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posted by janrinok on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-is-your-vote-worth? dept.

Senator Boxer Introduces Bill to Eliminate Electoral College

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Senator-Boxer-to-Introduce-Bill-to-Eliminate-Electoral-College--401314945.html

"This is the only office in the land where you can get more votes and still lose the presidency," Boxer said in a statement. "The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it needs to change immediately. Every American should be guaranteed that their vote counts."

[...] "When all the ballots are counted, Hillary Clinton will have won the popular vote by a margin that could exceed two million votes, and she is on track to have received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history except Barack Obama," Boxer said.

Trump will be the fifth president in U.S. history to win the election despite losing the popular vote. George W. Bush won the most recent such election, in 2000.

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3wLQz-LgrM


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by fritsd on Thursday November 17 2016, @09:57PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Thursday November 17 2016, @09:57PM (#428413) Journal

    About point 3. Swing states and point 4. Big states in that article:

    What you could do, is apply a weighing factor to the proportional vote result of each state.

    Something like a inverse square root(population) weight; this way, the smallest states get a disproportionally large effect on the vote, and the largest states a disproportionally small effect, but the weight of each state is still sorted according to their population.
    The EU parliament seat distribution [wikipedia.org] is done similar to this way I think. Germany has the most seats and Malta the least, but each Maltese voter weighs in at something like 10x a German voter.

    The important result of this would be, that if the Green party has a uniformly distributed 1.5% of the votes in each state, then they also get 1.5% of the seats in parliament. Each party, small or large, is respected (there's a cut-off threshold at the low end though).
    Then sort the parties from small to large, distribute the seats of the smallest parties first amongst those states where they had the largest % vote, then the next smallest, etc.
    So the voice of a non-centrist polity is heard!

    Also, swing states no longer exist. *ALL* states are suddenly important. The votes of people in all states count, but the least populous states the most.
    Also, the ridiculous gerrymandering no longer exists.

    About the arguments that the Electoral College reduces uncertainty: You're voting for the leadership of the richest, most powerful country on Earth. You don't need to know the result straight away. A few more days bickering doesn't matter. Just buy more popcorn.

    I did not understand paragraph 2 Everyone's President. You already have States; do you have Regions too? That's new to me. Just do it per Region then instead of per State.

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