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Presidential election popular vote tallies lined up against “did not vote” (mbin.grits.dev)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Because we have this stupid thing called the electoral college. Basically, each state has a certain number of votes, based (roughly) on population (its a whole other issue), and the states' votes are cast for whoever won the most votes within their state (barring rogue electors and the few states that use proportional representation for votes.) Theres a total of 538 votes, and all that matters is winning more than half of them. This has made the winner of the popular vote lose the election 5 times (though in 1824, it went to the house of representatives for a final decision because no one had a majority.)

To summarize: not a dumb question, VERY dumb answer.

[–] Michal 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's funny that even even if the weight was distributed equally by population (it isn't), it's not based on number of people voted. so, in theory if only one person votes, their vote still has the same weight as the whole state.

That's my understanding anyway.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

True.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Also to clarify further, the founding fathers created the EC specifically to override the popular vote, because they were afraid that land owning men might be too poorly educated to actually make decisions about our "democracy."

Really let that sink in. They probably would have opposed the expansion of voting rights to anybody.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What a weird system! Is there a specific reason why the US decided to do elections this way instead of just using the normal tallied vote count? This just adds a huge layer of complexity to the elections - you'd think they'd want to keep it as transparent and simple as possible.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

The copout answer is "Back in the day it made it easier to do federal elections since the US is so big" afaik

Tho really it's just hard to change, the democrats are lazy/don't wanna rock the boat, and the republicans benefit from it and are also evil