Discussion of the electoral college isn't, but that wasn't criticism of Soros, because Soros doesn't actually do that. The whole "Soros is cutting checks to liberal agitators" is a common right-wing conspiracy theory. Bringing up Soros in particular is always a red flag, because there are a lot of wealthy liberal donors, but there is an obsessive right-wing focus on Soros because he's a wealthy liberal Jewish donor. I'm not saying OW believes that conspiracy theory, but he obviously knows the implication of it or he wouldn't have specifically said it in order to bait TRR.K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-02-15 04:25amTRR, sorry, but I do not see „hate speech“. It is a discussion about electoral college and criticism of Soros in particular is not equivalent to hate speech, just as criticism of the State of Israel is or its lobbying organizations is not anti-Semitism.
Now, with that out of the way, since once again people are peddling in bullshit about the Electoral College, I once again feel the need to point out the bullshit that so many people have bought about it.
Bullshit Item #1: The EC benefits small states.
That particular meme only holds true when you assume 100% participation. And it sometimes assumes not just 100% voter participation, but 100% participation from the total population, since often the calculations used to "demonstrate" how it benefits small states involves dividing the state's total population by the number of electoral votes.
Electoral votes are allocated to the states based on total population, but awarded based on voter participation. In truth, what the EC truly benefits are states with large populations with a significant percentage that is unable to vote. Historically, this meant slave states. Electoral votes are allocated based on total number of representatives + senators. Slaves counted as 3/5th of a person in terms of calculating congressional representation, but were by design unable to vote. And initially the vote was restricted to white male property owners, which people usually equated with landowners, except slave owners 1) tended to also own land, and 2) could qualify even if they didn't because slaves were also property. The more slaves there were in a state, the more voting power was artificially inflated for the slave owners. In early elections, Virginia was by far one of the biggest beneficiaries of the electoral college, and it was the largest state in terms of free population, and had more slaves than some smaller states had total number of people, free or slave. If the founders built the EC to benefit small states, they did a shitty job of it because it didn't even hold true in the first elections after they created it.
Since we live in a post-abolition society, the modern implication of all of that is that states are incentivized to suppress the votes of demographics that tend to oppose the party in power. Suppressing the vote hurts a state when the president is selected by national popular vote, since it decreases the relative voting power of that state compared to states that don't suppress the vote. But under the EC, suppressing the vote is rewarded because the state's relative voting power compared to other states remains constant, but the voting power of the people in that state who retain their right to vote is massively inflated.
Bullshit item #2: If we didn't have the EC, then big cities would decide every election.
The US population is not that concentrated. If you added up every single city in the country with more than 1,000,000 people, you get a total of about 8% of the population. Outside of severe legal shenanigans, it's pretty much functionally impossible to cram a majority of the voting population into that small of a percentage.
However, an interesting thing does happen when you introduce the electoral college. New York, the biggest city in the country, is a little over 2.6% of the US population. However, it is over 44% of the New York state population. That makes it much easier for New York City to decide state-wide elections...like choosing which candidate gets the state's electoral votes. This plays out to a lesser degree all over the country. Chicago is 0.8% of the US population, but over 21% of the Illinois population. LA, San Diego, and San Jose, the 3 cities in California with more than a million people, combine to total almost 2% of the US population, but make up 16% of the California population. Columbus, the largest city in Ohio, is about 0.2% of the US population, but 7.5% of Ohio's population. And Columbus doesn't even make it into the 1 million population club. The EC actually gives more potential influence to cities than a national popular vote, since the cities comprise a much larger percentage of their state's populations than they do the nation as a whole.
