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by mikeyouse 3507 days ago
Over a million voters isn't a big difference? 2/5 last elections won by the loser of the popular vote seems extremely problematic.

Phrased differently, Democrats have won the popular vote in 4/5 of the most recent elections but only won office in two of them. In the 21st century, winning the most votes for president only results in a 50% success rate for Democratic presidential candidates.
2 comments
moduspol 3507 days ago
> 2/5 last elections won by the loser of the popular vote seems extremely problematic.

Well, no, because it was designed this way. Popular vote is the obvious option when designing a democracy. They decided to go with something else under the specific understanding that any system other than a popular vote would allow this to happen.

> In the 21st century, winning the most votes for president only results in a 50% success rate for Democratic presidential candidates.

It will always affect Democratic candidates more negatively because they don't do as well with rural voters and the electoral college exists almost specifically to give rural voters more power. This is by design--not an oversight or misunderstanding.

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mikeyouse 3507 days ago
I don't think it's an oversight or misunderstanding, I just think it's a complete catastrophe.
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patrickg_zill 3507 days ago
Read up on why the EC exists. I think the term that applies is "concurrent majority".

If you want a counter-example, you can look at small town and rural upstate NY and realize how their concerns are always neglected because the sheer number of NYC voters drowns out any chance they have to be heard as part of the electorate.

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int_19h 3507 days ago
EC exists because the states had to agree on a mutually acceptable compromise (between large and small states, and also between slave and non-slave states) when forming US. It doesn't make it inherently valuable - it was a compromise solution, which pretty much by definition means that it's not a perfect design.
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mikeyouse 3507 days ago
It's a shame we don't have some sort of national representation determined by the popular vote that's independent of state size or economic power...
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