And if you take out a couple states, Clinton won the electoral college. What's your point? That we should ignore the votes of two of the largest states because they don't agree with you?
> That we should ignore the votes of two of the largest states because they don't agree with you?
Ahh, yeah. That's the point. So America isn't CaliforNewYork.
The electoral college isn't a scam, it exists to bring balance, so your hipster javascript developer gets the same weight as a coal miner in rural Ohio.
Why should the coal miner get more of a voice than the guy who lives in a city? They're both citizens, right?
They both get to vote on their state, city, and county stuff. Why should the guy who lives in the middle of nowhere get to say "my vote's worth 50x what yours is, sucker!!"?
The minority already has constitutional protections to live, love, worship, engage in commerce, employ speech and association, without interference from the majority. Their rights are already guaranteed by the constitution.
Getting a way-outsized vote in federal elections is undemocratic, and doesn't protect the minority from "tyranny" so much as give it outsized power, just as a quirk of geography.
It doesn't reassure me that we give much more weight to a minority of voters just because they live in less densely populated areas. That's completely arbitrary.
It could be argued that 100 people living in 3 counties have a greater diversity of concerns and opinions than 100 people sharing an apartment complex.
Is "diversity of concerns" a primary goal of democracy? Obviously for issues that directly affect a local region, I do think those should be handled by a local government. The people in the apartment complex probably ought to have different rules than people in rural counties, each reflecting the concerns of the local population.
But there's only one President for the whole country, for better or for worse. It doesn't make sense to me to apply this idea here.
The U.S. should move to a political system where coastal city-dwelling individuals have 4x the voting power of people who live inland and in rural areas.
It's not arbitrary, or about whose votes matter more or population density at all. It's because the United States is actually a union of what was, before the founding of the country as we know it, relatively sovereign states. By joining the union they were giving up much of that sovereignty. It was good for the union that more states joined, so the great compromise was to allow states who were fearful of being dominated by foreign opinions to be granted additional votes just for being 1 state. So Rhode Island residents don't just vote as individuals - they get some votes proportionally and some votes for being a member state of the union. How do so many people educated in the United States not know about that compromise?
I know the reasons the electoral college was chosen. I still don't think it's necessarily a good idea, especially given the modern role of the President.
The design of the electoral college was not to prevent influence by larger states. That's the function of the Senate. The electoral college exists in part to enable the 3/5ths compromise and in part to allow the vote of the people to be changed by someone who is theoretically more sophisticated.