CGP Grey
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2015–2020
6:31 · 8.3M views · Nov 7, 2011
A short CGP Grey animation showing how the US electoral college lets a candidate win the presidency with as little as about 22 percent of the popular vote. It lays out the arithmetic of winning states by narrow margins.
Linked in electoral-system discussions as a quick, clear argument against the electoral college.
6 comments from Hacker News
> It's been around for a couple of hundred years so it can't be that terrible. Heh. If only everything that is old was good. The all-or-nothing electoral college system: 1. Removes power from all people, because they vote for electors not for the actual candidates. 2. Removes representation of people in both swing and predetermined states, because they don't get represented by their elector (all electors have to vote for the same party, not according to the fraction of their state that voted for party X). However, in a weird twist, not all states require that electors vote for the candidate the state told them to vote for -- meaning that they have insane amounts of power. 3. The way electors are assigned actually means that small states have more voting power than large states -- meaning that you can effectively become president if you can get the right 22% of the USA to vote for you. Oh, and please note that the electoral college system came about because the founding fathers thought you (the commonman) was too dumb to understand how voting should work. So they gave the power of voting to electors. Here's some videos on the topic: * [LINK] * [LINK] * this video
>The electoral college is a form of protection for the naturally less densely populated agrarian states against the densely populated urban ones. This is commonly repeated, but it's BS. What "protection" does the electoral college give to Kansas, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, or Montana? Presidential candidates don't pay any attention to any of those "less densely populated agrarian states". In addition, dense states like NJ, NY, CT, and Mass don't get attention from candidates. California doesn't get any attention either, so what gives? The states that get the attention are the swing states with the highest number of electoral votes, simply because the electoral college incentivizes trying to swing a small number of voters in such states. Watch some of these videos from CGP Grey for more info: this video
Some reasons why you shouldn't anymore (CGP Grey): [LINK] this video Even in the UK, where the concept originates, a lot of people view it as a bad idea. The issue right now is that nobody can agree what to change it to, since people gravitate towards the voting system that helps them in the next election cycle (and the big two want it to remain a two-party system).
>If presidential elections were just driven by popular vote candidates would only campaign in the top population centers. Entire regions of the country would be ignored. This is definitely 100% false; this goes against the mathematical population distribution of the United States. The top 100 biggest cities in the United States combined only make up less than 20% of the population. But even if it were true, it's not any different than the current status quo where candidates simply only campaign in "swing states," ignoring the vast majority of the rest of the Unites States. In fact, it would be better, because more Americans live in population centers than they do swing states. this video The other problems: Many people who live in solidly blue or solidly red states don't even bother voting for president - they know their vote doesn't matter. I know this because I've literally heard people say it. This it not even considering electoral college also entirely ignores 4 million Americans because they live in territories, not states.
That indeed is the problem, not the system itself. (if you want to continue with the cheap sarcasm) I see this pattern so many times in the US, blaming parties involved instead of the original wrongdoers (e.g. "Facebook and Google are so evil", yet the NSA and USG are out of the argument completely). That even a fairly educated crowd such as the one on HN falls for these cheap tactics is a great proof that in fact this technique works great for manipulating masses of people. (bonus example: the broken bipartisan and electoral college systems – all the talk is about how horrible Hillary and Trump are, instead of maybe taking steps to fixing the system itself | bonus video this video )