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Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

What you forget, or may not appreciate, is that (for example) Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Red may stay home, because their vote won't really count.

I've voted Dem all my life (since 1988), and while my preferred candidate has won several of those races, my actual VOTE never helped them because I voted in Mississippi (88), Alabama (92), and Texas (96 & thereafter) -- all of which have been GOP strongholds for a long, long time. (Texas, for example, hasn't gone for the Democrats since Carter v. Ford in 1976.)

It's easy to imagine that a feeling of despair about the efficacy of one's vote would drive someone to stay home.

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For some reason I’ve not heard this argument 8 years back when Clinton lost. At that time the fact that she won popular vote was used to critique the electoral college. Maybe at that time republicans stayed at home in the blue states?

As a foreigner it seems like the electoral college is obviously stupid. No matter who wins why. It is pure conservatism to keep it like doing something because the Bible says so. Given that it mostly helps one party it will never be changed but it cannot be argued from first principles in the 21st century.

It can totally be argued from first principles. If you acknowledge that USA is a union and not a single state then it makes sense that the votes do not necessarily reflect the population distribution and there is some form of rebalancing. Then its a wuestion how much and whether the current balance is the right one.

The US is a federal system. It serves the interests of the states, not the People.

The electoral college - and the Senate - were intended to explicitly put power in the hands of the states, as equals, without regard for population. The House of Representatives was intended to be the counterbalancing voice of the People.

I can totally understand disagreeing with the concept, but to say it's stupid tells me you likely don't understand its purpose and how it fits into the overall system.

This is circular reasoning -- "the system is the way it is because that's how it was set up".

US States are not meaningful cultural units -- people in Philadelphia are much more like people in NYC than either are like those of the rural hinterlands of their respective states.

> The US is a federal system. It serves the interests of the states, not the People.

Indeed, and that's a bad system that makes no sense in 2024. Disliking it doesn't mean one doesn't understand how it came to be this way.

(Tangentially related aside: plenty of federal systems have much fairer systems for election to federal office than the US does. For example Germany.)

> This is circular reasoning -- "the system is the way it is because that's how it was set up".

Maybe it's my lack of sleep from staying until until 7am watching election news, but I honestly can't see how this is applicable. My comment was explicit about why the system was set up that way.

> US States are not meaningful cultural units

I very strongly disagree.

The next time you meet a Texan, ask them if they think they are "meaningfully" culturally distinct from Californians.

> The next time you meet a Texan

Texas is a cherry-picked example of one of the states with the strongest specific identities. Most states are not like this.

Ask someone from Phoenix to explain how they are meaningfully different from someone from Denver and they will struggle.

The same could be said for Germany and Austria. States - as in "nations", not necessarily US states - can have shared culture and history.

Texas is the one that comes to mind as the strongest, but it's far from unique in that regard. Louisiana pops to mind next. Other examples of states with very strong cultural identities off the top of my head: Oregon, Utah, Tennessee, Florida, West Virginia, Michigan, Maine, Vermont, New York, Illinois... you get the idea.

I'd say about the half the states have a strong, unique identity. The remainder are similar to their neighbors but the farther you travel the more apparent the differences.

> The same could be said for Germany and Austria.

Well, yes. The differentiation is both dumb and well-reasoned, depending on your ethics.

However at least germany and austria have meaningfully distinct languages or dialects and many centuries more to marinade in their differences. Texan and californian aren't distinct enough to produce nationalities that are clearly distinct (aside from arbitrary pride!) and they regularly swap populations sufficient enough to provide cultural osmosis that keeps the two cultures tied together.

> The next time you meet a Texan, ask them if they think they are "meaningfully" culturally distinct from Californians.

Having lived in both places I can confidently say "not as much as either party would like to think". There are far, far, far more similarities than differences, especially because the population of either place doesn't tend to interact with their natural environment. Both simply have strong sense of nationalistic pride (however dumb this is).

I mean, I'll take a stab at it... the electoral college can be argued from first principles if you consider that the U.S. was supposed to be a federal union of sovereign states. There are certainly reasonable arguments for federalism and devolution of power.

The U.N. doesn't directly elect the general secretary.

The US is not, in practice, a union of sovereign states today, regardless of whether it was in 1789.

Is that an argument against the electoral college, or an argument for re-devolution of power? Because the latter is probably easier to do than getting rid of the electoral college, given the requirements to pass a constitutional amendment.

It exists to give outsized influence to small, rural (and, at the time, slave-holding) states -- which is also true of the Senate.

Honest question, Is it not somewhat similar in effect to a parliamentary system? My understanding, is generally a parliament is divided into districts, then after parliament is elected, the government is formed and the prime minister is selected by a majority of the members of parliament?

Not saying it's great, but maybe it's not too dissimilar from some other systems?

That’s how, for example, the British system works (but even it has some features that make it quite different in practice from the American one, for example the head of government needing to maintain the confidence of parliament).

It’s not how most of the actually well-run parliamentary systems work, because those have elements of proportional representation.

It's not a partisan argument. It's a fact of the mechanics of US Presidential elections.

If DJT ends up with a final popular vote advantage, though, it'll be the first time that a Republican has taken the Oval Office AND the popular vote since 1988.

> Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Red may stay home

Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Blue may also stay home.

Why doesn't this apply both ways? Red voters in Blue states are just as likely to stay home because they think their votes won't count. And ditto the other point, Red voters in Red states may not feel like it's worth the bother to vote when they already know their state is going their way.

> It's easy to imagine that a feeling of despair about the efficacy of one's vote would drive someone to stay home.

That's true, but I don't think Democrats had a feeling of despair before the results came in. It seems like most Democrats are shocked that the election turned out this way.

If true, their media diet betrayed them. This outcome was obvious.

If it helps, the right seems shocked it turned out this way, too.

Personally, I realized last week that I had no reliable way to know what to expect. There was ample data to support predicting any outcome.

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