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Comment by RKoutnik | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that 3 million more people voted for Hillary. I wouldn't chalk this one up to a design issue, rather implementation (in this case, weighting votes by geographic region).

We've submitted a patch and are waiting for enough reviewers to approve: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

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Campaign trails are also designed with the electoral vote in mind. Saying Hillary would have won if the election was based on popular vote, is not necessarily true.

This. Trump optimized to win the election, and Hillary ignored a bunch of states she thought she'd easily win (some of which she didn't).

I'm not sure Trump optimized for anything. Rumors from his inner circle suggest he didn't expect to win, and was surprised when he did.

Doesn't that make Hillary's loss all the more embarssing then?

Sort of hard for either of them when the polls turned out to be completely wrong

Polls aren't meant to be predictive. They're meant to be influential.

The final national polls turned out to be quite accurate.

This is a good point. If it was known to be a popular vote from the beginning, the strategy of the campaigns would have been different, so it's difficult to tell what would have happened. It seems common sense, but thanks for this input because it pulled my brain out of a bubble for a moment.

It's also worth noting that 90 million people who are eligible to vote didn't vote at all.

It's also worth noting the first past the post system encourages duopolistic government (Almost China and NK's monopolistic government ;) ) People vote against their sincere choice by voting for one of the two most popular candidates instead.

Some other systems: http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm http://www.elections.org.nz/voting-system/mmp-voting-system

> Almost China and NK's monopolistic government

That's one of the most perniciously false equivalence I've seen in a while, and that's saying something. The US has elected congressmen, elected senators, elected governors and an elected president. Even the top two presidential candidates are chosen from a wide field in primary elections. Portraying that as a stark choice between only two options and saying it's practically the same as China and North Korea, which provide no choice whatsoever, is really pretty disgusting.

You do realise that in USA, people mostly vote for republicans or democrats despite some hating them?

Rest of world have multi-party governments. Many more choices.

So much for an example that puts people on defensive instead of raising awareness of how distorted the electoral system in USA is.

And the US has primaries. Last year there were 17 Republicans all trying to win their party's nomination in a series of open votes; out of those, the eventual winner, Donald Trump, was perhaps the candidate least liked by the party establishment.

If anything, the problem was too many candidates, combined with a first-past-the-post system. The majority of primary voters disliked Trump, but were split between several preferred candidates (who I group because they were far more similar to each other than to Trump). Trump got a certain segment of the vote all to himself.

Joke or not, the comparison to China or North Korea is awful, and not at all close to accurate. For example, when the BBC went to report on an independent candidate in China, plainclothes policemen blocked them from entering the building[0]. North Korea is at least an order of magnitude worse off.

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38005603

I was pointing out that China and North Korea are monopolistic. Of course they don't allow more than one party with the system they set up.

Look at USA, it's duopolistic due to the system set up. There's only republicans and democrats.

What's funny is that China (Don't know about NK) brags that anyone can run for government but people only vote for one party. Just like USA brags that anyone can run for government but it ends up becoming republican/democrat.

Do you see the monopolistic/duopolistic point I was making?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

I can't comment on China, NK.

What do you think of range voting?

http://rangevoting.org

More likely it might make it worse. In US political scene, people are divided strongly and therefore moderates gets to chose in the end. This is better and keeps extremist grabbing the power (well, most of the time). With range voting, power of moderates would diminish and it would be matter of which side has slightly higher number of extremists.

I think what would improve US elections is rather this:

Publish results in real time. Most people don't seem to realize consequence of not voting . If results comes in real time then people who are lazy might get extra prode. If 95% of the population votes, there is less likelyhood of nasty surprises as opposed to say only 60%.

The electoral college is not the problem. If we remove that, than states that lose representation they were promised when they joined should have the right to secede.

This is a bad thing how? Serious question. The US would be a much happier and healthier place if it were more like the EU.

The US is quite a bit like the EU.

The average German has less say in EU politics than the average Luxembourger.

Similarly, the average Californian has less say in US politics than the average Wyomingite.

Where states are leaving or threatening to leave, and where the bureaucracies seem completely unconnected with the voters? I think not.

