chalkdust
ular p o p t s a le e h t e b o t How American president Brian Copeland, CC BY 2.0
Francisco Berkemeier
S
ome people say the US presidential election system is unfair, since one candidate can win the popular voteβmeaning there are more people voting for that candidate than for other candidatesβbut still fail to win the election. This means that the difference between the number of votes for each candidate is irrelevant to the election outcome, in the sense that if you didnβt count the extra votes, the result would be the same. This is the result of how the electoral system is designed: the presidency is not determined by the popular vote, but by a system called the electoral college which distributes 538 electoral college votes among the 50 states and DC. A stateβs electoral votes are equal to the number of representatives and senators the state has in congress. House seats are apportioned based on population and so are representative of a stateβs population, but then the extra two Senate seats per state give smaller states more power in an election. The electoral college is supposed to Martin Falbisoner, CC BY-SA 3.0 Electoral college votes correspond to seats in guarantee that populous states canβt dominate Congress, plus three additional votes for DC. an election, but it also sets up a disparity in representation by misrepresenting every state. As a result, it has happened five times since the founding of the republic that a president has won an election without winning the popular vote. Let me invite you to a thought experiment on the implications of such a system in an extreme scenario. chalkdustmagazine.com
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