2016 POTUS Election Thread

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L.T. Fan

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The Electoral College was meant to keep unqualified dipshits like Trump from becoming president in case the population had a collective brain fart like this year.

Originally people in each state voted for electors, people they trusted to make a good choice for the office.

Somewhere along the way the electors became just a rubber stamp for the people.
Yeah God forbid that the government process rubber stamp the wishes of the people.
 

L.T. Fan

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The people picked Clinton by over 2,000,000 votes.
Yeah I posted the article showing how that probably happened. NewYork would have chosen the president but for the electoral college. The rest of the country would have been snubbed.
 

Angrymesscan

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Yeah I posted the article showing how that probably happened. NewYork would have chosen the president but for the electoral college. The rest of the country would have been snubbed.
How many people voted? Why localize those votes in NY? Why should their vote not count? Should we take votes away from Trump in Florida because Florida shouldn't choose the president?
I really don't get the logic where taking votes away from people and telling them your vote doesn't count.
 

L.T. Fan

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How many people voted? Why localize those votes in NY? Why should their vote not count? Should we take votes away from Trump in Florida because Florida shouldn't choose the president?
I really don't get the logic where taking votes away from people and telling them your vote doesn't count.
No ones votes were taken away. The votes in New York were where the popular vote totals had a 2 million lead. The rest of your hypothetical questions do not address the electoral college system. They are philosophical discussion issues.
 

L.T. Fan

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How many people voted? Why localize those votes in NY? Why should their vote not count? Should we take votes away from Trump in Florida because Florida shouldn't choose the president?
I really don't get the logic where taking votes away from people and telling them your vote doesn't count.
Look at it this way. New York has only so many electoral votes. If the popular vote determined the election then it would have had the effect of negating all the electoral votes in the rest of the entire nation. That's why one high density area shouldn't have the sway for the entire country.
 

townsend

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No ones votes were taken away. The votes in New York were where the popular vote totals had a 2 million lead. The rest of your hypothetical questions do not address the electoral college system. They are philosophical discussion issues.
Every state has about half of their votes taken away. Over 3 million people voted for Hillary in TX, over 2 million people voted for Trump in NY. PA, Florida, NC, VA, MI, WI, and NH were decided by a tiny percentage of swing voters. The rest were effectively ignored.
 

Jiggyfly

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This election is more flukey than I actually thought.


https://www.thenation.com/article/republicans-cannot-claim-a-mandate-when-hillary-clinton-has-a-two-million-vote-lead/


1. HILLARY CLINTON IS WINNING THE NATIONAL POPULAR VOTE BY MORE THAN 2 MILLION VOTES.
Two weeks after the polls closed, the Democratic nominee had 64,225,534 votes to 62,209,804 votes for Trump in the well-regarded count maintained by David Wasserman for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Those numbers put Clinton ahead by more than 2 million votes, a number roughly parallel to that seen in a count maintained by David Leip, another serious monitor of the results.

Clinton’s margin will grow significantly, as it is estimated that several million votes have yet to be counted in Western states (particularly California) that encourage high turnouts, that are meticulous about the process of counting absentee and provisional ballots, and that have strongly favored Clinton in this election. Clinton has also picked up tens of thousands of votes as local and state election officials in Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and other states continue standard reviews of vote tabulations. Wasserman and others now estimate that the Democratic ticket is likely to finish with a popular-vote advantage over Trump of roughly 2.5 million.



Clinton’s popular-vote lead is now so substantial that it can be compared not merely with losers of the presidency but with winners. The former secretary of state enjoys a popular-vote advantage that is now 15 times greater than that of John Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960. Her lead is now more than three times greater than that of Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey in 1968. It has even surpassed that of Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford in 1976.
3. TRUMP’S PERCENTAGE OF THE POPULAR VOTE IS DECLINING.
As Clinton’s advantage grows, her percentage of the popular vote increases; she’s now around 48 percent. At the same time, Trump’s percentage declines; he’s now around 46.5 percent.

The overall results remind us that the majority of Americans did not vote for Trump for president. In addition to the roughly 64.1 million votes that have been counted for Clinton so far, another 7.1 million have been counted for third-party and independent candidates. With scattered write-in votes, that means that 53.5 percent of voters chose not to cast ballots for the Republican nominee. Only 52.8 percent of Americans rejected Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.

Trump’s Electoral College advantage extends from very narrow leads in several battleground states. In Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Trump’s ahead by around 1 percent of the vote. Out of almost 3 million ballots cast in Wisconsin, for instance, Trump’s ahead by roughly 27,000 votes. In Michigan, the Republican’s roughly 9,500-vote lead (out of 4.8 million votes cast)

IT NOW APPEARS THAT MORE AMERICANS CAST BALLOTS IN 2016 THAN IN ANY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN AMERICAN HISTORY
.

Contrary to much of the initial reporting on results from around the country, the 2016 election drew a relatively high turnout by American standards. Two weeks after the polls closed, the review maintained by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report indicated that 133,475,821 votes had been counted. That’s roughly 4.5 million more than in the final 2012 count. It is also more than the final count in 2008, which was generally viewed as a high-turnout election. The US Election Project is now anticipating that the final count will be around 135,000,000.

