The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #160912   Message #3819703
Posted By: Steve Shaw
10-Nov-16 - 07:31 PM
Thread Name: BS: The election results show
Subject: RE: BS: The election results show
Well it's interesting that Clinton pipped Trump in terms of the overall vote, but the US is not quite a single amorphous entity but a federation of many smaller entities. If you want the people to feel that they are stakeholders in the democracy, you have to do slightly better than saying to them that they have one vote in a population of 300 million once every four years. On the surface, the electoral college system seems like a pretty good crack at fairness. But where, to me anyway, it breaks down is in the all-or-nothing lottery of the final allocation of representatives. If Florida has 29, and Trump squeaks in by a few tens of thousands of votes out of 20 million, then it seems to me that he should get 15 and Clinton 14. Etcetera, repeated across the nation. But you give him the whole lot. Why is that? Mind you, when you look at our system...