Monday, November 14, 2016

A quick note about the absurdity of the Electoral College


A migration of less than two percent of Clinton voters to the Midwest would have won her the race


Here is a quick little note about the absurdity of the Electoral College.

If just 1.8 percent of Hillary Clinton voters from the state of California -- less than one in every fifty voters who cast a ballot in her favor -- had instead moved to one of three states just thirty days earlier, we could have seen a Clinton victory over Donald Trump.

Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes would have required an additional 27,000 votes from California in her favor. Michigan would have required an additional 12,000 votes. And in Pennsylvania, Clinton would have needed 68,000 of those additional California votes votes to win.

That’s 110,000 ballots that Clinton actually had, but that she needed in three different states. Had the voters in California -- again, just 1.8 percent of the total she won there -- lived in those three states instead, she would have won the presidency.

But simply because of geographical state borders, which make no distinction from one U.S. citizen to another in any other facet of our government, we give votes from different states higher or lower weights. We reward states for having smaller populations with more importance, despite Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan citizens being equal to California citizens in every other way imaginable.

And that’s an absurd thing to do, in what’s supposed to be the world’s example of how a democracy should be. Each citizen's vote should carry the same weight as every other. The Electoral College needs to be removed -- a point agreed upon by the president-elect himself.

Total state counts and 1.8 percent figure based off of final results found here, as of 11/14/2016

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