Comment by AbrahamParangi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AbrahamParangi | Hacker News Reader

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While I agree that Trump's election being illegitimate is a narrative many (on the left) want to hear, I disagree with your characterization of the popular vote as irrelevant.

I think most Americans consider the electoral college a funny historical quirk and 'getting more votes' is the source of the mandate to rule. Except when popular vote splits happen in which case everyone remembers that we've got a bizarre system that very, very occasionally returns a different result than the popular vote.

Although, who knows. Of the 5 popular/electoral splits that have ever happened, 2 happened in the past 16 years. Maybe shifting demographics will preserve republican electoral competitiveness even if their fraction of the total vote shrinks.

It is irrelevant in two ways. First, the constitution stipulates election via the Electoral College, not the popular vote, so until that changes the point is moot. Second, if the EC was abolished before the election then BOTH campaigns would have run completely different strategies. The current tallies are not relevant to a direct popular vote outcome so its impossible to say under that scenario who would have won. Its pure speculation to assume Clinton would have won under different rules and thus irrelevant.

The electoral college favors rural states and rural areas vote Republican. And elections hereafter will tend to be close owing to campaign strategizing and optimized campaign financing. And even then, politicians are only interested in swing states. So now the popular vote has lost in half of all 21st century elections and will continue to do so fairly often and will always be in one direction.

So the question is do we want customs that arbitrarily advantages one party for no clear reason.

I say customs and not actual laws because electors are only bound to vote the party line by a small fine and tradition not by the letter of the law. In the same way the letter of the law does not require a president to divest his assets, only ethics and tradition.

But even so, I imagine there will be an astounding number of highly creative justifications for the ludicrous electoral college remaining exactly as it is.

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