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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

The US constitution is working great. Democracy isn't necessarily good. If we had a national vote where 51% of the people voted to kill 49% of the people, that would be bad. More democratic institutions also have a tendency to favor hand outs to people, people vote for the policy that gives them free stuff, or rather that robs other people and enriches them.

The issue is a cultural one, where people are looking out for themselves over their country. Where politicians seek to enrich themselves, people just want to get a hand out, and lobbyists write sections of laws.

Where democracy shines is that we can leverage democracy to amend the constitution. If they think that moving to a pure popular vote or something would be better, then get that amended into the constitution, we have a process for this, just get 2/3s of states to vote for it.

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> The US constitution is working great. Democracy isn't necessarily good. If we had a national vote where 51% of the people voted to kill 49% of the people, that would be bad.

"Democracy is bad because majorities can vote for bad things" is hardly a meaningful argument on its own. How is the current system of minority rule via electors better? If we had an electoral vote where 22% of the people voted to kill 78% of the people[1], would that be better?

1. The current apportionment of electors is such that you can achieve 270 electoral votes with states accounting for roughly 43% of the population. Since nearly all states grant all electors to the candidate winning the popular vote within themselves, you only need roughly 22% of the overall US population to elect a president.

22% is unlikely. The electoral college, the senate, the house, the state legiatures for constitutional ammendments. These are multiple layers that are meant to act as a check against a popular mob in a heat of passion.

Trump got 77,302,580 votes. US population is slightly over 340,000,000. That's at best 22.7% of the US population voted for Trump.

Who cares what the non voters say. They didnt vote! They voted for “whatever happens is fine by me”. Trump received over 50% of the vote.

Person A: A president can be elected with roughly 22% of the population voting for him or her.

Person B: That's unlikely.

A: It just happened in the most recent election.

B: Who cares!

Classic. Just absolutely classic.

If 3 people vote and 1 million are eligible but dont vote. Then 2 people vote for A and 1 person votes for B. A wins with 66% of the vote not .000000001% of the vote. Effectively those million people surender their votes to the other 3, or even just to the winners. They dont count anymore, they chose to not be counted when they chose not to participate. Whether those votes effectively disapear, or go to the winner or are divided based on the results, it doesn matter. If youre counting non voters you mignt as well get really pedantic and say that only the president, house and senate really get votes on a law so its .000000001% that vote on anything, but we dont because we known those votes represent the will of the people.

The person to whom you were responding very explicitly said "roughly 22% of the overall US population" [emphasis added].

But double down, dog. That's absolutely classic, too.

Then they are misusing the 22% argument. The 22% to win argument, is a specific arrangement of votes that is an argument against the electoral college. In that if someone were to merely win a the electoral college with 51% of the votes in each states but receive 0% of the votes in all other states, they could still win the presidency. So it is an extreme case of a president winning the electoral college despite a landslide crushing defeat in the popular vote. It is not about counting all non-voters as having been votes for the opponent.

They’re not misusing it. You are arguing things in your head instead of reading what is written. That you double down on it, when wrong, shows why you make up arguments with yourself.

Simply read what is written before making false claims against what you misread. Stubborn ignorance is still ignorance.

> If we had a national vote where 51% of the people voted to kill 49% of the people, that would be bad.

How is it different from the majority of electoral votes supporting killing everyone in, I don't know, let's pick a random state, Minnesota.

>people just want to get a hand out

They want to work and America can't even promote jobs to Americans. Get out of here blaming the people for the ransacking of government.

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