[julkali]

As a non-American, my personal concern for Democracy in regards to the USA is the questionable system of the electoral college which, in my opinion, is one of the worst forms of representative democracy on the planet and certainly not apt for a country so proud of its democratic values.

This also goes hand-in-hand with the black-white thinking of a two-party-system.

[bluecalm]

If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now. Thus when we are forming a union we stipulate that we have equal voting rights.

It's going to happen in EU in some form as well (assuming EU goes into closer integration direction) because there is no way small countries accept closer union without a mechanism similar to electoral college.

[saghm]

> If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now. Thus when we are forming a union we stipulate that we have equal voting rights.

That's not how the electoral college works. The electoral college equivalent would be one village with 1000 people, the second with 2000, and the third with 4000, and each village getting "electoral votes" proportional to their population that gets awarded entirely to the candidate with the majority vote in that village. The entirety of the first two villages vote for candidate A, which awards 1 electoral vote for the first village and 2 electoral votes for the second. In the third village, which has 4 electoral votes, candidate A only gets 1999 votes, whereas candidate B gets 2001 votes, so they win the electoral vote 4-3 and become the leader despite only winning 2001 votes overall out of 7000.

The reason that the analogy needs to be this complicated is because the electoral college isn't some sort of common-sense system that happens to occasionally produce quirky results; it's an extremely contrived system that produces equally contrived results, which shouldn't be remotely surprising.

[bluecalm]

I simplified it a bit however this:

>>that gets awarded entirely to the candidate with the majority vote in that village

is not correct. It's up to the states to decide how they split their electoral votes.

It seems natural to me. States gets electoral votes based on census and then they decide how to split them.

[saghm]

> If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now.

> States gets electoral votes based on census and then they decide how to split them.

How is this any different than the original problem you cited before? The majority of a state deciding to allot the entirety of its votes to a single candidate based on a majority of the internal vote is pretty much exactly what you described. That makes sense for a state-wide office like a senator or governor, but there's absolutely no reason that it should work like that for a national election. The only possible argument I could imagine is that it's an attempt to make sure that people in each state have their priorities represented, but it does the _opposite_ of that by rendering what's usually over 40% of the votes in each state entirely meaningless, and that's not even mentioning the fact that states aren't monolithic entities with uniform concerns but populations of individuals who might care about different things.

There's no point in mincing words here; the electoral collage is a construct designed to give states the power at the expense of the individuals in the state. I'm sure there are people who would argue that's a good thing, but I'd argue it's an anachronism from a time when most people had far less access to education and far fewer concerns that ranged beyond their local area. Granted, at the time I'm writing this it's not clear which way the popular vote went in 2024, but that doesn't change the fact that in the presidential elections preceding this one, the "winner" lost the popular vote a third of the time across two decades, so this isn't a theoretical concern.

[echoangle]

I think you’re misunderstanding the problem (or I am), the problem is the winner-takes-all per state, not that voting ratios between states are fixed (they aren’t BTW).

[marcosdumay]

I'm sorry but... WTF?

The US voting system doesn't even solve that one "problem" you are presenting. The number of districts and votes are constantly adjusted to population.

[seanp2k2]

A good dive into the history of the electoral college can be found at https://www.hks.harvard.edu/more/policycast/if-electoral-col...

[nathanaldensr]

States elect Presidents, not the People. If you knew anything about why states exist at all, and their history in Constitutional law, and that they have far greater sovereignty than any other country's sub-national political division, you'd understand why the electoral college system exists.

[arp242]

I don't disagree, but Trump won the popular vote by a decent margin.

[xnx]

The popular vote would be very different if it weren't for the electoral college.

[lavezzi]

Just a reminder that not all votes have been counted yet.

[arp242]

The margin is so large that it doesn't matter (I did check before commenting). Something truly spectacular and unprecedented needs to happen for Harris to win the popular vote.

[culi]

This is completely untrue. While Trump is favored, there are around 7 million votes left to count in California alone. Predominantly from major cities. Harris is expected to gain a net of almost 3 million from that

[JeremyHoward]

No it's not. Harris has less than a 1% chance of winning the popular vote at this stage. You can put $100 on her right now and make $20K when she wins.

[arp242]

That's not how I read it when I looked earilier, but we'll see how it turns out. I can't be bothered to check again, and I don't think it's an important point to argue right now. For what it's worth, I hope you're right and I'll gladly be wrong here.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Yeah, if we talk about it, counting votes for days/weeks, and no ID laws are ridiculous.

