2016 US ELECTION: Official Results Thread

[Broomstick]

They shouldn't have equal standing you moron. 1 person 1 vote. If the flyover states get a sad, oh well.

So... if California decides it wants the water in the Great Lakes and can convince New York that's a good idea you're OK with draining them dry, right? The East Coast needs oil - well, let's just frack the hell out of Oklahoma - what's that, Oklahoma, you no longer have water fit to drink, and you're annoyed by all those earthquakes caused by shifting shit around underground? Suck it up, buttercup, we outnumber you so we can come fuck your shit up.

Is that how you want things to run?

[Terralthra]

FDR: Re-elected twice (1940, 1944).

[nitpick] Re-elected THREE times. First elected PotUS in 1932, re-elected in 1936, 1940, and 1944. The only person ever voted into office as PotUS four times and thanks to the 22nd constitutional amendment probably the only person who will ever serve more than two terms in that office. [/nitpick]

1936 was not a war-time reelection, thus doesn't matter for the purposes of the conversation you entered.

So... if California decides it wants the water in the Great Lakes and can convince New York that's a good idea you're OK with draining them dry, right? The East Coast needs oil - well, let's just frack the hell out of Oklahoma - what's that, Oklahoma, you no longer have water fit to drink, and you're annoyed by all those earthquakes caused by shifting shit around underground? Suck it up, buttercup, we outnumber you so we can come fuck your shit up.

Is that how you want things to run?

As opposed to now, when we subsidize growing corn to turn into CO2 in the atmosphere and sugar to give children diabetes because Iowa is electorally important?

[Joun_Lord]

They shouldn't have equal standing you moron. 1 person 1 vote. If the flyover states get a sad, oh well.

Having the attitude of "fuck the flyovers" is what got goddamn Trump elected in the first place. Angry people tired of being ignored who made their concerns felt. The fact they didn't think they have a voice and think urban people without their values or concerns were running roughshod over them is why they got out in voted for the whore who said what they want the way they wanted.

[Flagg]

They shouldn't have equal standing you moron. 1 person 1 vote. If the flyover states get a sad, oh well.

Having the attitude of "fuck the flyovers" is what got goddamn Trump elected in the first place. Angry people tired of being ignored who made their concerns felt. The fact they didn't think they have a voice and think urban people without their values or concerns were running roughshod over them is why they got out in voted for the whore who said what they want the way they wanted.

Let me break it down simply for you so that you can understand, fuckwit: The electoral college doesn't do shit for rural Californians, New Yorkers, or Illinoisans, any more than it does for urban areas in Texas, Missouri, or Washingtonians. All it does is disenfranchise those people. So to pound it in to your tiny mind: THERE IS NO FUCKING REASON FOR THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. Was that plain enough or do I need to draw pictures?

[Flagg]

FDR: Re-elected twice (1940, 1944).

[nitpick] Re-elected THREE times. First elected PotUS in 1932, re-elected in 1936, 1940, and 1944. The only person ever voted into office as PotUS four times and thanks to the 22nd constitutional amendment probably the only person who will ever serve more than two terms in that office. [/nitpick]

1936 was not a war-time reelection, thus doesn't matter for the purposes of the conversation you entered.

So... if California decides it wants the water in the Great Lakes and can convince New York that's a good idea you're OK with draining them dry, right? The East Coast needs oil - well, let's just frack the hell out of Oklahoma - what's that, Oklahoma, you no longer have water fit to drink, and you're annoyed by all those earthquakes caused by shifting shit around underground? Suck it up, buttercup, we outnumber you so we can come fuck your shit up.

Is that how you want things to run?

As opposed to now, when we subsidize growing corn to turn into CO2 in the atmosphere and sugar to give children diabetes because Iowa is electorally important?

All but 1% of agriculture in the US goes into feeding livestock. And farmers get subsidy after subsidy, especially in bad harvesting years. But if fishermen have a bad season? Nothing. So welfare queens farmers get no sympathy from me.

[Flagg]

They shouldn't have equal standing you moron. 1 person 1 vote. If the flyover states get a sad, oh well.

So... if California decides it wants the water in the Great Lakes and can convince New York that's a good idea you're OK with draining them dry, right? The East Coast needs oil - well, let's just frack the hell out of Oklahoma - what's that, Oklahoma, you no longer have water fit to drink, and you're annoyed by all those earthquakes caused by shifting shit around underground? Suck it up, buttercup, we outnumber you so we can come fuck your shit up.