The electoral college no longer provides the intended benefit to those states anyways -- it just makes swing states more important.

Why? They would get the chance to participate in any amendment to abolish the electoral college.

The electoral college is antiquated and premised on an idea that didn't pan out. Specifically that people would have a primary allegiance to their state and not the federation. This was true since World War I at the latest, and Reconstruction at the earliest.

Quite frankly it's asinine that my town has more population and less representation than 6 states.

As a non-American, I have to ask why the large, liberal states don't embrace States' Rights? I know that historically, "States' Rights" has been a codeword for racism, but times change.

Why don't liberal states push for a smaller federal government, and more power for their own governments? Mitt Romney introduced a law to that became a blueprint for Obamacare, when he was governor of Massachusetts..if Trump were to abolish Obamacare, why couldn't states introduce their own programs? Similarly, if Trump appoints a conservative who wants Roe v Wade overturned, states that want to maintain abortion could do so, right? States that value clean water could enact regulations protecting their water supplies, while those that value economic growth sacrifice the health of their residents a little. And citizens could vote with their feet. If a state like Kansas ended up gutting its government by cutting taxes (as it has), surely the problem would self-correct at some point, and set an example for other states?

Pollution is often a cross-border problem, but why couldn't states sue each other to enforce pollution controls? Why couldn't liberal states impose taxes and fund their own EPAs (perhaps with bigger budgets, since federal taxes would be cut), or do interstate compacts to fund agencies for basic science that would be too expensive to fund alone?

The constitution and Bill of Rights would still be in force, but it seems like the federal government's actions seem to lead to great unhappiness, from both sides, when the other party is in power. Why is there such opposition to cutting the power of the federal government, from liberal Americans?

I'm not an American, but I do follow US politics somewhat closely, and I'm genuinely perplexed by this.

It's more of an urban verses rural than a red verses blue states issue.

American here, and I completely agree. I would love for my state to legalize marijuana and not be beholden to the whims of the current president (since it's still illegal at the federal level). Another thing I'd like to try would be a basic income guarantee with corresponding removal of minimum wage (but again, there's a federal minimum wage).

> Similarly, if Trump appoints a conservative who wants Roe v Wade overturned, states that want to maintain abortion could do so, right?

Yeah, but a lot of people aren't content with that. Some people want to force it to be legal everywhere, even in states that wouldn't otherwise want it.

>The electoral college is antiquated and premised on an idea that didn't pan out.

It absolutely panned out. Smaller states joined a union they would not otherwise have joined. To change the system requires 3/4ths of the states to sign on, too, so it's not going to change.

This is an ahistorical interpretation.

All the states admitted to the union with one notable exception were territories controlled by the United States, and all were dominated by American citizens. These populations had nowhere else to go. Do you honestly think that Idaho was going to join Canada, or strike out on its own? Of course not.

The idea that people would have a primary allegiance to their state absolutely did not pan out. No one puts South Dakotan at the center of their identity in 2017, but in the late 18th century they certainly did. For evidence look at how many signers and organizers of the revolution failed to bother to show up to the constitutional convention. There was no United States or national identity at the time. At best, it was like claiming to be a citizen of the European Union today.

>All the states admitted to the union with one notable exception were territories controlled by the United States, and all were dominated by American citizens. These populations had nowhere else to go. Do you honestly think that Idaho was going to join Canada, or strike out on its own? Of course not.

They could have created a different union, or struck out on their own. The idea they had no other options is, well, ahistorical.

>There was no United States or national identity at the time. At best, it was like claiming to be a citizen of the European Union today.

Which bolsters whose point, yours or mine?

> It's worth noting that 3 million more people voted for Hillary.

She has, in many respects, just as many problems as Trump. If the US used the popular vote, we would just be screwed in a different manner.

This is not a "patchable" problem with some implementation detail. It's a fundamental problem with trying to force hundreds of millions of people with dozens of vastly different cultures to live under the same overburdened legal and regulatory system.

I was 4 when such a system collapsed around me in the Balkans. It was interesting, I don't remember much, but 25 years later a lot of the politics still revolve around it.

Arguably the US 2 party system is still better than the Yugoslav 1. And while the multiparty system common in much of EU is crazy inefficient, it sure makes This Current Problem high unlikely.

