Argument: Abolishing the electoral candidates will lead to candidates only visiting California, Texas, Florida...

Argument: Abolishing the electoral candidates will lead to candidates only visiting California, Texas, Florida, and New York


Math shows how wrong that is.

A candidate could visit only these for states, but they'll be abolished.

Let's use the 2016 election numbers and assume only two candidates run

137,053,916 voted, so to reach a majority you would need 68,526,959, or 50% plus one. So, how many states do you need to get there?

So, you win the top ten states
California - 8,753,788
Texas - 4,685,047
Florida - 4,617,886
New York - 4,547,562
Illinois - 3,090,729
Pennsylvania - 2,970,733
Ohio - 2,841,005
Georgia - 2,089,104
North Carolina - 2,362,632
Michigan - 2,279,543

All together that's 38,238,029 votes which doesn't look like enough :/

Let's go with the biggest 20 states then.

New Jersey - 2,148,278
Virginia - 1,981,473
Washington - 1,742,718
Arizona - 1,252,401
Massachusetts - 1,964,768
Tennessee - 1,522,925
Indiana - 1,557,286
Missouri - 1,594,511
Maryland - 1,677,928
Wisconsin - 1,405,284

All together that is 55,085,601, which is close but still not enough.

Colorado - 1,338,870
Minnesota - 1,367,716
South Carolina - 1,155,389
Alabama - 1,318,255
Louisiana - 1,178,638
Kentucky - 1,202,971
Oregon - 1,002,106
Oklahoma - 949,136
Connecticut - 897,572
Iowa - 800,983

66,297,237 votes WHICH IS CLOSE

Utah - 515,211
Mississippi - 700,714
Arkansas - 684,782
Nevada - 539,260
Winning the top 34 states in the country gets you to 68,737,204 votes, or just over half and finally you win.


I'd also like to mention that it is incredibly unlikely that all of these states would vote for the same person, so it might be even more small states you have to pay attention to.

Yeah it's bullshit, all of the arguments for the electoral college are so patently flimsy I'm surprised we still hear them again and again from people who should know better.

Right now the election is completely decided by voters in ~5 states who happen to live in states roughly evenly divided by partisan lines.

Under a popular vote system, every vote counts, and you would campaign wherever you wanted that would get you votes.

They say the electoral college insures small states get a voice. In fact it removes everyone's voice, besides the tiny minority who live in those ~5 states.

The only small states that really get a say are New Hampshire, Iowa, and Maine

no one wants to try to refute this?

alright I want to see all of you against the electoral college

...

tl;dr lol.

your evil bitch lost, kid. president trump won. there is NOTHING you can do. he is the 45th president of the united states.

you
do
not
have
a
choice

it's over. constitutional republic =/= direct democracy. get a clue, learn to cope or huff some cyanide you fucking idiot.

1. I voted trump
2. That has nothing to do with what I said. Yes, Trump will be president. Not the topic. I've never seen more fallacies in my life

what about voter fraud?

I don't think OP was fighting for either candidate, if you actually read the post.

tl;dr if we abolish the electoral college, then candidates will have to visit the entire country and then math proves it

what about it?

Awww, Democrats and liberals were so for the electoral college before the election? What happened? Tyranny of the majority is not cool and is exactly what the Democrats tried to do and still are trying to do. The founding fathers were genius.

exactly

Cool. Better get the means necessary to amend the Constitution to make your dream a reality then.

The Electoral College doesn't need to be abolished. What HAS TO be abolished however, are electors themselves. Just award the electoral votes directly, without resorting to men that may not even vote the way they promised (and we had a fuckload of them this year).

I'm a registered republican

Tyranny of the majority? Liberals would not win every single election unless Conservatives fuck up really bad, and they're going in the right direction. The majority switches ideologies all the time. The minority wants their say? Wait a few years and they'll become the majority.

Well I'm not in the government so it might be pretty hard for me to do.

Why would they be for it, they lost 4 Democratic presidencies that way and the Republican president ended up being objectively terrible in each case

Why does the electoral college not need to be abolished? Hell, why would you keep the winner take all system? Why not give electors based on the vote?