Is that how you want things to run?

This is almost too stupid to respond to, but I'll bite. California doesn't consume enough water to "drain the Great Lakes dry", they are Fracking the shit out of North Dakota right now, and will do it in Oklahoma if there's shale oil and Oklahoma would let them and reap the economic boom. But let's not let facts get in the way.

No, what you are describing is called "democracy".

[Joun_Lord]

Let me break it down simply for you so that you can understand, fuckwit: The electoral college doesn't do shit for rural Californians, New Yorkers, or Illinoisans, any more than it does for urban areas in Texas, Missouri, or Washingtonians. All it does is disenfranchise those people. So to pound it in to your tiny mind: THERE IS NO FUCKING REASON FOR THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. Was that plain enough or do I need to draw pictures?

Hence me mentioning this........

The electoral college gives a voice to smaller state, sparsely populated areas and such. Is it perfect? No, its not but neither is the popular. Alot of people think the electoral college could be improved by not having a winner take all approach but actually divide the votes across the states to vote how districts vote rather then each state going solid one way or the other.

The electoral college system is flawed too, it disenfranchises people too. But arguably a popular vote disenfranchises just as many if not more because urban areas in Texas or California or where ever would carry more weight despite being only a small portion overall of the country. Dividing the election by county would fuck over urban areas because there is alot more rural counties then urban.

And yes I'd love for you to draw pictures. Hows about like a sweet flaming skull Geocities style or maybe a stormtrooper, always had trouble drawing stormtrooper helmets.

[Flagg]

Let me break it down simply for you so that you can understand, fuckwit: The electoral college doesn't do shit for rural Californians, New Yorkers, or Illinoisans, any more than it does for urban areas in Texas, Missouri, or Washingtonians. All it does is disenfranchise those people. So to pound it in to your tiny mind: THERE IS NO FUCKING REASON FOR THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. Was that plain enough or do I need to draw pictures?

Hence me mentioning this........

The electoral college gives a voice to smaller state, sparsely populated areas and such. Is it perfect? No, its not but neither is the popular. Alot of people think the electoral college could be improved by not having a winner take all approach but actually divide the votes across the states to vote how districts vote rather then each state going solid one way or the other.

The electoral college system is flawed too, it disenfranchises people too. But arguably a popular vote disenfranchises just as many if not more because urban areas in Texas or California or where ever would carry more weight despite being only a small portion overall of the country. Dividing the election by county would fuck over urban areas because there is alot more rural counties then urban.

And yes I'd love for you to draw pictures. Hows about like a sweet flaming skull Geocities style or maybe a stormtrooper, always had trouble drawing stormtrooper helmets.

Are you honestly arguing that a popular vote system is bad because it doesn't take land area into account? Do you know how stupid that is?

[Broomstick]

Want to get rid of the Senate, too? Because that's based on geographic units, not population.

[Steel]

In the UK in the early 1800s, changing population distributions created the problem of "rotten boroughs", which were old constituencies that were so small, that basically nobody lived there. It was possible for a single family to sell off their votes in order to elect an MP.

If the rural population keeps draining relative to the cities, the US will be headed in that direction as well. I don't think the solution is to force people to move to the rural areas: there are less people there because it is undesirable. Surely the actual solution is for the people who are sitting in decaying rural areas that cannot be saved to move to the economically viable areas, let the rotten areas die, and reform the voting system so that tracts of land don't govern people, but rather the other way around.

[jwl]

And regardless of weather Trump would have campaigned differently had it been based on popular vote, the numbers do show definitively that more individual voters did choose Clinton than Trump.

Which I take as a small silver lining, because it shows that Trump is not the new voice of the American people, and his politics are not the new norm. Disturbingly popular, yes, but still rejected by the electorate as a whole.

Bullshit.

The election was legitimate by the standards of the voting system.

Trump is the legitimate voice of the US people just as Merkel is still the legitimate representative and voice of the German people despite not receiving a majority in elections.

It seems painfully obvious that most Parliamentary systems where the PM is decided by who has the most seats in the legislature suffer the exact same issues the EC brings to America. Heck, if we just made the President the choice of the House and Senate you'd *still* get a republican.

