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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I don't know - we live in a different world than we did in say, 2000. It might be easier to create a mass movement advocating for its removal today...
Oh God! Natural light!While I do believe some wouldn't care about the Electoral vote if Hillary won(or at least wouldn't have made a noted complaint), it would be just as easy to point out how bullshit it is by design, regardless of who won.
I agree with getting rid of it because it makes many votes worthless around the US. It discourages votes by design. If Trump would've won the popularity vote, it'd be annoying due to what he stands for, but it'd be a respectable and proper vote count instead. It's hard to respect the voting system which it's not a proper democratic one. And this isn't just because I'm a Democrat, it's because of the point of a voting system. That the one that gets the most votes win. Plain and simple. I don't like how worthless it feels.
That said, I'm not sure how trying to play the blame game amounts to anything at this point. You're probably right, some wouldn't care, but this overall event brought to attention the problem with the electoral voting system, so... I guess one good thing came out of this election? Sucks how we figured out this problem, though. :/
Shadow?Well, I googled it and according to this article they're still counting like a million votes out in California. There's a reason it's got fifty five electoral votes. And they may still be counting Michigan, but I couldn't find anything else newer than three days ago.
@Irene: The popular vote is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: it is a count of every single vote cast by the eligible population - a popularity contest. The Electoral College is a seperate vote and hasn't actually happened yet, though it is essentially predetermined.
edited 14th Nov '16 1:50:53 AM by TheAirman
PSN ID: FateSeraph | Switch friendcode: SW-0145-8835-0610 Congratulations! She/TheyI freely admit, I really don't get how the election system in the US works...it seems to be overly simplified and complicated at the same time.
One thing for sure, the circus around the election is just idiotic. I am more used to the German system, which allows only one advertising spot per party, and ensures that there is only a very short time-frame for the actual campaign. Not this one year nonsense which only costs money.
Steve Bannon, you mean?
Well, he's not really capable of being described as the alt-right's representative in Trump's government - the alt-right eats out of his hand.
Granted, Breitbart's impartiality issues are already sufficiently massive (mostly in relation to reality) that having their ex-editor work for Trump can't possibly make their news less credible.*
*Unless you're into Disdain For Plebs or other Facebook meme pages.
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotPresidential elections in the US work like this:
Each state is assigned a number of Electoral College seats based on its population. The largest is California, with 55 Electoral College votes. The total is 538, so with 270 you've got a majority of the votes. That's what you need to be elected President. If two candidates get 269 votes each, the House of Representatives pics the President, while the Senate picks the Vice President.
Almost all states have decided that whoever gets most votes in that state gets all of their Electoral College votes. There are two exceptions: Maine and Nebraska. Both of them have decided that they'll give 2 Electoral College votes to whoever wins the popular vote in that state, and 1 vote each for every one of their Congressional districts. Maine has 2 and Nebraska has 3 districts, so in each of them you can have both candidates winning some electoral votes by winning one or more regions even if they still lose the popular vote in the state. (Incidentally, the phrase is popular vote, not "popularity vote".)
Most states lean very heavily towards one of the two major parties. Usually, the vote in these states is so predictable that the major parties don't even want to spend a lot of effort activating their base or getting new voters during the campaign. Both sides simply expect the state to go the way it usually does, which practically disenfranchises people in those states (especially if they don't support the more popular party there).
States that don't tend to always vote the same way are called Swing States and they're the ones where the election really happens. The candidates will focus most of their campaign resources and time on those states. The most important swing states, because of their large population (and thus electoral vote count), are Florida and Ohio.
The Presidential candidates for all parties (though I suppose it would be enough to only ever speak of the two big ones) are picked in the primaries. Each party arranges a primary election campaign, with the candidates going from state to state to try to get that party's voters in that state to support them. The primary election's rules, in terms of the allocation of representatives in the party convention to vote for the Presidential candidate, vary by state and by party. Usually only members of that party (or voters registered with it) are allowed to vote in the primaries.
The inevitable consequence of this is that the candidates must try to appeal very strongly to that party's voters from the pool that are interested enough to go to the convention. That drives the candidates away from the centre during the primary season, and the one that is picked as candidate will then have to try to pivot back to the centre before the Presidential election really gets going.
From a Finnish point of view this system looks very poorly designed, as does the First-Past-The-Post system that the US (and UK and several other countries) use for other elections. FPTP means that each district chooses one representative. If you get 49% of the vote you get nothing. In practice, this system encourages parties that are rather centrist and try to appeal to a very broad range of political views (even if they're in conflict), and exclude the minority fringes if they don't happen to be sufficiently close to that party's centre. It also leads to almost all voters always opting for the "least bad" option.
