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Comment by Dagwoodie | Hacker News Reader

Without California, Hillary loses the Popular vote as well. California 'single' handedly gave it to her. Some already think it was the Illegal-Alien vote that gave that to her in the first place.

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Without Texas, Trump lost the Popular vote by even more. With neither, Hillary still wins the popular vote. If we remove arbitrary chunks of the vote, it can go different ways! This is insightful!

Of course, the winner of the popular vote is meaningless anyway, because that's not how the election works.

Somewhat agreed. There is a difference between "has no procedural effect" and "meaningless" - it does speak to popular opinion slightly more forcefully than other polls.

Not really. In a counterfactual world where the winner of the national popular vote became President, the candidates would have campaigned differently. So it's impossible to say what the alternate result would have been.

I'm not sure what that counterfactual has to do with anything here. It would be relevant if I were saying "clearly we should ignore the electoral college and hand the election to Hillary." I'm not. I'm saying Trump has a bit less of a mandate, losing the popular vote by a small margin, than he would have had if he'd won the popular vote by a small margin, and much less than if he'd won the popular vote by a huge margin. Yes, the numbers would have been different if popular vote had been the chief objective, but... so what?

I don't understand how that is relevant.

She could have lost (to pick a blue state at random) Vermont and still held the popular vote. What you're saying is that by removing the most populous blue state, she'd lose the popular vote. How is that relevant? States are arbitrary boundaries; we could slice and dice California up into 55 states, giving each one an electoral vote. Now we could remove any one of those and she'd still maintain the popular vote. We're allowing an arbitrary division determine our president, rather than a somewhat less arbitrary "majority of voters".

But all -that- aside, the parent comment was referencing the OP. Literally nothing was said about the popular vote; the OP is about possible voting irregularities in some of the swing states that might lead to Hillary also clinching the electoral college majority (and the parent comment was saying how they're not very happy with the prospect of a recount).

I was simply pointing out how unlikely it is to change anything at this point (Look at WI, MI, PA), and if there is a change it will likely result in civil disturbances if anything at all.

Do you think that there's anything to the idea of compartmentalization? For example, suppose people in one area were so homogeneous in circumstances and concerns that they were of universally the same political opinion. By pandering to that one area, a candidate could win a large number of votes. In contrast, to win votes all across the country, a candidate would need to have wider appeal, taking into account the concerns of the wider population.

It seems like the electoral college helps compartmentalize the votes, preventing an "overflow" of opinion in certain areas from outweighing the wider population's combined opinion.

Not just without California, but even without Los Angeles County:

    | Popular vote totals:                          |          |
    | Clinton                                       | 60900953 |
    | Trump                                         | 60328203 |
    |-----------------------------------------------+----------|
    | Los Angeles County votes:                     |          |
    | Clinton                                       |  1654626 |
    | Trump                                         |   542591 |
    |-----------------------------------------------+----------|
    | California votes:                             |          |
    | Clinton                                       |  5931283 |
    | Trump                                         |  3184721 |
    |-----------------------------------------------+----------|
    | Popular vote totals minus Los Angeles County: |          |
    | Clinton                                       | 59246327 |
    | Trump                                         | 59785612 |
    |-----------------------------------------------+----------|
    | Popular vote totals minus California:         |          |
    | Clinton                                       | 54969670 |
    | Trump                                         | 57143482 |

Go ahead, downvote facts. :/

In addition to the bizarre idea of excluding parts of the vote... Your post was not factual; the numbers are grossly out of date. The current numbers for the popular vote are about 64.2M vs 62.2M, and the count is not actually yet finished.

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