... discussions about the winner of the popular vote is meaningless and irrelevant.

The winner of the popular vote gets NOTHING.
The winner of the electoral vote WINS.
Those are the rules, and often times, the winner of the popular vote also wins the electoral vote, but that is only a correlation.

Saying that the winner of the popular vote should win overall makes as much as saying that if we applied the rules of competitive Frisbee throwing to the election, that a different candidate should have won.

Reasons?
-We would not be a nation if we didn't develop the electoral college into the Constitution. We are a representative Republic and not a direct democracy.

-Since the popular vote doesn't determine the winner, using the popular vote to judge the effectiveness of the electoral college is asinine. Think about it. How many people in heavily red/blue states just didn't vote because they knew their vote would not tip the electoral vote of their state. Now, you apply the popular vote, which was never intended to choose a leader, to an evaluation criteria for the Electoral College. The nation was not voting to directly elect the President, they were voting to elect representatives that vote for the President.

-If you want to scrap the Electoral College, you need come up with a reason that a direct democracy is preferable to a representative Republic, and leave out ANY FACTS related to the discrepancies between the popular vote and the electoral vote.

Just my opinion but personally I think all 50 states should split their electoral votes. A winner-take-all system is ridiculous. Abolishing it would give 3rd parties a better chance and prevent a lot of wasted votes.

I agree with Belgian. Keep the EC, but make votes proportional.

The problem with splitting, is that each state that does split loses influence over picking the President, so you would likely need an all or nothing approach.

Also, the winner needs a majority of the electoral votes, hence 270.

Assuming the numbers are 47.7%, 47.3%, 3.5%, 1.5% Then you get 256, 254, 19, 9 votes, no winner, and the House of Representatives picks out the winner. I don't think that is preferable over the winner-take all, so we would need something else on top of just splitting electoral votes.

If you make electoral votes proportional aren't you effectively making it a popular vote? I mean, a proportional electoral college should ultimately reflect the popular vote...

Consider a race like this one where one candidate had a large margin in some states and small deficit in many others. The current system means that candidate loses despite the higher vote total. The proportional system means that candidate wins due to the higher vote total...

@Richard, with 2 exceptions:

1) Smaller states have a higher proportion of electoral votes to population (Every state starts with 2 from the senator's representation and 1 from the House representation, thus Wyoming has higher impact per person) and

2) you still have a modification of winner take all... in a state with 3 electoral votes, I would imagine that 0-25% of vote would earn 0, 26-50 earns 1, 51-75 earns 2 and 75%+ earns 3. You'd still have some cutoffs where peoples votes aren't counted, but not as drastic as winner take all.

Eh, for the most part it would reflect the popular vote. If you're going proportional you might as well just go straight popular at that point. Even in a dominant state like CA or NY the winner is only going to get at most ~65% of their electoral votes. Those losses are offset by electoral votes won in the close losses.

I don't have the time to do it right now but I'd wager the proportional results of this election (and past ones) would mirror the overall popular vote.

And I'm well aware of how the electoral vote totals per state are determined.

But your straight-proportional argument throws out the contribution of each state's contribution, regardless of population, that was crucial to forming this country.

Here's a link to an article that did it for 2012.
http://www.occasionalplanet.org/2016/03/18/electoral-votes-awarded-proportionally-2/

Just ran it for 2012 election that Obama won by a wide margin of 332-206.

Popular vote was:
50.91% Obama, 47.13% Romney, 0.99% Johnson, 0.33% Stein, 0.61% other
Straight proportional electoral vote would be:
50.48% Obama, 47.49% Romney, 1.03% Johnson, 0.34% Stein, 0.63% other
Rounded Proportional vote (no partial electoral votes):
50.74% Obama, 48.61% Romney, 0.18% Johnson, 0.00% Stein, 0.46% other

Like I said, proportional electoral votes would effectively be the same as the popular vote total. The actual electoral votes would have been:
Popular vote: 273.89 - 253.56 - 5.33 - 1.78 - 3.27
Straight prop: 271.59 - 255.49 - 5.54 - 1.83 - 3.39
Rounded prop: 273 - 261.5 - 1 - 0 - 2.5

Negligible difference.

Pooh, your link is useless. At one point it states:

2012 Popular Vote: 50%, Romney 49%

The actual results were 50.9 to 47.1. Huge difference there. Throws all further calculations out.

Even eliminating third party candidates from my methodology above, I get electoral votes of 279.37-258.63 for a popular vote or 277.5-260.5 for a straight proportional electoral vote.

Once again, a negligible difference.

Proportional electoral effectively equals popular vote.

Edited 11/9/2016 22:19:03

Sorry, didn't check the source of the source.

@Richard, was your analysis done on a state by state basis? Or just of the overall numbers?

State-by-state with data from here: https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/2012/popular-vote.html

Threw it all in a spreadsheet.

-If you want to scrap the Electoral College, you need come up with a reason that a direct democracy is preferable to a representative Republic, and leave out ANY FACTS related to the discrepancies between the popular vote and the electoral vote.

QOTY. Seriously. Half of the secession movements around the world could easily be silenced with an electoral college-like system. See Scotland.

There are other types of representative democracies than the Electoral College.

>Brexit passes

"The UK is bad because Scotland and Ireland voted en maasse but it didn't work because the bigger state always dictates everything. We gotta ditch England."

>Trump wins election

"Why are the votes weighted instead of equal? This is terrible for the country."

^ Common theme: butthurt liberals

How many people in heavily red/blue states just didn't vote because they knew their vote would not tip the electoral vote of their state.

This.

Why vote in California, Wyoming, Kentucky, NY, Texas, etc.

We could just give many states away.

But we don't.

# democracy are not the rules
# topkek
# more salt
# triggered
lol

Alex Jones said 3 Million Illegal Immigrants voted. Let's say he is 10% right (300,000 voted), and 90% (very generous) voted for Clinton, you have Trump getting the lead in the popular vote. I am sure there are numerous cases where the popular vote would go in Trump's favor.