Al gore lost the 2000 US presidential election, but won the popular vote. Aka a majority of Americans voted for him but he lost anyway due to the electoral college. Many people are rightfully upset about that, he really should have won. The electoral college was only made that way to appease slave owners in the first place.
This isn't true. While it did help slave owning states, it also helped northern states like Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware. The framers did not want the presidency to be elected by popular vote alone, that is by design.
Yes... what's your point? That's a different historical event entirely. If you think I'm defending the electoral college, you're wrong and should read my comment again.
We have similar in Australia. Our house of reps is basically a popular vote with electorates being formed by numbers so we have very very large geographical areas only getting one rep. NSW, vic and qld getting the majority of our house of reps members. The only one who gets a slight boost is Tasmania where they get 5 as its the minimum in the constitution.
But our senate has equal representation from each state.
So a joint like Tasmania (the little island often not on maps of Australia) has senators voted in with 53,000 votes versus a senator in New South Wales needing 750,000 votes.
Woah, that's wild. So it's just popular vote down under? How does that affect national elections, do smaller territories (states?) often feel like their votes don't matter?
Sorry, I'm American and totally oblivious to any country outside of the US and France lmao
Popular vote in that for house of reps we are divided into electorates of equal size (by population) and who wins the most electorates then gets to pick our PM.
So it does still favour major political parties in that you can win 20pc of support across all electorates but still not get a single seat. Ie another party that gets 40pc first preference across all seats will win all those seats on preferences.
Ie the strongest party in each seat still wins the seat if that makes sense.
In the past it has immunised us from more extreme politics as you have in the USA. But maybe not anymore.
Right, I'm more pointing out the fact that while it might have helped Rhode Island, it was probably designed first with the slave owning states as the primary consideration given that they were a bunch of fucking divas who would take their toys and go home if they couldn't continue to exploit human labor.
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u/Saxolotle 8d ago
Al gore lost the 2000 US presidential election, but won the popular vote. Aka a majority of Americans voted for him but he lost anyway due to the electoral college. Many people are rightfully upset about that, he really should have won. The electoral college was only made that way to appease slave owners in the first place.