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Electoral College

Posted: 14 Nov 2016, 22:07
by TheKingsHills
With the recent election, and those pointing out the fact that Hillary won the popular vote but not the electoral votes. A large portion of people are against the electoral college system.
What are your guys' thoughts on it?


Personally, I was initially against the electoral college. But after looking into it, it makes sense. Rather than considering the US as a whole (popular vote) we break it down into states with proportional votes to their population size.
In my eyes this is somewhat irrelevant unless the race is extremely close.
The way it is structured in a way, is rather than this being 1 giant election, I liken it to more of 50 elections going on in each state. The president who gets elected in the most of these states wins. Sorta, this is like a really basic and watered down version of it. But I believe that it is fairly accurate.
As such, it's similar to the ratifying system. If so and so states ratify [insert] law, it becomes federal law. Except with the president. I may be wrong, so I'm curious as to your guys' thoughts.

Re: Electoral College

Posted: 15 Nov 2016, 19:48
by Flobalob
I don't really think it works all the time. I get why it's there, and most of the time it's fine, but where it fails is in large battleground constituencies such as Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, because it basically ends up "ignoring" millions of votes for whoever loses, in these three cases Clinton. Then again, it also fails in safe states because it's really, entirely irrelevant how much you win by.

tl;dr It sucks but I don't have a better alternative.

Re: Electoral College

Posted: 15 Nov 2016, 20:35
by The Divine Potato
Flobalob wrote:tl;dr It sucks but I don't have a better alternative.


The summary of both politics and economics right there.