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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

> lost fair and square.

Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course.

In any case, its clear that Mr. Trump won with less money spent. Bernie Sanders is similarly a candidate who famously spent less money that Ms. Clinton but also had a chance.

The main issue is that these candidates (Trump and Sanders) were far more willing to participate in reality-distortion-field politiking, which is something that the mainstream candidates did not do as much. But that's a different debate... I would definitely argue that money has a role in politics, but it isn't as strong as most people think it is.

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No. Not of course. If the Electoral College did not exist, the campaign strategy would have been completely different for Trump. If it was by popular vote, Trump would have campaigned primarily in California even though he had no chance of winning the state (so spent very little resources there).

I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. However Trump won fair and square.

> completely different for Trump

I agree things would have been different. That's not the real issue.

> I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair.

I think this is where you and I can agree, and is the more important issue at hand.

Just to play Devil's advocate, one could argue that the EC is a necessary evil. More than 25% of the population of the US lives in just CA + NY + TX. Without the EC, there would be absolutely no incentive for the President to even acknowledge the existence of a majority of the states.

Without EC, there is little incentive for low population states to remain in the union. Giving low population states is the method for which a united states of America stays united.

Look at Europe. The seats in EU is regressive representative to the nation population. This mean that some very small nations are allowed a seat while having a population that's a fraction what a seat of a large nation, while large nations still have more total power than smaller ones. If EU followed popularity vote, then a bunch of countries would likely never bother being part of EU and you would get an EU that's just a handful of countries that may or may not even be neighbors.

This is only popular vote for the president though. Each state has equal representation in the Senate, which is half of the law making process. Big states cannot simply ram through legislation that is slanted against small states. And since there are only 17 states with greater than 2% of the population (what you'd expect if population was evenly distributed), there are more small states than large ones to prevent that if they tried.

With the EC, there's no incentive for the candidates to acknowledge the existence of any "safe" state, and instead they focus on "Battleground" states.

As a result, safe-states get safer over time and partisanship might be on the rise. Maybe if Trump did focus on California, and maybe if Clinton did focus on Texas... then our country would better understand each other's viewpoints.

Well stated. The EC doesn't eliminate the problem that is often cited as justification for the EC, it merely moves the problem and arguably makes it worse by creating these unchangeable silos of states unwilling to listen to viewpoints from candidates of a different color than the one they prefer.

Isn't that exactly where Clinton went wrong, though? She (and most pollsters) assumed far more states were safe than actually were, and Trump swooped them.

I don't think it's reasonable to call winning via the only electoral system we've ever had not "fair and square."

There's no real sense in which this is the only electoral system we've had.

The electoral college is an order of magnitude smaller than the original constitution would call for. The method by which many states apportion electors has changed since the US's founding. We also count people differently than we used to. Not to mention the 12th amendment.

When you weigh the loss by the sum of money spent, it IS fair and square. In other words, megadollars per percent of votes.

But the design of the electoral college was to deadlock the states and provide Representatives in the US Congress the final say in the matter. In effect, our country's founders were AGAINST the founding of political parties, in part because they knew it'd break the system that they worked so hard to set up.

Alas, not all plans work out. Our current system is an accident, created in the ignorance / naivete of political parties with little thought or design put into the real operational use.

The only thing that DOES work is that our constitution can (and regularly does) change when everyone is convinced that our rules and regulations are in need of an update. And more and more people are beginning to think that this whole "Electoral College" crap is stupid.

Sounds like the problem is with having political parties, not the EC.

It seems far more likely that we design our system to actually work with Political Parties (instead of being corrupted by Political parties), rather than trying to ban political parties.

Tribalism, Cheerleading, Echo-chambers, "Fake News", Yellow Journalism, Propaganda... these are facts-of-life in America and no amount of legal writing will prevent humans from being humans. We will always separate ourselves into camps during political decisions.

Its a bad thing for our democracy because our system wasn't designed for it. But alternative voting mechanisms or improved systems can allow us to make progress in spite of the corrupting influence of human nature.

What have we learned in the past 250ish years of this country? And what can we do with that knowledge to improve our country? In general, this country learns to harness human nature, instead of trying to defeat it.

When you try and defeat human nature (say: Amendment 18), you are only met with failure.

>can allow us to make progress

As long as there is healthy debate on what is progress, I am all for it. No suppression of free speech.

The optimal method for gaming the system is entirely dependent on the details of the system.

In this case, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting produces a two-party system. No matter how you structure the electoral college, as long as their vote is FPTP/WTA, the two-party system will change every other rule that they can touch to ensure that only those who will vote for the party can ever become electors.

I wouldn't call it the only one we ever had considering a few hundred years ago the electoral college was not elected by direct election (in every state, it was actually up to the states how they wanted to elect the college and the original states predominantly did it differently in the early 19th century) and if we were under the old rules pre-amendment Hillary would be the VP right now.

"Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course."

I think Wikipedia succinctly provides a factual assessment in this case: "The United States Electoral College is the mechanism established by the United States Constitution for the indirect election of the President of the United States and Vice President of the United States. Citizens of the United States vote in each state and the District of Columbia at a general election to choose a slate of "electors" pledged to vote for a particular party's candidate."

One can argue about the merits of the popular vote, but as per the Constitution, elections are won according to Electoral College vote.

That's the rules. That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change.

Mrs. Clinton also had a chance to win a round of Yahtzee, if Rock-Scissors-Paper were used to determine the winner.

And the writers of the Constitution didn't believe in Political Parties. Things didn't work out as they expected however.

The expectation was that each state would deadlock upon "local favorites" and then the House of Representatives would choose the winner.

Clearly, the Electoral College system is not working as designed, and I really do think its time that we start thinking about changing the constitution to make things more fair.

> That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change.

How in the world do you consider the 12th and 13th Amendments and the Apportionment Act of 1911 "little change"?

Would Mrs. Clinton have won in an alternative universe where the aforementioned alternations did not take place?

Yes. She would have won the Vice Presidency, as Trump became President.

Which only demonstrates the supreme idiocy of the original system our founding fathers envisioned. Its a good thing they gave us a mechanism to change the Constitution and the rules.

The founding fathers never tried to design a perfect system. They only hoped to make a "more perfect" system, that over time would improve upon itself.

And improve itself it has. Vice Presidents and Presidents now run together, instead of being #1 and #2 in the Electoral College. Black people can vote (and be more than 3/5ths a person), slaves have been outlawed, Women can vote. This country is one of continuous self-improvment (or at least, ATTEMPTED self-improvement)

>This country is one of continuous self-improvment (or at least, ATTEMPTED self-improvement)

yes, and last presidential election was such an event.

"Yes. She would have won the Vice Presidency, as Trump became President."

And what, exactly, would that have changed?

For one, Ms. Clinton would be the tiebreaking vote in the Senate.

Which means every "close call" vote in the Senate (including the Supreme Court Justice vote, various laws that have been passed this year, etc. etc.) would have only passed at the Pleasure of Ms. Clinton.

For another: Mr. Trump delegates a lot of tasks to the Vice President. The Vice President has a lot of power when it comes to implementing the President's policies.

Gorsuch was approved by the Senate by a 54-45, non-party-line vote. As for the remaining tiebreakers, one was the approval of DeVos as Education Secretary, two involve HHS items, and one was to push forward AHCA.

So far, none of the above have been groundbreaking.

As for your last point: the idea that Trump would delegate anything to VP Clinton in the same manner he delegates items to Pence is utterly absurd.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and/or ideological battle. That's not a legit use of this site, and we ban accounts that do it. (We have to, because it's destructive of what HN is for.) Would you kindly (re)-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this?

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