[bcrosby95]

Counting votes for days/weeks. No ID laws. States not allowing pre-counting votes. States not allowing early voting. Having to wait 7 hours to vote at some polling locations vs 10 minutes at others. Allowing some forms of state agency issued ID to vote but not others.

I'm sure everyone from every side can come up with their own list. How about we solve it all once and for all.

[marcosdumay]

Counting for days is ok. Having fights about it for a week or two is also ok. None of those break anything.

The no ID culture and everything around it... I honestly can't understand it.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Counting for days is not OK. To ensure fair counting you need to have poll watchers from all interested parties present during voting and counting, and it is difficult to be present over 96 hours period - people need to sleep, and they can't observe the ballots repository or counting while they sleep.

There is no reason why all ballots can't be counted it a few hours. If more people are needed to do it, then so be it.

[grahamj]

As incredibly disappointing as that is to me, the fact is this is only the 2nd time the Reps have won the popular vote.

In other words the US leans left and Reps only win because of the electoral system.

[echoangle]

> the fact is this is only the 2nd time the Reps have won the popular vote.

Definitely not, where did you get that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

[grahamj]

hmm I read that somewhere this morning but it seems to be way off. I stand corrected.

[tech_ken]

Second time in the current millennium is probably the talking point you saw; Reagan was the the last Rep president to win two terms with a popular vote majority.

[arp242]

I would argue the Democratic Party is hardly "left-wing". The old joke is that the US has two parties: the right wing party and the very right wing party. They have moved a bit to the left though, but many "left wing" policies they support have broad universal support among the left and right in Europe. Today it's more the centre/centre-right party and the monster raving looney party.

But yes, the system is not great. This matters even more in the senate elections by the way, where every state gets two senators regardless of population size. I get the argument that you don't want densely populated cities dominating large swaths of rural areas, but 1) elections are about people and not trees, and 2) now it's the reverse where sparsely populated rural areas dominate. So...

[015a]

All true, and I feel there's hope that this is the wake-up call the American left needs; that if they keep playing the role of the centrist establishment what they end up crafting is a super boring campaign that no one feels the passion to get out and vote for. Total voter turnout this election is shaping up to be significantly lower on the left (-15M currently) versus the right (-3M) as compared to 2020.

I think the takes that this is the right taking over America etc are super doomerist. The more accurate story is: The left put up a really boring, bad candidate. The only campaign the left has figured out how to run for literally the past three elections is "stop Trump", and its not even resonating with their own voters anymore. What are they going to run on in 2028 when there isn't a Trump to stop anymore?

The left needs to wake up and have a Trump moment of their own.

[arp242]

Trump is incredibly boring. All he does is throw insults and is obsessed with personal loyalty. He has barely any meaningful ideas at all, and has very little interesting to say. It's almost all just politics of grievances and whipped up anger, at times based on abject malicious lies.

That really is the problem: one side runs a nihilistic campaign completely unencumbered by any truth, morality, or any sense of decency, and the side, well, doesn't. There are two sets of rules and two games being played here. That much has been obvious for almost a decade now. So how do you counter that? Well, no one really knows.

[9dev]

The little he has to say still got him the most powerful position in the world, which is a problem. I am thoroughly afraid of his capability to destroy and deceive.

[drawkward]

Progressive policies are broadly popular; inevitably, some totalitarian and intolerant wokeists always end up hijacking the progressive wing, driving the center rightward.

[bcrosby95]

They also have broad support in the US, but once a policy gets the socialism word attached to it it loses popularity.

For example, the ACA is very popular. Obamacare is not. It's all about the messaging.

[briandear]

Is the EU president elected by popular vote?

[simonask]

There is no president of the EU.

There is a President of the European Council (Charles Michel, elected by member countries' heads of state), there is a President of the European Commission (Ursula von der Leyen, elected by the European Parliament), and there is a President of the European Parliament (Roberta Metsola, elected by the members of the parliament).

Seats in the European Parliament are not proportionally allocated (small countries have more seats per capita), and member countries have different systems for allocating their seats among representatives, but nobody uses first-past-the-post, maybe except Hungary (debatably - their system is weird).

So, no, none of the "EU presidents" are elected by popular vote strictly speaking, and none of them have a role that is even remotely similar to the US presidency.