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I'm not sure why people bring up the popular vote as if it means something. The popular vote was never intended to decide presidential elections.


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> I'm not sure why people bring up the popular vote as if it means something.

Because it clearly shows the president is not picked by the people but through an abstraction that steals voting power from some and gives it to others.

> The popular vote was never intended to decide presidential elections.

And black people counted as 3/5th, women couldn’t vote, black people couldn’t vote, the entire bill of rights, and more were “never intended”. That’s such a silly argument.


> Because it clearly shows the president is not picked by the people but through an abstraction that steals voting power from some and gives it to others.

That "abstraction" is known as "degressive proportionality" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degressive_proportionality], which is also used by the EU to apportion seats in the European Parliament. The US's system aims to make sure that the President is elected by a broad base of voters across disparate states, the same way the EU elects its Chief Executive (today that's Ursula von der Leyen) in a manner that dilutes the power of highly populated Member States. You generally use counter-majoritarian institutions like equal representation and/or degressive proportionality if what you're trying to build is a Federal union, and not a unitary state. The United States is not and has never been a unitary state. The individual States are unitary in nature; it's impossible to elect the Governor of a State without winning the popular vote, in that State.

> And black people counted as 3/5th, women couldn’t vote, black people couldn’t vote, the entire bill of rights, and more were “never intended”. That’s such a silly argument.

This is a non-sequitur. The counter-majoritarian institutions of the Federal government aren't unique to the US (see: Australia's Senate, Switzerland's Council of States, Argentina's Senate, Mexico's Senate, the EU), and is certainly unrelated to the very real evils of slavery or disenfranchisement of Black people. It's just a way to organize large heterogeneous polities. The same way that it doesn't make sense to invalidate the Constitution's right to a free/fair trial just because it also happened to include some unrelated bad things, so too is slavery entirely irrelevant to the question of whether the US ought to be a Federal union. The core question at hand is: should the US be a unitary country or should it be a Federal country. As long as it's a Federal country (i.e. the status quo), you will have counter-majoritarian institutions at the Federal level.

Even in Canada, the Prime Minister's party won fewer votes than the rival party, but still won more seats in Parliament. In 2019(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Canadian_federal_election) the Liberal party won ~6M votes and won 157 seats in Parliament, while the Conservative Party won ~6.2M votes but only won 121 seats. The same thing happened in 2021 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_federal_election... ~5.5M votes to 160 seats vs ~5.7M votes to 119 seats. This means that the plurality vote getter did not win the plurality of seats, and thereby did not enjoy the possibility to drive the formation of a majority coalition. The reason for this is that many of the Conservative Party's votes were clustered in specific parts of Canada, and there were diminishing returns to driving up large majorities in those clusters; you have to appeal to multiple disparate clusters. This is a feature and not a bug of Canada's Federal system, because the goal is to optimize for the breadth of voters, not just the depth of voters, especially at the Federal level where policy impacts everybody, and not just a single state/province.


In order to make the case that votes are being "stolen", you first need to make the case that popular vote is better or more just. This is a contentious point, and I think it does a lot of disservice to any real discussion to assume it.

If people want to talk in an echo chamber (or to themselves) , than by all means, they should make every assumption they want.

If you want to talk about the issue, then address the root: Should states have power beyond their proportional population in congress and presidential elections?

This is a much more interesting discussion.

For congress I say no, but I would support states allocating their electoral college to match how their state votes, like Maine or Nebraska, opposed to winner take all.


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