All right then. Thanks for making this pointless thread.

Make sure to stay pissed about the most powerful law document of the land though. In sure that'll do something.

>1. I voted trump
>don't worry, fellow patriot, i'm just like you

LOL nice try you subversive bitch. 0/10. fuck off back to your safe space over at tumblr.

Why not just get rid of this entire board then? I doubt anyone in government visits Sup Forums, so none of us should debate anything at all.

?
I don't have a tumblr.

Do you have anything to say about the argument?

>implying there aren't psyops implemented by the CIA and foreign governments on this board right now

>riding on a fallacy this hard
You're exclusively presuming that 100% of the people in certain states will vote for candidate A while 100% of the people in other states will vote for candidate B.

The reality is that certain states have a tendency for their populace to vote certain ways and every state will have mixed voting results regardless of whether a candidate visits or not. However, going purely by the popular vote will give densely populated areas outsized interest from candidates because if you can successfully bribe and coerce the handful of large populated areas to vote for you in majority (at the undoubtful expense of other states' interests), you have an enormous advantage in the election. Basically, if trump flipped the cities to just a 50-50 split, he'd have won in an absolute landslide because the other states would have carried him forward regardless.

The electoral college balances interests so a handful of cities don't run the nation and elect candidates who will shower them with handouts at the expense of all the other states.

The point I'm making is that you can be as assblasted as you want with the Constitution. U til you amend it, your opinion is irrelevant.

So here I'll indulge you. You're 100% right. I'll be sure to write my congressman and tell him I think the Founding Fathers should be undermined because some stupid faggot on the internet said one of the main staples of the most powerful law document of the land is dumb :(

There, happy now?

I'm talking about like, senators and stuff. I don't think Tom Cotton reads Sup Forums

Because, to quote the argument that you guys are repeating ad nauseam, the UNITED STATES are a, guess what, union of states. If USA were a unitary republic, popular vote would've been understandable.

I'd agree with this. The part that's outdated is the electors themselves; it'd be better to keep the population based 'elector' element per state and maintain that these 'votes' will go to however the state voted in order to balance out various states' interests.

It's not like the other states that are ignored will give 0 votes to the candidate. This is very important, just adding 100% of the votes from the largest states isn't helpful.
The problem with popular vote is that almost all rural states/counties will be ignored, why go to any of them if the biggest bang for your buck will always be cities and states with large populations?

Wrong. I did not use the amount of voters in a state, I used the amount of votes the winning candidate in each state got.

A handful of cities will not run the nation because there aren't enough people in the big cities. If you can find me data for each individual city voting, I can show you how you're wrong but I can't find such data so I used states.

They're large but not large enough. You need to visit some rural places.

Das RAYCISS tho

how dar u suggest we pay whitey any attenton

day RAYCISS

black folk are the wuns been opprezed an sheit. day shud have more of a say

Your numbers are totally off you dense retard. If you do it your way, winning the largest 30 states STILL isnt enough to win the election. So who wins? The person with the smallest 20 states? Seems a bit off, doesn't it?

It's because the numbers you used are flawed and retarded (8M in California? Really?) and you didn't account for the fact that you don't need 50%+1, just one more vote than the next candidate. That means that because of third party candidates and such you will need significantly less votes to win, you can't write that off. Run your analysis again.

Yes, we have states. Your point?

This has to be a Canadian under proxy or some edgy 13 year old. Look at that fucking text. Jesus Christ.

I have a different argument in favor of the electoral college. I support it because pure popular vote would result in the majority tyranically ruling over the minority. The electoral college gives the minority a say.

>If you do it your way, winning the largest 30 states STILL isnt enough to win the election. So who wins? The person with the smallest 20 states? Seems a bit off, doesn't it?
holy shit i didn't even notice that

Yes, you are correct. Third parties exist. I understand that the popular vote will never actually look like this. It was just to show that the winning big states isn't enough.

