• bi_tux@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    1 month ago

    I’m not from the US and don’t know much about your politics, please explain to me how the party with less votes can win.

    • Localhorst86@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      I’m not from the US, either. But from what i understand, the issues comes from the US having a “first past the post” voting system on a state level. The President is not elected by the percentage of votes, but each of the 50 states gets assigned a number of electors, based on their population. When a party/candidate has won the majority of votes within a state, they will receive all the electoral votes of that state.

      Here’s a simplified example of how that works: Let’s assume 3 states with an equal ammount of inhabitants (let pop=1 million) and an equal ammount of electoral votes (let el=10)

      State 1 has:
      600.000 votes for candidate A (60%)
      400.000 votes for candidate B (40%)

      State 2 has:
      200.000 votes for candidate A (20%)
      800.000 votes for candidate B (80%)

      State 3 has:
      510.000 votes for candidate A (51%)
      490.000 votes for candidate B (49%)

      candidate A has received a total of 1.310.000 votes (~44%)
      candidate B has received a total of 1.690.000 votes (~56%)
      candidate B has won the popular vote, because most people voted for them.

      However, candidate A won the majority in States 1 and 3. So candidate A will receive all 20 electoral votes of those states (which they won by only a comparitively small margin), whereas candidate B will receive only 10 from State 2 (which they won by a landslide).
      As a result, candidate A will become the next president.

    • Five@slrpnk.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      The U.S. was founded by slavers, and in order to preserve the rights of white men to own slaves, they built several anti-democratic institutions into the constitution of the new country. Northern states had fewer slaves and more voters, while southern states has more people but most of them weren’t allowed to vote. A one-person one-vote system that included slaves would result in the end of slavery. A one-person one-vote system that excluded slaves would give most of the political power to the north, and would probably end slavery. So to make sure people could continue to be deprived of their humanity, the electoral college was invented.

      All states were given votes in the college proportional to their population, with slaves counting as 3/5 of a person. This gave greater power to the plantation owning whites who were responsible for ratifying the constitution, and insured nothing short of a civil war could end their reign of terror.

      After the civil war the electoral college remained, and continues to distort the popular vote.

    • lath@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 month ago

      I’m not from the US either, but I’ve seen enough to attempt answering this.

      They have two voting systems

      • popular vote
      • electoral college vote

      Popular vote is the easily corruptible people going out and voting after a long period of politicians lying their teeth off face to face.

      Electoral college vote is a bunch of easily corruptible fuckwits who vote with whoever pays best, regardless of popular voting.

      Electoral college vote seems to matter more than popular vote. Not sure how or why. So less popular candidates can win because fuck the people, I guess.