I know you are bombarded with election posts right now, but disregarding who won or loss, I want to talk about how in this election the system once again failed. I have made a post in the past talking about how I believe we need to change the voting system so you can look at that if you want, but in this post I want to focus on a few elements that sadly were not unique to just this election and analyze some of the data we saw last night.
Despite electoral votes having a difference of 51 electoral votes in favor of Trump, this election was close, very close. Hillary won the popular vote meaning more Americans actually voted for her, but she lost the electoral votes by such a tiny margin. If we look at some of the states with more electoral votes that are often battleground states we can see the votes were so close that either side could have won them. Let’s take Florida Pennsylvania and Michigan, three states where Trump won by around 1% more people. If just those three states had a tiny fraction more of democratic voters, Hillary would have won. Those three were not the only states that were extremely close, it seems like many states that were predicted to be a sure thing for Hillary ended up going republican. In the end Trump won the electoral vote , but lost the popular vote, which many ask how it is even possible.
This is actually not the first time this has happened and in fact, now 7% of all US elections have ended up this way, showing a relatively large amount of inefficiencies when it comes to representing actual citizens. It is possible to win the popular vote and lose the actual election because when you cast your vote you are casting it for an elector not the actual president himself. While the majority of the time the electors who get your vote will vote what the population wants, sometimes that doesn’t happen as we saw in Maine last night. This was a system put in place because the founding fathers really did not trust the general population to vote so gave the electorates the power instead. However it is a system that is no longer needed in this day in age. Many argue that the outcome should be solely based on the popular vote and honestly I somewhat agree, but I personally would suggest another method.
Rather than counting state electoral votes I would add more electorates and distribute them amongst specific counties scaled to the population like we currently do with states. Rather than one state going one way completely, the amount of electoral power within the county in the state can vote how their citizens vote. Take in mind we don’t need to use integers either, for example a county could have .245 electoral votes. That way the entire state would feel much more represented as a whole. This is just a basic change, that will still have problems though, what I think we really need to do like I talked about in my other post is change the entire voting system.
Ranked or preferential voting as it is sometimes called is my favorite, where you rank the candidates from 1 to 3 on a ballot. The problem with this is there leaves a large amount of human error because the votes themselves are hard to count and calculate. However, in the future if we did something like voting on a blockchain or process them solely through computers on every state. The calculation can be done itself almost instantly. Regardless of if your candidate won or didn’t win in this election, the system needs to be fixed, because next time the opposite could happen. The whole point of democracy is to represent the desires of our voting population so to have someone win the popular vote and lose the electoral one is inefficient to say the least.
-Calaber24p