The thing is, the majority and the minority always flip so everyone eventually gets their say.
I mean, I guess. It's not impossible that someone could win in only the 20 or so smallest states and still win.

"haha look at me i watch alex jones haha fuck libtards haha pol and jews are bad nigger hahahahaha im so cool"

Wrong. You've not disproved the point.

>I used the amount of votes the winning candidate in each state got.
Right, while assuming typical red/blue states will flip in totality against the leader in those other states. As I said, Each state has certain voting patterns and certain states will vote for certain candidates regardless of whether they have been visited or not.

>A handful of cities will not run the nation because there aren't enough people in the big cities
>tfw you realize most of Clinton's support was from the counties of big cities.
Even 'blue states' are an ocean of red counties with a few blips of blue where the cities are but the cities carry the whole state into the blue zone.

I beg to differ, the difference in the 5 million or so votes required writes of several states just on its own.

Plus your calculations never included the amount of votes the loser in each state had. To just write them off as 100% to the opposite candidate is a terrible assumption to make.

Your argument is that you need to win the most populous 34 states in order to obtain a majority so it follows that the 16 least populous states have as many voters as the top 34?

I have to be missing something here or your argument makes no sense whatsoever. What am I missing or is this total bullshit?

I'm surprised I missed that too.
>shamefur dispray

The majority of states in the country are fairly split dead even with a few exceptions for both left and right
The problem with going with just popular votes is that the few states that tend red every time are small Midwest states with very low populations where as the states that tend blue every time are large coastal states like California and New York

Not even that; most of New York is red except for Albany and NYC and half of California is red too.

> campaign exclusively in a handful of cities (which contain a majority of the US population)
> cities overwhelmingly vote democrat
> Basically turn America into a one-party state

Also

> implying a true popular vote election wouldn't increase voter turnout

Everything should be on the table. Each state should decide whether or not it wants to be in the union or not. If a state wishes to join the USSA, and be subject to its constitution, and a president selected by popular vote, OK for them. Any state which does not want to join may choose to form their own union, or remain independent nations. Europe has about 30 countries on a landmass the size of the lower 48. No reason we can't have a number of independent nations.

Not really. There have virtually always been consistently more dems then republicans.

get over it, you'd need to amend the constitution and that isn't going to happen EVER. amending the constitution isn't easy for a reason.

Space wise, yeah but not population wise
The most damning example of liberal populations in big cities is Nevada
>Las Vegas and Reno, the only big cities, are very liberal
>more people in two cities than the rest of the state, whole state turns blue
This is why we can't just use a popular vote, one or two towns lets democrats control whole states

But with the electoral college, candidates will only visit Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania and other swing states. Considering I live in Massajewsetts, my vote barely matters when the states going to go blue anyway. There is no right answer.

That's the strategy. I think that's also why the support free trade, so rural places lose opportunity and are forced to move to cities for a job so they can be more effectively indoctrinated.

OP, you don't understand. When people say 'You could lose the election with only 5 states', it implies that you get the entire population from those states. Let's look at your argument from that perspective :
>California : 14,236,856
>Texas : 8,917,965
>Florida : 9,430,059
>New York : 7,706,777
>Illinois : 5,574,950
>Pennsylvania : 6,163,012
>Ohio : 5,536,528
>Georgia : 4,138,772
>North Carolina : 4,741,564
>Michigan : 4,822,952

>>Total : 71;269;435

Well, would you look at that. By focusing all of my efforts on the bigger states, i just won the entire election! Fuck the other states!

The point is that high population centers can decide the election -- this would mean that people would not care about the other states interests and merely focus on the big states!
This is why the electoral college is in place, so candidates have to go to each state and look to each of their interests rather then focus on the big population centers.

I don't understand how a popular vote helps. I only see it hurting the US. Each state has its own government therefor its own representation in congress and electing president.

>and Virginia, and Nevada, and Arizona, and Colorado, and North Carolina, and New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, and Michigan, and Iowa, etc.
Swing states aren't static and there are rarely few of them.

You don't need a majority of votes to win a state, just a plurality.