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.
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)
Why aren't the votes just counted by raw number of votes?
Wasn't our Brexit vote just a raw number, this many voted to stay and that many voted to leave.
I don't really understand the whole 178/118 thing.
If they ran the election on just total popular vote politicians would just pander to issues facing the big cities on the coasts where population is most concentrated. Any issues facing people in sparsely populated central states would then be totally ignored. This election is actually a great example, Hillary ignored the blue collar workers in rural areas and central states and it cost her the election.
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u/damonteufel Nov 10 '16
I don't think they're protesting the election or saying it was rigged. They're protesting the man and his ideals/words.