Politics is fun! *sarcasm detected* Obama or Romney?

I don't see how a vote that represents a state is devalued. You have more power per vote when representing state then you do when casting an indvidual vote. Your vote has MORE of a chance to affect the outcome of the election.

I suppose. It just seems really...I'm not sure what the word is I'm looking for here.

If I vote for Jim-Bob Jenkins for president, and Jim-Bob Jenkins wins the popular vote, but Joe-Bubba Smith wins the electoral votes and becomes president, then why did I bother voting? Shouldn't the POPULAR vote determine who wins, since it's what the most people want?

Electors have occasionally voted against the way their people have told them to. In half the states, they're punished. In the other half it's still political suicide. That sort of thing has never actually changed the outcome of an election, and it's not like entire states randomly decide to shirk the public. It's very rare, and who knows what their reasons are.

Also, I generally find that most of the time when people get all up in arms over how stupid it is, they don't actually have any working knowledge of it.

And like Tat said, without it, unless you live in NY or CA, just stay home. It applies a curve to the popular vote.

Didn't that happen in 2000?

John Quincy Adams who lost by 44,804 votes to Andrew Jackson in 1824

Rutherford B. Hayes who lost by 264,292 votes to Samuel J. Tilden in 1876

Benjamin Harrison who lost by 95,713 votes to Grover Cleveland in 1888

George W. Bush who lost by 543,816 votes to Al Gore in the 2000 election.

So it's happened a few times variously throughout the history of America.

The complete list of insightful, meaningful, intelligent comments on politics that aren't a complete waste of time and effort to type and/or read on all message boards across the internet:

1.

And that's it. The list includes everything I have ever said too.

Pfffft, the most logical answer is obvious! To appeal to all possible demographics, they must do a Fusion Dance and become...OBOMNEY!

...or would it be Robama?

Robama sounds more like a robot version of the president.

No, you're talking about something else.

I said the outcome of an election has never been changed by a representative who voted against the people he represents. "Faithless electors". What you're talking about is when the total popular vote for all the states is in favor of the losing candidate, meaning roughly that the winner took a lot of smaller states but lost the couple big ones. The electors voting in those elections still voted in line with the way the people in their state voted, since that's their job. That's what happened in 2000. Bush didn't win because the electors all said "screw them, we'll vote however we want!" He won because we're a republic made up of a bunch of semi-independent states.

Here's a fun fact: New York reasonably conservative, if you don't count the massive growth called "New York City". The state votes the way the city does because it's such a huge portion of the population, and the state taxes the fuck out of us and sends all the money off to the city. It's a thing. I hear it's similar for California.

it's like that in a lot of places. You'll get big liberal urban sprawls and the rest of the state voting republican. New York, California, Washington is like that too. It's Seattle = Blue Everywhere else = Red.

Geopolitics is pretty interesting, in my opinion. Unfortunately it inevitably leads to talking about actual politics, which pretty much can only end in a fist fight.