But there is a difference in the sense that parliamentary systems are designed to elect MPs, not the PM (originally in the house of commons, there was no PM), which is why the house of commons can change the prime minister, as they did with David Cameron=>Theresa May or perhaps more relevantly Blair=>Brown (because Cameron arguably had a choice), and can overrule the prime minister's wishes on laws she wants passed, e.g. when David Cameron wanted to push through Sunday Trading Laws. The only reason why electors exist is to decide the president, so it might be an idea to optimise the system for picking the president rather than picking electors.

We tend to re-elect war-time presidents because people are reluctant to change leadership when they are uncertain about the future. It is not a huge numerical bias, but it is big enough to swing an election.

Is this common, or one of those odd American things?

Well, one of the common reasons cited for thatcher winning the election in 1983 was the Falklands war (before that, the SDP-Liberal alliance was ahead in the polls above both Labour and the Conservatives).

Why do people in rural areas deserve to have their votes count for more than people in urban areas ?

We are talking about electing a single person for a single position. There is no way to get someone who represents everyone.

They shouldn't count for more but urban votes shouldn't be able to automatically win any vote as they would in most popular votes because of their higher numbers.

Why should people in a few physical areas be able to tell the rest of the country, a majority of the physical country, what to do (unless they are the government)? To decide what happens for people in completely different areas with different interests and aims? To completely disregard alot of states and people because they have less people? Because thats how it would be with a majority only vote.

This is especially important because of the rural/urban divide in things like health, wealth, policing, emergency services, jobs and job loss, the environment, and guns. People in urban areas have wildly different views on such things, completely different opinions on the importance of things that might be highly important to Country Joe Cowfucker.

So rural hicks and rednecks and whatever other semi-slurs people call them need a voice too. So they are going to have a disproportionate voice to make themselves heard.

There is no other way that I can think of (admittedly not the sharpest sword in the toolbox) to get something close to fairness, to allow urban and rural locations to have equal standing.

Of course they don't have equal standing under this system either, rural areas still get less electors than urban areas, they just get more say than they would under a straight vote system (which isn't really proportional representation, that would involve in this case Trump and Clinton having to negotiate with third party candidates and/or each other). If you wanted to optimise the system for giving rural and urban areas an equal voice, you would set things up very differently.

[jwl]

In the UK in the early 1800s, changing population distributions created the problem of "rotten boroughs", which were old constituencies that were so small, that basically nobody lived there. It was possible for a single family to sell off their votes in order to elect an MP.

If the rural population keeps draining relative to the cities, the US will be headed in that direction as well. I don't think the solution is to force people to move to the rural areas: there are less people there because it is undesirable. Surely the actual solution is for the people who are sitting in decaying rural areas that cannot be saved to move to the economically viable areas, let the rotten areas die, and reform the voting system so that tracts of land don't govern people, but rather the other way around.

"Rotten boroughs" still exist to an extent, that's why Labour has an advantage over the Conservatives in general elections, and why they are not wildly happy about thew idea of boundary changes removing that advantage (it's true that they now say that the changes be amended because the EU referendum shows an increase in voter turnout, but they were still unhappy about the changes before this event happened). Of course, there is still a current trend toward labour voters moving out of safe labour constituencies towards marginals, so by the time the boundary changes actually happen the boroughs might be slightly "rotten" again anyway.

[Flagg]

Want to get rid of the Senate, too? Because that's based on geographic units, not population.

No it's not, you twit. Every state gets 2. And house seats are based on population. This is elementary school shit.

[Civil War Man]

But arguably a popular vote disenfranchises just as many if not more because urban areas in Texas or California or where ever would carry more weight despite being only a small portion overall of the country.

This doesn't follow. Going by popular vote means a vote in New York City is worth exactly as much as a vote in Dayton, Ohio. NYC only has "more weight" in a popular vote system on account of it having the population of over 60 Daytons. Under the current system, though, Dayton has an almost immeasurable amount more weight than NYC, because it is located in one of the highly coveted swing states, while NYC is not.

I've mentioned this before, but the whole "if we go by popular vote people will only campaign in the big cities" argument is just flat out wrong. NYC is the biggest city in the US by a wide margin, and it has less than 3% of the total US population. Every city with at least 1 million people in it combined come out to just over 8%. If you combine the population of the 100 largest cities, you might get up around 25%.

