Those are the rules for democracy, so he is the legitimately elected president.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/10/13587462/...
The remaining 43% voted for 'I'll take whoever wins'. So, ~72% of the eligible voters can be held accountable for him becoming president.
Those are the rules for democracy, so he is the legitimately elected president.
Definitely, it is legitimate, even if we don't like the outcome ;).
Or they lived in some of those insane regions where only a single voting office served thousands of people and couldn't affording standing outside for 8+ hours, or they couldn't get a tuesday off (sane countries allot a whole weekend for voting), or they couldn't afford to get sufficient id to satisfy their state's demands. (Yes, i know, mail-in voting is a thing, but i'm sure there are good reasons to keep people from using that as well.)
There's plenty of reasons otherwise eligible voters didn't vote beyond "didn't care" and many of them are "they were prevented from doing so by institutional problems".
Really, that's how it is in US? Any semi-decent country is responsible for creating comfortable conditions for anyone to vote.
Here in Poland there were 28k voting offices for 30 million of potential voters, so there's on average little more than 1k voters per office. It is almost impossible to be waiting in line for more than 5-10 minutes, even in the most crowded offices.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/opinion/long-lines-at-min...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
Elections are mostly regulated at the state and county level, which causes a lot of disparities in registration law and polling place funding. Invariably every election during the non-stop coverage, you'll see the pictures of the long lines wrapped around blocks in cities throughout the country, but especially in Republican controlled swing states. I think it's an utter failure of our society that we can't hold elections with fair and accessible voting methods.
'Democracy in America', by Alexis de Tocqueville is still about as valid today as when it was written. In that he describes this scene where townspeople literally shoot at a farmer to keep him away from the polls. Not all that different than the gun toting individuals who show up to polling places today to 'protect' the vote.
Feel free to replace with "No true Scotsman".
And honestly, having big states control who becomes president just because of their population, given how independent states should function, is a cornerstone of the electoral college.
Something closer to that might be enough. However, I don't think that the electoral college could be changed because the parties responsible for changing it would be decreasing their electorates influence in the government which might be unpopular with said electorate.
That's great and might seem scary to some, but nothing close to that has ever happened.
This used to be true, but as more government control has been ceded to the federal government I don't believe this to be the case. The President is not all powerful either, this should be a fully democratic election. Also, the electoral college was broken when states started alotting their votes in a winner take all manner.
Maybe this is the problem then? If you have less federal government control, and more state-level control then it wouldn't be as big of a deal if Trump is elected if you're a Californian. Likewise with a democratic candidate.
And the current setup actually works pretty well. You should get diminishing returns on popular vote in a republic. Otherwise you have some areas that dominate others instead of a balance. In other words, you don't punish people/states that are not highly populated. It may not have worked out for us this time around, but it's more fair. If you want a different system, then abolish the Republic and the States.
What is it with non-US citizens in this thread? Honestly, none of you seem to have a good understanding of US politics and are being very insulting.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Inters...
This created a problem, as the get out the vote efforts from groups like unions and others were tepid as a result, and the GOP isn't stupid and courted these voters pretty heavily. The other thing is that the Democrats over-relied on minority voters as a key base, which didn't work out for a variety of reasons.
I think strategically they missed the fact the ethnic voting requires an ethnic candidate. They also missed that certain key platform positions alienate ethnic factions of their voting base. In the old days, the Irish-Catholic political machines didn't run aging teetotaler baptists as candidates for a good reason!
Basically, Mrs. Clinton ran a campaign that was divided, disorganized and poorly administered, which crippled her ability to make appropriate decisions. Trump's opportunism, marketing savvy, and tight team made his campaign agile and tightly focused on the objective. When the campaign had internal divisions, he purged the dissenters and moved on.
They made a choice to let Trump win, just to tell Hillary (and the Democratic Party) that they didn't like her!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/omribenshahar/2016/11/17/the-no...
Fixing that would be great (most sensible solutions would probably also fix our massive gerrymandering problem at the same time) but is unlikely to happen any time soon.
It's guaranteed not to happen as long as you vote for the big two parties, making sure it doesn't is one of the things that gets bipartisan support.
While I agree a win for a third party likely end with the new party entrenching itself like one of the current two, that seems like the best way to get a new party devoted to fixing this to emerge.
