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Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

Those stats might hold regardless, but to be fair one would expect different voting patterns under the current system, versus a direct popular-vote election, so it's not accurate to say that anyone "won" the popular vote in any US Presidential election, since that wasn't the contest and the fact that it wasn't affected how voters and candidates behaved. It's like challenging someone to a foot race, losing, and then deciding afterward that you won on "style points" or something. That wasn't the contest, and the other participant might have done things differently under different rules.

The system as it stands makes voting pointless for people who are in districts that reliably go for the "other team". If they could at least influence the Presidential election, more of those voters might show up at the polls. GOTV and other campaign efforts take this into account, which magnifies the effect.

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Fine, you want another example of systemic bias in our government? The 50 Democratic senators represent 41.5 million more people than the 50 Republican senators.

Also: don't forget that the District of Columbia has no voting representation in Congress.

DC has a larger population than Wyoming or Vermont, and will probably overtake Alaska by the next Census based on its current trajectory.

Not just DC. American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Northern Marianas Islands, US Virgin Islands, and Guam are all American citizens but can't vote for president at all, don't get a Senator, and collectively only get a few representatives, most of whom are ceremonial and don't get to vote.

I don't really have an issue with the way the senate is setup, since that was intentional. My issue is with the house, where we are supposed to have equal representation, but don't.

> I don’t really have an issue with the way the senate is setup, since that was intentional.

Why is bad intent less bad than bad accident.

> My issue is with the house, where we are supposed to have equal representation, but don’t.

House representation was supposed to be approximately equal limited by granularity and it remains approximately equal limited by granularity.

>House representation was supposed to be approximately equal limited by granularity and it remains approximately equal limited by granularity.

But the "limited by granularity" part is growing more and more limited. The size of the House originally grew as the size of the population grew. Once we capped the size of the House, we lost relative granularity allowing this problem worsen as the gap between the smallest and largest congressional districts increased.

It was intentional and a big part of it was to protect slave-owners. Evil intent does not get a pass.

That’s not a systemic bias against Democrats, that’s an intention design so that small states and large states have more balance of power.

Which is literally a bias against democracy.

States are not fixed entities. It's people that should be represented, not an arbitrary geographic boundary.

That intentional design makes it so depending on where you physically live, your vote is worth many times less or more than someone else's. That makes no sense.

Please bone up on government design. Democracy sucks, it’s majority rule. We’re a republic that is intentionally designed to provide balance rather than “51% voted to spend 99% of the budget on the cities so I guess rural folks can pound sand”.

Note that pretty much every country has something similar - some body that acts on a check of pure democratic representation.

Ah, yes, instead we should have 35% voted to end civil rights for an entire group but they live in more land, so 65% can pound sand.

Much better.

But it’s not ending civil rights? The legislature is still free to pass laws protecting abortion. All the heavily blue states that support abortion won’t see any change at all.

It is in fact, ending civil rights for hundreds of millions of people.

idk why you're getting downvoted. This was literally a compromise made by the founders to protect smaller states from larger states

The downvotes are probably because intentional bias is still bias.

That's not a systematic bias. The senate was DESIGNED from the beginning to be immune to population differences: each state gets two senators, regardless of population. It was one of the compromises that convinced the small states to join the union in the first place.

Intentional, designed-in bias is still bias. Right?

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