Not only that, but as I said before when this came up, if your goal is to make candidates not campaign in the cities, the electoral college is not what you want to do. NYC is the most populous city in the country. When compared to the country as a whole, it has less than 3% of the total US population. But under the electoral college, as many people say, it's not one national election but 50 state elections, so we need to compare the cities to the population of the state they are in, instead of the country. By that measure, NYC is over 40% of New York State's population. In a hypothetical world where New York State is one of the deciding states in a Presidential election, NYC has massively more voting power under the electoral college than it would under a nationwide popular vote.

NYC is an extreme example, but it works out elsewhere, too. To use an example from a state that does swing elections, Columbus is the largest city in Ohio, and is estimated to be the 15th largest city in the country. It makes up about 0.2% of the US population. But it makes up about 7% of Ohio's population.

Not to mention, saying the electoral college was crafted to increase the voting power of smaller states is pretty much exactly like saying that the American Civil War was about states' rights. It is true in the most abstract sense possible, but it must be taken in historical context. The Civil War was about "states' rights", specifically the rights of states to have slavery. And the electoral college was crafted to increase the voting power of smaller states. It just so happens that the "smaller" states at that time were overwhelmingly slave states.

[FireNexus]

Want to get rid of the Senate, too? Because that's based on geographic units, not population.

No it's not, you twit. Every state gets 2. And house seats are based on population. This is elementary school shit.

A state is a geographic unit. And one to which an arbitrary number of senators are assigned regardless of population. (And hell yes it should be gotten rid of.)

[Flagg]

Want to get rid of the Senate, too? Because that's based on geographic units, not population.

No it's not, you twit. Every state gets 2. And house seats are based on population. This is elementary school shit.

A state is a geographic unit. And one to which an arbitrary number of senators are assigned regardless of population. (And hell yes it should be gotten rid of.)

Senators are not in any way shape or form assigned based on geographical units. If they were, Alaska wouldn't have the exact same number as Rhode Island.

[Flagg]

An acre, hectare, etc are geographical units.

[FireNexus]

No it's not, you twit. Every state gets 2. And house seats are based on population. This is elementary school shit.

A state is a geographic unit. And one to which an arbitrary number of senators are assigned regardless of population. (And hell yes it should be gotten rid of.)

Senators are not in any way shape or form assigned based on geographical units. If they were, Alaska wouldn't have the exact same number as Rhode Island.

That is incorrect. You're thinking of units of area. A geographical unit is an area with defined boundaries designated for some statistical or administrative purpose. For instance, here is a Canadian census bureau "hierarchy of geographical units":

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/92-195-x/2 ... /h-eng.htm

Note that under this definition, both the Canadian equivalent of states and the entire country itself count.

[Gaidin]

An acre, hectare, etc are geographical units.

Those are units specially designed for land area. In the same way there's a nautical mile.

[FTeik]

"Majority-vote is five wolves and a bunny deciding what's for dinner. Democracy is, when the bunny has a gun to refute the decision."

Isn't it the purpose of a constitution to prevent the majority to run roughshod over the minority?

[K. A. Pital]

Transitioning to a popular vote system in the near future can't be done in the US.

Just a reminder. It is infeasible and highly unlikely at least in the next 4 years, but probably for a much longer period.

[FireNexus]

It would have happened tomorrow if the result had been a Democrat narrowly edging out a win with a popular vote deficit by barely turning a few reibly red states.The national popular vote compact would have been passed by enough states to effectively end it almost immediately.

Too bad that's not how it goes.

[FireNexus]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ss/508328/

The GOP wants to bring back pork. And all I can say is THANK FUCKING GOD. We can finally spend on infrastructure and have tools to overcome congressional gridlock again.

[Broomstick]

Want to get rid of the Senate, too? Because that's based on geographic units, not population.

No it's not, you twit. Every state gets 2. And house seats are based on population. This is elementary school shit.

Yes, it is you moron. That's why states with huge land areas like Alaska or Texas get two senators just like teeny states like New Hampshire and Rhode Island do. It's even less population based than the electoral college.

[Flagg]

Want to get rid of the Senate, too? Because that's based on geographic units, not population.

No it's not, you twit. Every state gets 2. And house seats are based on population. This is elementary school shit.

Yes, it is you moron. That's why states with huge land areas like Alaska or Texas get two senators just like teeny states like New Hampshire and Rhode Island do. It's even less population based than the electoral college.

I was talking about units of land. Kudos on not actually reading the quote, though.