The situation in the EU is a lot better in many ways because the EU has much less purview than the US federal government. When you do less stuff, you're less likely to piss off people with irreconcilable cultural differences.

A true popular vote would be just as horrible... minority interest gets buried...

But honestly, its the size of the nation thats the problem. People in the northeast have fundamentally different beliefs than those in, say, Alabama and california... and trying to rule over all of them as a single government is only going to cause pain...

That has nothing to do with size. When the system worked the federal government was really only concerned with national level things - war and trade, mostly. Over the years more and more power got transferred to the national level, and now we're at the point that states are pretty much satrapies of the federal government. Now the system doesn't work, because the Alabama voters have a big impact on California and vice versa.

But how is it any more fair to let three large metro areas override the preferences of most of the rest of the country?

Right now, the electoral college lets large metro areas override the preferences of rural voters in their state. The rural voter in Michigan gets outsized representation, the urban voter in California gets downsized representation, and the rural voter in California gets no representation at all.

That isn't the alternative. The alternative is to let the sum of each equal individual vote determine the outcome. Metro areas don't vote. Neither do farms. People vote. Just like most of us presumably agree that gender, ethnicity, etc. shouldn't affect the impact your vote has, I don't think that the amount of land you own or the population density of the area you live in should affect the impact of your vote.

This is how you get the Roman/Parisian mobs that were the downfall of the Roman and French Republics. All you have to do is promise the mob everything and they'll give you the support to suppress the provinces. The Founders had the Roman example to draw on, as well as Venice's devolution into an urban oligarchy.

With the electoral college al you have to do is appeal to the mob in the swing states. Then you give that select group of voting Americans the ability to suppress the rest of the population. How is that any better?

Yes, you can just appeal to a smaller mob which has the same political influence as larger mobs.

These things aren't static- the South (and the major religions) used to be solidly Democrat, California gave us Reagan, etc. This changed in my lifetime and I'm not that old. You start taking your base for granted,you end up wondering how you lost.

You need to review your Constitutional history. The Constitution mandates that the president is elected by the states, via electors who are selected in each state "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." It's not a direct popular vote and never has been.

I am well aware of how it is. I just think it ought to be different.

I don't see the parent comment implying the US had ever used popular vote, so I'm not sure where you're getting that from.

Furthermore, the Constitution can change. That's why there's amendments; quite a few have already gone through, in fact.

"most of the rest of the country" by square miles, perhaps, but citizens are not square miles. Why should someone's vote count less because they happen to live in a more densely populated area?

Because one person, one vote. I don't give two shits how many acres you own, you should get one vote (and that was the justification from the beginning -- a compromise so slaveholding scum would be overcounted). The country would have been so much better had Sherman executed the treasonous slavers, rather than burning the land. But alas, the story of the US is "well-meaning moderates" bending over themselves to placate backwater racist scum.

Slavery was added to the Articles and Constitution because South Carolina's support was deemed as critical to the rebellion against Britain.

The other colonies begrudgingly added this, opting for changes to the wording of the clause to enshrine slavery into the constitution, and did everything they could to violate their constitution until South Carolina wrote them back saying it is best if South Carolina exited.

This is a silly argument. Trump and Clinton competed for the electoral college, not the popular vote. Which means that Trump spent a lot of time campaigning for one electoral vote in Maine and almost none in courting millions of people in California and New York. It's impossible to say what the outcome would have been if the popular vote would have mattered, because both campaigns would be run totally differently.

The parties may of run entirely different candidates if it was a popular vote as well. They would likely hold entirely different policy positions as a party.

Actually, no it's not. The electoral college was setup in 1787. What it has to do with politics two centuries later in the age of the internet seems out of date. Yet it's the rules we live by, not the rules we like.

Since 2000, it's clear that voter majorities have been underrepresented in presidential elections. And as we claim to be the world's largest democracy, we have been, in fact, the world's largest republic.

It claims to be both a democracy and a republic and is generally accepted as both.

I'm highly amused that you start with "actually, no it's not", implying that you are going to disagree with my comment, because you don't actually address anything I said. Did you even read what I said?

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