In the year 2016 we're still running presidential elections based on a plan set in motion by men who died two centuries ago. Does that make sense to anyone? It shouldn't, but we've still got a system based on state by state vote counts that determine who wins the electors from that state. And each state gets as many electoral votes as it has representatives in Congress, meaning two senators from each state and whatever they're entitled to in the House of Representatives based on population. So the state of Wyoming gets three electors for a tiny population of less than half million people. Less people vote there than in a small section of a large city, but they get three electors. The total popular vote total in this dimwitted election plan means nothing. Does that make sense to anyone? On several occasions the winner in the electoral college lost the popular vote, but still, they became the President. This just happened again when Trump lost the popular vote by more than two million votes. He won the entire west other than the west coast and a few states, and then more populous states he won were usually by squeaky think margins where voter fraud could have been part of the game. And so, this all means that we ended up with a pussy grabbing, lying, cheating, unqualified, blabbermouth as President.
Trump was right about one thing - elections are rigged. They're rigged by a crooked press, the media, and by idiotic state elections laws governing how votes are cast, and by a dumbed down voting public stupid enough to believe almost anything. I'm not sure fixing the voting system would do much to fix the class of people we now have trooping to the polls, but doing that would at least make it more democratic. The electoral college needs to be junked and the winner should be the candidate with the most popular votes. It should be a matter of who won it all and not who won what state. I've never been a fan of the federal system, which means I've never cared for states. If you want to build a nation that can take care of national matters, get rid of state sovereignty over things like elections. In national elections, we should have national rules that all government units abide by. There can be no national direction as long as the nation is fragmented by different rules of governance.
I'd offer a solution for this, but it's a mute point. The insignificant state will fight tooth and nail to keep their place in an electoral college, and since it's a political issue, it won't die easily. And, we'll always be at risk of getting bad leaders. A lot of people understand this but want no part of trying to change it. We don't even seem to learn lessons the hard way, and somewhere in all of that, logic is lost. It's so simple and easy a fix that we can't see the value in it. Does everything have to be complicated? Just count the votes, dammit, and do that in a way fraud is reduced . . . and you've finally got a winner that deserves the office.
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