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Electoral College Elects Donald Trump As President (nbcnews.com)
mi writes: The drama is over, Donald J. Trump passed the 270 electoral votes necessary to become President. A few electors dissented, resulting in their prompt dismissal and replacement per their state's laws. Ironically, more dissenters turned on Clinton than on Trump... The sky may not be falling yet, but the Earth is already in peril.
We sort of do, just not on national popular vote. We elect them, in general, based on state popular votes. While states are technically allowed to choose their electors any way they want, most choose the group affiliated with the ticket that won their state popular vote (apart from Maine and Nebraska who partition the votes). While they could if they wanted to, none of the states do crazy things like choosing electors based on a mouse race or paintball fight or any such nonsense. Barring some drastic change in the future, the way the majority of your state votes is the way your electors vote for the most part.
California!? What do they know? Oh yeah, how to build a economic powerhouse that respects cultural diversity.
Not exactly. The fact that several high value tech companies decided to locate somewhere over there has more to do with mundane things (like weather and geography) than any political factors. If New England was one state instead of several, you'd see basically the same landmass only with a bigger economy.
Clinton didn't win the popular vote. She won a plurality of the popular vote - 48.06%. Not a majority.
Mathematically, there is no perfectly fair election system. They're all flawed, and in certain circumstances can yield a result which is contrary to a reasonable definition of "fair". You have to pick a system which you think will be least likely to have an unfair outcome, and you just live with it if you lose the roll of the dice and the unfair outcome happens.
An instant-runoff system is generally regarded as fairer than a pluralty system, and is already used in many countries. In an instant run-off system, people vote a ranked preference for the candidates. Then you eliminate the lowest vote-getters until you're left with just two candidates. That way the winner has to get a majority.
If we'd used an instant run-off system, the Green party identifies as liberal, but the other three major third parties - Libertarian, Independent, and Constitution - all identify as conservative. If you add up the popular vote along those lines, then liberals (Democrat + Green) would've gotten 49.12% of the popular vote. Conservatives (Republican + Libertarian + Independent + Constitution) would've gotten 49.92% of the popular vote. 0.96% voted for other candidates, but I think it's safe to say conservatives probably could've gotten at least 0.09% of that, putting them over 50% of the votes cast this election.
Like it or not, Trump is probably the correct winner for this election - both in terms of Electoral College, and in terms of majority of popular votes.
Seriously, I shouldn't bother posting in political threads. The butt hurt is so strong, I only ever get modded down, despite not trying to troll, but simply not repeating the same line as everyone else. But I'm a glutton for punishment, so I'll bite, again.
The "whole point" of the electoral college is not to block a winner that the college doesn't like. The main effect has always been to elevate the voice of lower population centers. It was clear, even at the start of the country, that more rural areas of the country, while being lower in population, need to have a way to have their voice heard, and their interests protected. The electoral college provides votes for states based on population, but gives a larger voice to the smaller population states. While it is true that states like Florida, California, and New York have very large populations and therefore more electoral votes, the voice of those states alone cannot dictate the course of the country.
But whatever... I'm sure I'm just an ignorant troll, so mod me down accordingly.
Or one could say the point of the electoral college is that sometimes the popular vote is a bad choice.
No, the point of the electoral college is that the President is president of the united states and needs to have the interests of ALL the states in mind, not just the few most populous ones. "Bad choice" is highly subjective; the result of the election is a quantitative measure.
It was to have a mechanism to block a bad popular candidate
An it worked perfectly. Hillary was a bad popular choice.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Trump is a dangerous imbecile
THAT thinking right there is the reason you lost the election. You thought he was a imbecile but he clearly isn't. He owns a very large business empire and had a successful tv series. These are are far from the acts of a 'imbecile." An now he will be the next president of the United States
Trump is many things but a imbecile he is not.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Even in cities with several ethnic groups the are all in clusters, like oil drops in water.
You mentioned Silicon Valley in the 1980's. That's not Silicon Valley today. I live in what used to be a predominately white apartment complex outside of downtown San Jose. Except for the folks in the leasing office, I'm the only white person in this complex. When I get on the bus, I'm usually the only white person on board and a half-dozen languages other than English is being spoken at any time. When I go to work in Palo Alto, I'm the only white person in the IT department.
California [...] the racial war zone it actually is.
As we say in California: "What are you smoking and where can I get some?"
I so look forward to the day if the National Popular Vote legislation gets enacted... of a Republican winning the popular vote and all those Democrats having to vote for the Republican....
It would be almost assured that every one of the Democrat electors forced to change their vote by that law would not do so because....well its all really about Democrats always winning.
Collectively Democrats have been an absolute embarrassment this election. They are whiny sniveling, pretentious, condescending, toddlers. They should be ashamed to call themselves a political party. They already were ashamed to call themselves Americans...and that is why they lost...
Before the Republicans went absolutely insane, "Blue" states voted for Republican presidential candidates plenty of times.
The Republicans are the ones desperately trying to hang-on to power. They're the ones passing all those voter ID laws, which courts keep striking down. They're the former home of Jim Crow laws. They're the ones gerrymandering voting districts, which is the only reason the GOP is able to keep their House numbers up, even though the population is mostly Republican. It's a Republican governor and senate in North Carolina stripping the powers of the incoming Democratic governor. Lets be clear which party the facts show are desperately trying to corrupt the democratic process to hang on to power...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If you ride the bus, you probably don't make as much as those who drive their car to work, which means you live with the poorer demographic.
I pay $140 per month to ride the express bus to Palo Alto (one hour each way) to avoid taking the local buses (two hours each way) and driving on the freeway (20 minutes in the morning, 45 to 90 minutes in the evening). I'm sure my fellow passengers who work at Tesla, SAP, vmWare, Google, HP, Lockheed and Stanford will get a kick out of being considered a "poor demographic" in Silicon Valley.
How many people that live in actual houses there are non-white or non-asian?
One of the Indian engineers who worked at HP complained about owning a five-year-old condo with 20-foot-tall ceilings.
[...] and poor black people tend to like run-down apartments [...]
My 50-year-old apartment complex looked like 1960's housing project when I first moved in nearly 12 years ago. After four different corporate owners in recent years, these "luxury" apartments with new paint and appliances are going for the same monthly rate as a new luxury apartment complex down the street.
No, you can't conclusively say that if it was by popular vote Clinton would have won. All you can say is that if you run an electoral race, Clinton had more popular votes. If you ran a popular race, the voting outcomes could be very different than they were. You can't change the rules of a game and assume the players would make the same moves... It's like saying that if the queen was the piece that determined victory in chess you would have won against that grand master who sacrificed his queen. Well not really, you just don't want to admit you lost...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?