rather similar in a straight popular election.

An intermediate step would be to increase the size of the House of Representatives.

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