"cut out the votes Clinton got in California and Trump has more of the popular vote". California does have the reputation of being democrat central and going blue every time.
Well sure, this is technically true. But you might as well say cut out votes trump got in Texas and Clinton wins the electoral collage.
At one point Clinton's lead in California was larger than her total lead. So, you could say that Trump won the popular vote everywhere except California. Not that that means anything any more than "Clinton Won the Popular Vote" is a statement with meaning.
On the other hand, if Trump had not won Texas, neither candidate would have had 270 votes, so neither candidate would have won the electoral college.
Trump won because according to the rules he won.
The rules are pretty standard for a federation : each members got a share of the vote, proportional but not directly proportional to their population.
For all the ridicule you're giving to the argument "the election were rigged we won the popular vote" you aren't behaving any better by insisting that the election "ought to be proportional" for no reasons.
The only reason it isn't proportional is because in 18th-century southerners would have torn the country apart if they didn't get to use their slaves as political pawns even as they stole their lives. The electoral college is a vestige of that, and nothing more.
No, the proportional vs static representation thing was a compromise between large states (New York & Virginia) and small states (Rhode Island and Delaware). You are improperly conflating it with the 3/5ths compromise where for both taxation and representation only 60% of the enslaved population was counted.
The electoral college is irrelevant since it's basically a number of vote for each states.
The fact that the number of vote each state has doesn't directly matches the population of the state is normal.
In Europe, the number of representative you get isn't proportional to the population of each countries either. That's a pretty obvious step you have to take if you don't want the most populous members of the union lording too much over the smaller ones.
EU is made up of nations full of different, paranoid people. USA is made up of states full of same people, trusting people
You can get away with fairer systems in USA
Considering how much distrust there is between California and Iowa, or Maryland and Utah, I don't think that "fairer" systems would fly here. Also, the general population in the US during the 1780s was incredibly paranoid. Hence the bill of rights. Even more so, hence the revolutionary war. When the constitution was first proposed, the various states might as well have been different countries. One of the key differences between the US and the EU is that the US constitution gives all power over immigration and naturalization to the federal government whereas the EU leaves that power to the various member states. So, in the US, anyone who is a citizen of any state becomes a citizen of a different state when they change their residence.
Author
Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1417858 times)