FPTP systems discourage voting for third parties and bring down the share of eligible voters who bother to turn up at all. US Presidential elections tend to hover somewhere around 45-55% of eligible voters participating in the election. For comparison, in Finland we're very worried that turnout in Parliamentary elections is barely reaching 70%.
In most Western countries the electoral districts are larger than just one representative, and the system is usually designed to favour smaller parties (at least to get one or two representatives through). The consequence is that a party with 5% support will get at least some representation, while a party with about 30% support will be one of the largest. There will usually be about 3 or 4 big parties that get to be the central power of a government coalition (the largest party usually getting the seat of Prime Minister), and they'll make compromises with smaller parties to get them to join the government coalition and share responsibility and power.
The ideal outcome is a government with a strong mandate (with the parties, combined, having well over 50% of the seats in Parliament) and sufficiently aligned political positions between the parties that they can get decisions done. They'll also be sufficiently diverse that each party's most outlandish positions will be vetoed by the other parties.
Of course, these systems with proportional representation do have problems. You can get governments that are not very united, which might necessitate new elections more frequently; or you might get a government that barely stays together and doesn't get a lot of legislation passed. Then again, in the US system you also get terms of Congress were next to nothing gets passed, especially if the President is from the other party.
I definitely favour a proportional representation system over a FPTP one. To me it's not fair that 45% of voters in a state can vote for a candidate and not end up helping that candidate at all. (You might get millions and millions of votes in a big state and get 0 electoral college votes for it, while a couple of million in a smaller state will get you electoral college votes.) To me it doesn't make sense that you've got below 60% turnout and celebrate your elections as successful. I am much happier in a system where a party that gets 15% of the vote will get at least close to 15% of seats in Parliament.
In case you're curious about how a President gets elected in a proportional representation system, I'm going to use Finland as an example because I think it's representative. In our system the Presidential election has two rounds. In the first round, each party gets to have its own candidate, and you get a campaign and debates and so on. Sometimes a party will opt not to have a candidate of their own, and support another party's candidate instead, but that's not common.
After the first round, the two candidates that got the most votes will enter the second round. (If someone got more than 50% in the first round the second round is skipped entirely, but that's almost impossible.) In the second round, you have a brief campaign just between the two remaining candidates, and you get another vote, and then it's just simple majority. The one who gets more votes wins.
Of course, in this case the President will probably have had something like 20-30% support in the first round, and it would be very weird to give a lot of power to someone like that. That's why the President, in our system, does not have the most power; that distinction if with the Prime Minister, who leads the government coalition.
The speaker of Parliament also has a lot of power, but ultimately the parties in Parliament tend to vote in blocs, with the parties in government usually supporting whatever the government does. (If a party does split from the government's line in a given issue, that legislation might not pass Parliament. Then again, the government will have hope that at least one of the opposition parties will happen to support that policy, even if it's from the government and they're in opposition. It does happen.)
edited 14th Nov '16 4:32:36 AM by BestOf
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.![]()
I googled that page. I need some Brain Bleach now.
We have something similar in Argentina.
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Yeah, one wonders what the hell at least some of the Founding Fathers were thinking when they designed those parts of the political system. Did they really distrust the common citizenry that much?
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.![]()
Actually, I think that one major reason behind Trump's rise is the whole "appeal to far-from-center groups" thing that was mentioned in that explanation. The GOP had been essentially hijacked by the Tea Party after Obama became president, all because appealing to them was an easy way to win the primaries, not caring or realizing that doing so would eventually make the GOP increasingly dependent on pandering to such far-right extremists lest they lose their edge on the Democrats.
So no, Trump seems to me as an example of what's wrong with the Founding Fathers' design, not what it was trying to guard against (though technically it's not mutually exclusive; it could be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy thing, that they tried to prevent it but didn't realize they were instead causing it).
edited 14th Nov '16 5:32:37 AM by MarqFJA
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.At least some of the founding fathers really did think people were too stupid to vote properly. Like, someone would come along and say "Vote for me, and I will be your king for life!" And people would actually vote for that. (Which has actually happened, in some places, so I don't think they were entirely wrong.)
Nowadays, that is somewhat difficult to achieve, if only because of the 8 year limit.

It's hard to make voters enthusiastic about something that doesn't affect their lives in any way, yeah. Probably the stink being raised about it now will have died down to basically nothing in 2020.