POPULAR NATIONAL VOTE
Hillary Clinton
62,049,189
Donald Trump
60,966,031
In most democracies, the person who receives the most votes from citizens is declared the winner of an election. That is not true in United States presidential elections.
In the 2016 United States presidential election, Hillary Clinton received 1,083,158 more votes than Donald Trump got -- that's over a million more votes. But Trump won the election.
That's because we don't choose our presidents by the winner of the popular vote. Instead, we still use an archaic electoral college system, where the individual states have the final say in who wins.
This system was originally chosen because it gives smaller and less populated states a bigger say in who becomes president, and it probably fulfills that purpose. But it also does something else. It denies individual voters a voice in who wins. Because of our electoral system, Democrats in red states (and Republicans in blue states) don't really have a voice in who becomes president.
That is silly, and it's undemocratic (resulting in the person with the fewest votes becoming president twice now since 2000). If we did away with the electoral college, then the vote of every citizen in every state would count toward picking the winner.
It would be very hard to do (maybe impossible), but I think we need to abolish the electoral college. Let the person with the most votes be the winner -- just like we do in all of our other elections.
It wont solve very much, as you will now have the terror of the majority, which is not all that good.
ReplyDeleteIf the electoral college had been abolished before this election, the popular vote would have come out differently - not saying which way. Electoral College is a winner take all system, so in California, for example, some people didn't bother voting because it was obvious that Clinton would get the electoral votes. Visits to California are for fundraising, not campaigning.
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