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Comment by shanusmagnus | Hacker News Reader

This "losing the popular vote" narrative would be a lot more compelling (at least to me) if the elections were less close. It looks bad to win the Presidency and lose the popular vote, but I don't think it actually matters. In a nation of 300 something million, close enough to half want either candidate. The problems lie elsewhere. (The fact that I can say "either candidate" is part of it.)

[Edit: I should have said "Close to half the voters in a nation of 300 million want either candidate."]

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First-past-the-post voting makes "either candidate" inevitable. The only real way to fix it is to switch to instant runoff voting, proportional voting with parliamentary coalitions, or other systems that represent voter desires in a proportional or ranked way.

> In a nation of 300 something million, close enough to half want either candidate.

Neither of the major candidates ever has support from anything close to half of the 300-something-million population; of the total 324.5 million population, the 2016 election was like 20.03% to 19.26%.

Even of the eligible-to-vote population, the vote for the two major party candidates was about 26.84% to 25.68%.

Which underlines the parent post's point. Those margins are so slim as to not matter. We're talking about the entire election hanging on the difference of one moderate sized city's population.

So many problems with this.

1. 300 million people are not registered voters. ~50-60 million are.

2. First Past The Post means people are voting for the candidate they hate the least, not the candidate they prefer.

3. The election wasn't very close. 2 million votes more for 1 of the candidates in 2016.

4. The electoral college "matters" in that without it, the Iraq war wouldn't have happened, nor Trump. Saying it's the people's fault is unfounded when the people did not vote for these things.

> 1. 300 million people are not registered voters. ~50-60 million are.

Each candidate of two in 2016 USA presidential elections got approximately as many votes. So total number of voted - not registered to vote - is twice as much.

2016 popular vote, President:

    Donald J. Trump      Republican       62,980,160
    Hillary R. Clinton   Democratic       65,845,063
    Gary Johnson         Libertarian       4,488,931
    Jill Stein           Green             1,457,050
    Evan McMullin        Independent         728,830

2000 popular vote, President:

    George W. Bush       Republican       50,456,002
    Al Gore              Democratic       50,999,897
    Ralph Nader          Green             2,882,955
    Patrick J. Buchanan  Reform              448,895
    Harry Browne         Libertarian         384,431
    Howard Phillips      Constitution         98,020

If the US had either a popular vote system or a ranked vote system state by state, the outcome would have been different. Nader had more votes in Florida than the difference between Bush and Gore.

Devil's advocate (I'm not even American): would the parties' results have been the opposite and the same people that support popular vote would still insist on it?

Or with different words: if you were living in a state with low density, would you still think that strict popular vote is fair?

> 1. 300 million people are not registered voters. ~50-60 million are.

The 2016 popular vote total was over 130 million [0]; registration appears to have been somewhere between 157 million and 191 million. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/p20/580/...

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