The number of eligible voters has expanded, of course, so the actual percentage of the population casting ballots in 2016 is still below that of 2008, when turnout of eligible voters hit 62.2 percent. But this year’s turnout is likely to be comparable to 2012, when turnout was pegged at 58.6 percent. That’s still an absurdly low level of participation when compared to other countries. But the 2016 turnout rate did not collapse nationally.
7. RELATIVELY HIGH TURNOUT DID NOT TRANSLATE INTO A MANDATE FOR DONALD TRUMP OR HIS PARTY.
Talk of landslides and mandates should be put aside. This election offered a clear indication only that the United States is a divided nation. The Republican Party did not sweep the voting.

The Republican nominee lost the popular vote for the presidency. Preliminary results suggest that Democratic led in the overall popular vote by for Senate seats by almost 6 million votes. Democrats picked up two seats in the Senate, and Democrats picked up at least six seats in the House.

And this was 10 days ago the count is now 2.5 million.
 

Cowboysrock55

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"government of the people, by the people, for the people..."
Why should a state decide? I thought you were all against government intervening, why should the state do with my vote as it pleases?
I am against the Federal Government deciding things. It's why I don't favor things that take the power away from States and hand the Federal Government even more authority. If you want to go to a pure popular vote you'd have to have the Federal Government standardize the voting process and basically run the polls and counting of votes. I'm very much against that.
 

jeebs

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So your vote should count less, because you live in a big city...?
no, you just have to win a majority in the majority of places. You can't just pander to California and New York and be elected president of the whole country.

The majority of the majority of places. Without California, trump dominates the popular vote of 49 states and that is why he won. Just because California super hated the guy won't be enough to sway thing
 

townsend

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no, you just have to win a majority in the majority of places. You can't just pander to California and New York and be elected president of the whole country.

The majority of the majority of places. Without California, trump dominates the popular vote of 49 states and that is why he won. Just because California super hated the guy won't be enough to sway thing
But Trump didn't win the majority in most states, mostly he won a narrow plurality. But due to the voting power allotted by arbitrary boundaries, a few thousand votes in rural counties were deemed more important than millions of votes from cities.

This is by design. The founders of this country were elitists that didn't want to give the common person very much sway in politics. Which is why only land owning white males were originally allowed to vote. Real estate, which is to say material wealth (as well as 3/5ths of each person you own) was how you got political power. The filthy urchin living in the shit stained streets of big cities were intentionally disenfranchised.
 

skidadl

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I'm guessing that if Hillary had won in the fashion that Trump did this argument wouldn't be going on.
 

L.T. Fan

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I'm guessing that if Hillary had won in the fashion that Trump did this argument wouldn't be going on.
Right. These grapes are especially sour since it was a foregone conclussion that she was a shoo in and the election was a mere formality.
 

townsend

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I'm guessing that if Hillary had won in the fashion that Trump did this argument wouldn't be going on.
It's pretty much impossible for a republican to win that way. The only popular vote they've won since the 90s was 04.

But if the system worked as intended and favored elite whites instead of rural whites, liberals would probably be virulently defending the system.
 

L.T. Fan

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It's pretty much impossible for a republican to win that way. The only popular vote they've won since the 90s was 04.

But if the system worked as intended and favored elite whites instead of rural whites, liberals would probably be virulently defending the system.
But the system is working as intended because it was the rural citizen who the lawmakers had in mind for this system to be devised. They sought to provide for the ones who didn't have access to the same circumstances as the urban residents nor the influence the leaders of city dwellers had. It was a way of providing parody for a country rather than have dense population dictate all the political determinations.
 

townsend

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But the system is working as intended because it was the rural citizen who the lawmakers had in mind for this system to be devised. They sought to provide for the ones who didn't have access to the same circumstances as the urban residents nor the influence the leaders of city dwellers had. It was a way of providing parody for a country rather than have dense population dictate all the political determinations.
You misunderstand what the social structure was back then. When you say city dwellers, think poor people. When you think rural, think slave owners (who get 3/5ths of a vote for each slave.)

This is why new non-slave states, and the election of Lincoln triggered a civil war, because suddenly slave states were going to lose their long held advantage, due to expansion of real estate westward.
 

L.T. Fan

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You misunderstand what the social structure was back then. When you say city dwellers, think poor people. When you think rural, think slave owners (who get 3/5ths of a vote for each slave.)

This is why new non-slave states, and the election of Lincoln triggered a civil war, because suddenly slave states were going to lose their long held advantage, due to expansion of real estate westward.
The electoral college came into being long before the civil war. In the late 1700's the country didn't have a lot of plantations except in the Deep South. Most of the population was in the Northeast and there were thousands of people living in small towns as a result of the westward push and thousands more with small farms. That was the population mix at the time of the initial beginnings of the electoral college. The population makeup you are describing wasn't a societal structure until the early 1800's so the faction you are describing were not seriously in play yet. The revolutionary war was still a vivid memory to some at the time of of the beginnings of the advent of the electoral college.
 
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