Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

No, that's not just as arbitrary. Please don't make bad-faith arguments.

The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate.

The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office, and that's literally it. It just tells us who did better at influencing voters in a handful of states that actually matter in the idiotic electoral college system, putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters. That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has.

In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did. It wasn't a blowout, he has no mandate. And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote. If candidates had to campaign in every state, to get every voter out that they can to support them, the final results would probably not look the same as what we go.

View on HN

>putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters

Are you referring to the final 538 electors who actually make the final vote? Most of them are bound to vote based on who their state voted for. Aside from some rare exceptions (like that WA elector that voted for Chief Spotted Eagle in 2016 as some sort of weird protest).

Or are you trying to claim that only swing voters in swing states are responsible for the outcome of the election? Because that's a fallacy I've seen a lot of people make recently that I'm just going to start calling "the tiebreaker fallacy". If you have a panel of 101 voters where 50 people vote one way, 50 vote the other way, and one person is the tiebreaker, you can not make the claim that only the tiebreaker's vote counts. All 101 voters were part of the process. At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.

> At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.

This is where your analogy is getting tripped up. The EV outcome for the vast majority of states is certain. California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any possible reality. Louisiana's EVs were never going to go for Harris. These states cannot "change their votes."

If the makeup of the 50-50 split voters in your scenario is fixed and known with certainty ahead of the election, then it really is the case that only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1 person's vote.

This is how the EC works. The EV outcomes for most states are fixed and known ahead of time. The only votes that matter for the presidential election are those in the ~7 or so states that we call "swing states," because the outcome of the election in the other ~43 states is known with certainty ahead of time.

Note: I'm using "fixed" here to mean "unchangeable," not something like "rigged".

>The EV outcome for the vast majority of states is known ahead of time.

There's a world of difference between being predicatively partisan and not being able to vote at all.

>only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1 person's vote

No, its actually that 50 people have to live with 51 people's votes. That one person is not voting alone. Your post is the perfect example of the tiebreaker fallacy.

This seems like a distinction without a difference. It is still the case that the only people influencing the election outcome are the voters in the swing states. The outcome will always be "40% + swing-states" versus "40% + other-swing-states." If you're in one of those 40%s, your vote does not matter to the result, because your state's result is already determined. This is unlike your analogy, which supposes that no votes are fixed.

> California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any possible reality.

California was reliably Republican in the 80s, so no, you can't really say that for certain.

All states shifted to the right in this election. Illinois for example has been reliably Democrat, but if it shifts as much in the next election as it did in this past one, it would become a swing state.

He absolutely has a mandate. You don't have to have a "blowout" to have a mandate. He has several mandates actually.

> The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate.

This would only be true if the popular vote result would be entirely unchanged if the election system was changed to be based on popular vote. And the popular vote would almost definitely have been different if the election results were based on popular vote, so it's then not a measure of the level of support for the candidate.

> The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office

Why is it unfortunate?

> That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has.

Can you cite any evidence that the popular vote is a better indication of the candidate's popular support than the electoral college?

> In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did.

Again this would only be true if the popular vote would be unaffected if the election was based on popular vote, which is a false assumption.

> he has no mandate.

Please cite.

> And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote.

This seems to contradict everything else you wrote as your reasoning is only valid if you work under the assumption that the popular vote would not have changed at all if the system was based on the popular vote.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com