shepperoni:

slashmarks:

anyway I don’t think the story of the 2016 election is that America wanted Trump.

I think the story of the US election is that a supreme court decision allowed states with a history of totalitarianism to arbitrarily change voting law in ways that made it disproportionately difficult for people likely to vote Democrat to vote while a foreign country was running an intelligence campaign to discourage voting on the left and, real time, prod right wing voters in important districts to vote during the election in a race with massive question marks about the security of voting infrastructure, with a widely unpopular Democratic presidential candidate–

And Trump still lost. By roughly three million votes.

That’s six times the loss George W Bush had when he won the electoral college without winning the popular vote in 2000.

Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by a larger margin than Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon or John Kennedy; she just won it in the wrong places.

Trump is now president because the electoral college assigns more weight to rural states, which are also states with more discriminatory voter laws and more disenfranchisement and therefore states in which it is harder to vote for people likely to vote Democrat.

And all of that is what I mean when I say the biggest problem with the American system is gerrymandering.

i wanna break it down in terms of number for yall. obligatory disclaimer: I’m a polisci major, not a mathematician, so feel free to correct me if I misrepresented this in some way.

the population of wyoming is approx 580,000 people. wyoming has 3 electoral votes, meaning around 193k people per elector. wyoming is overwhelmingly republican.

california has a population of approx 40 million. california has 55 electoral votes, meaning around 727,000 people per elector. california is always a democratic majority.

in short, a voter in wyoming counts for 3.75 times more than a voter in california, because their pool of voters per elector is that much smaller.

most of us know that the electoral college is unfair. but just not how overwhelmingly, infuriatingly so.