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Ending the US Electoral College

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

quintessence writes:

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 "The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it needs to change immediately.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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @10:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @10:18PM (#428429)

    All absentee ballots are counted. [vote.org] (Although I've seen claims elsewhere that this varies by state.) At least by December. I was surprised to learn that they do in fact lean Republican (despite early voting leaning Democratic), but multiple sites do agree with that. Of course, it's difficult to measure how discouraged voters would vote; really with ~50% turnout, the election is a pretty poor measurement of what most Americans want.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @09:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @09:06AM (#428755)

    "As of Saturday, projections from the United States Elections Project show that there were 231,556,622 Americans eligible to vote, but 134,457,600 voted. That means that 42.1 percent didn't vote, while 58.1 percent did. The voter turnout will likely increase as the popular vote continues to be counted.Nov 10, 2016"

    2016 (58.1%) was the highest voter turnout since 1968. And in 1968, you had Vietnam war protests going on. Higher percentage of the population turned out to vote than when Obama first got elected.

    And although only 58.1% of the population voting is paltry, putting that into perspective makes a big difference.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections [wikipedia.org]