Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway30yo | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com