Not voting is a form of expression as valid as any other.
You really don't have to accept a very bad candidate and by doing so you signal future candidates the availability of "free" votes.
Now, I admit that voting NULL is a stronger message, but is it really an option?
Absolutely according to the rules in force in the USA. Other countries have different rules, and I don't think that there is some set of unique 'best rules' for this.
UK tomorrow many of us are voting for the mayors of 'combined authorities'. The voting paper has two columns for each candidate and you get to state a first preference and a second preference - they call it the supplimentary voting system
https://www.wmcaelects.co.uk/frequently-asked-questions/
It will be 'interesting' to see how this one works in an election that noone especially wanted and that traditionally has a very low turnout - but at least we are trying different approaches.
Mr Street said it was the start of a "new, urban Conservative agenda".
Overall, 26% of eligible voters chose a candidate with most people staying away from the polling stations on Thursday." [1]
So, the man has a majority of less than 2% in an election where just a tad over one quarter of those eligible actually voted. He is in charge of a unitary authority where most of the constituent authorities have Labour administrations.
What kind of mandate do you think this chap has?
Those are the rules for American democracy, which has many flaws, an inherent two party system being one of the major ones.
The who-voted-for-whom discussion in one of adjacent subthreads just sounds like airing dirty laundry in front of everybody - nobody cares, it just makes you look bad.
The gerrymandered system with even more party control is not the system that has been in place for anywhere near that amount of that time.
The parties in place dont have that kind of history either.
Our voting laws are different, even non-white men can vote now! (though they are disenfranchised as much as possible.)
Basically, the system is constantly in flux, ad yes, we get to complain about it all we want and change it (again.)
There are maybe two states that have large electoral college districts that could be impacted by it, but they are irrelevant in the larger picture.
But changing it requires changing the Constitution, which requires a supermajority of state legislatures—and the electoral college shifts power from citizens and the federal government to states.
This hack lowers the barrier, but not by enough, at least yet.
I have always wondered how hard it would be to switch to direct voting rather as opposed to the system with an electoral college. Is it impossible because the current system is codified in the constitution, or does it 'only' require an amendment. If so, was there ever a serious attempt to change this system?
The constitution simply says that each state gets to appoint its electors as it sees fit.
Wit that in mind, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact [0] commits states that adopt it to appointing their electors in line with the national popular vote: e.g., in the 2016 election, had it been in force, every state that had adopted it would have chosen electors for Hillary, regardless of how the vote in that state fell.
So far, it has been adopted in principle by 10 states and the District of Columbia. However, it doesn't come into force until adopted by enough states to achieve an absolute majority in the electoral college; currently, it's 105 votes shy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
The system was designed to avoid the concentration of power you desire.
And saying the US system "was designed to avoid the concentration of power" sounds like a sad joke from an European perspective (First-past-post-system, extreme presidential powers etc.)
They were submitted as (sometimes secret) change requests by every president post WW2 and accelerated by presidents in the last ~20 years. Unfortunately, the code review team didn't remove the changes and tacked on their own during the process.
They started way sooner than that, the first major one was the Louisiana Purchase. Basically non-Washington presidents have been trying to expand their power.
When the constitution was first signed if votes had been distributed by population the Southern states would have essentially never had a voice, which was a non-starter for them. Considering that these states were also the economic power houses of the US, not including them was also a non-starter. The electoral college coupled with the 3/5ths compromise was the eventual solution to this problem.
1.) The constitution can be changed 2.) The thing the changes the constitution is an amendment.
You're prescribing a lot of "this is how the US political system should work" without really (it seems) understanding it.
In the end, the idea that low population area have more impact-per-voter comes from the need to keep people united and making sure that high population areas don't completely out vote the needs of the other areas. The obvious alternative is independence, so instead of one united states you would have several smaller countries based on common needs.
I like NZ's MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) system, but there are others that work too. Anything that results in fewer, bigger districts electing multiple representatives should break the power of gerrymandering. And Proportional representation makes 3rd parties viable, which gives you more than a single forced political axis, and just might lift the level political discourse above the current 'My team, right or wrong'
Speculation nonetheless though.
And vice versa on both counts for red states.