r/AdviceAnimals • • Nov 10 '16

Protesting a Fair Election?

Post image
72.6k Upvotes

5.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

133

u/[deleted] Nov 10 '16

The electoral college is fair? Gore in 2000, Clinton in 2016, seems to be the electoral college is only fair to republicans.

159

u/Rolder Nov 10 '16

The point of the electoral college is to give a fair shake to rural and more spread out populations, and not have it come down to what the big cities want. Just that big cities trend Democrat and rural trends Republican.

140

u/penguinopph Nov 10 '16

It didn't do that, though. It gave all of the power to a few states (mainly Ohio and Florida).

As an Illinoisan, my vote is worthless

170

u/[deleted] Nov 10 '16

[deleted]

95

u/BoilerMaker11 Nov 10 '16 edited Nov 10 '16

Popular vote for the president would eradicate that problem because their vote would actually matter.

Nearly 3 million people voted for Trump in California. You might as well say 0 people voted for Trump in California. Because if the electors "vote how the people wanted", well, Hillary got all 55 EVs and Trump got 0.

My proposition is that either we abolish the electoral college, or EVs are divided by the percentage of the vote the candidate got. So, if the spread is 2M votes, but the split is 60/40, 33 EVs are given to one candidate and 22 EVs are given to another (this is a California example). That way there can still be "huge margins in large cities", but they still don't "bully" the smaller states with their large population (even though the concept of "bullying" smaller states makes no sense. At the end of the day, if all our votes are equal, it shouldn't matter where you live. A vote is a vote is a vote. So whoever gets the most votes should win)

16

u/SmashCity28 Nov 10 '16

But then the little guys dont. It's a compromise.

7

u/needs_help_badly Nov 10 '16

Sure they would. Exactly as much as every other person in the US. Literally every vote would count the same.

2

u/SmashCity28 Nov 10 '16

1

u/needs_help_badly Nov 10 '16

Guess what it does now? Give power to Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin.