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Comment by applecore | Hacker News Reader

Politicians know the electoral college decides the election. If the candidates had been campaigning for the popular vote, presumably Trump would campaign harder for more votes in large states like California and New York.

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It's about the people, not the politicians. The fact that campaign strategy matters more than campaign platform is a huge weakness in the current system.

It's like that by design. Representative democracy is intended to limit the ability of the majority to shoehorn the minority -- in this case the coastal population centers vs. the rest of the country.

>Representative democracy is intended to limit the ability of the majority to shoehorn the minority

That is a benefit of certain aspects of our political system, but not the electoral college. The electoral college only serves to introduce bizarre volatility into the elections.

This is a nice sound bite (kind of), but doesn't bear out the actual facts. The EC was designed specifically to ensure that States (in the big-S, Constitutional meaning) decide the President, not the people.

That's true, but doesn't really contradict what I said.

It directly contradicts the last line of your statement. The EC does not exist "to introduce bizarre volatility"

Allowing states to control the elections is a mean not an end. Given that the vote of states are determined by a popular vote within the state, the only end that is accomplished by the EC is introducing volatility.

No it's not, it's like that as an artifact of what it used to be (that the President was elected by electors, not by the people).

Right, and it was up to the state to decide how the electors were elected. The intended goal is the same -- a midpoint between State-level republicanism and populist democracy.

Possible. But so would've Clinton.

Clinton couldn't gain as much support because she already has most of the likely voters, and a lot of Republicans think, why bother, she's a lock for the electoral votes.

Whatever, with no data to back up your claim this is just hot air. Maybe she would've gotten more support from people that now decided to vote third party or didn't bother to vote at all. You can basically rationalize every outcome outcome if you don't have to rely on data.

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