(Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin, running for a new six-year term in an election that his opponents say is a parody of democracy, said on Tuesday that past U.S. elections had been rigged by postal voting.
“In the United States, previous elections were falsified through postal voting … they bought ballots for $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that’s it,” Putin said, without providing evidence.
I never really understood this. Why do an election when the electoral college decides who the winner is?
I’m not a US American.
The electoral college complicates things by having each state be its own separate popular vote.
Two states, Nebraska and Maine, will split their electoral votes based on their popular vote. But the rest of the states just give all their electoral votes to their popular vote winner.
The core issue is that a presidential candidate can win 50.1% of the vote in a state and will receive all electoral votes as if 100% of the state voted for him.
A secondary issue is that electoral votes aren’t equal. Each state has a minimum of three electoral votes. This creates a situation where Wyoming, a state who’s population is smaller than our capital Washington D.C., has more voting power per person per electoral vote than California; the most populous state.
Only Maine splits their vote. Nebraska awards votes by congressional district, allowing the state to effectively gerrymander the electoral college.
Without proportional electors, in a close election where the swing states–the only states that matter–vote near 50-50, the outcome is essentially random. In the states that vote 50.1% for one candidate, 100% of the votes will go to one candidate, and in the states that vote 50.1% for the other candidate, 100% of the votes will go to that candidate. Random noise in how votes are aggregated, from the district level up, can theoretically lead to wildly unfair results. In the worst case, all voters in 49.9% of states (by elector count) vote for one candidate, and then all voters in 49.9% of the voting districts in the remaining states vote for the same candidate, but 50.1% of voters in the remaining districts vote for the other candidate, that other candidate’s ~25% of the popular vote becomes a majority and they win the election. The required popular vote percentage is even lower if you factor in how California voters are less than three fifths people (closer to one fifth than two fifths, even) compared to Wyoming.
Depending on how you count it, you only need 23-27% of the popular vote to win the electoral college. This scenario is very unlikely but it illustrates how skewed the electoral college can make our elections.
The original thinking was the electoral college could stop any truly disastrous votes. But we’ve seen how that goes! Now we’re stuck with it because it helps one party and would require a constitutional amendment to abolish, and too few people in power are interested in doing what’s right for the country - they’re interested in doing what’s right for their party.
(For another example of the “party first” mentality that has taken over: Washington, DC residents have no vote in Congress. This seems like an obvious thing to fix, give them a two members of the House and two Senators…but whoa, we can’t do that, it would change the balance of power in Congress! Seriously. That’s why DC residents have no real voice in Congress. For clarity, their votes do count for the Presidential election.)
The voters decide what the electoral college chooses, though. I suppose it has been a sort of buffer against the dumbfuck citizens making dumbfuck choices. Donald Trump’s presidency of course has shown that if any such buffer ever existed, it sure doesn’t now.
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This might be explained by the latency that large economic decisions have. As a practical example, the leftist government in Finland increased expenditure by quite a lot in Finland during 2019-2023 (mostly due to Covid-19 and Russia, but also beyond that) leading to a much increased governmental deficit. As a result, the economy is doing poorly now, and since the Finns chose a rightist austerity government in 2023, it looks as if the economy was doing well under a leftist government, and poorly under a rightist government – even though the consequences for the current situation can clearly be derived from the previous government and there’s no way the current government has had enough time contribute to the situation.
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I’m unfamiliar with the details of economics decisions in the US. How much does the president get to decide those things versus the House and Senate?
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Historically, it was implemented because in the 1800’s, a lot could happen between an election in, say, Wisconsin, and the time the electoral college member arrives in Washington DC.
The US being the oldest democracy might have a nice ring to it, but realistically it’s just means that there’s a lot of outdated baggage attached.
That would make sense, but that’s not the law. In most states, the electors can vote differently and it still counts, and in only some of those states is it even illegal for the elector to do that.
Originally the electors were actually meant to deliberate. It was supposed to be a no party system.
In practice the electors have never demonstrated any independence from the political power that sent them there.
Then you have states having to figure out how they select those electors, under the eyes of voters. Back then the representative to voter ratio was a lot smaller so losing your seat was a lot easier. So they did the politically reasonable thing and made the electors an elected position.
It wasn’t long before that transformed into candidates selecting their electors, and people just selecting the candidate on the ballot.
So electoral college remains now as a compromise between large population states and small population states. And the backup. Which is supposed to be Congress voting by state, is similarly population balanced because they get one vote per state in that instance.
This all made a lot of sense in a semi-decentralized country that wasn’t supposed to have parties. Unfortunately parties formed literally right away. Also, since the Civil War we’ve been a lot more centralized. But we’re stuck with old voting systems because if we held a Constitutional Convention to update it then the Republicans would do stupid shit.
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