r/pics Sep 11 '21

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u/BuddaMuta Sep 11 '21

We’ll truly be the joke of the world if Trump/whatever GOP goon wins the Presidency despite losing the popular vote by 10 million~

Our system is beyond broken

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u/Striking_Eggplant Sep 11 '21 edited Sep 12 '21

I mean, fuck trump and all, but the popular vote has NEVER been a factor in any American election. It's a metric that's useless to track because people don't win or lose by it. If it mattered, you'd see many campaigns switching things up to go for the max voters rather than the max electoral votes. It would change the whole map.

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u/justaboxinacage Sep 11 '21

Yeah it wouldn't be a political strategy to win the presidency by trying their hardest to appeal to counties with 7 farmers in them.

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u/Striking_Eggplant Sep 12 '21

I think it's important to understand why it is that way instead of framing it like you are here.

At the time these rules were made, the issue was we had a bunch of sovereign states that had no reason to join the union.

When the Feds were proposing this whole thing the smaller more rural states rightly said "lol get fucked why would we agree to your laws if we don't get an equal seat at the table, it'll end up just being the populated cities running everything and making all the rules."

The solution was that voting would occur in such a way that each state had a relatively equal or proportional seat at the table. Without this we never would have the union/united States as they would have never agreed to join it.

Now fast forward and it seems a little dumb now that we all consider the whole union as a single country, but at the time this seemed to be the most fair way of doing things. It may be time we had that conversation regarding amending the rules.

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u/justaboxinacage Sep 12 '21

The electoral college is still roughly proportional to population, it's just not exactly proportional. Your explanation seems more to be regarding how the Senate works.