Quote Originally Posted by sycld View Post
Yeah, this makes no sense whatsoever. The electoral college is set up to bear some proportionality of electors to each states' population, just like the number of representatives in the House allotted to each state rises

And it's obvious what you mean by this: you're saying that as the system stands now, it makes it more likely that the liberal and more highly populated east and west coasts can't have the largest effect on the presidential election "to the detriment of the rest of the country." Har har.

Well, arguably there was only one election where the electoral college clearly elected the candidate into office that did not win the popular vote, which happened in 1888 when the memorable Benjamin Harrison won the election in between Grover Cleveland's two non-consecutive terms in office.

In the other 3 cases where the candidate who did not win the popular vote got into office, the electoral college did not truly ultimately determine the outcome. The first was in 1824 when John Quincy Adams got in due to a vote by the House of Representatives, as no candidate got a solid majority of electors as required (he actually also lost the electoral vote.) The second was in the close presidential election of 1876, where technically Hayes did win the electoral vote by a 1 vote. In reality, many of the electoral votes were contested, and the election was truly determined by back-door deals between the Democratic and Republican parties. The third is one that is in all of our recent memories, in 2000, when the Supreme Court essentially determined who the winner was.
Actually, what I'm saying is that the total number of votes in the election should not be the major factor in deciding the influence of any one region. My issue with the simple majority is that it allows the 51% majority to abuse the 49%.

The point is that California can only count for X percentage of the total outcome. If all 36 million California voters turned out in an election that totaled 50 million votes, they could elect a candidate who serves only their own agenda. As it is now, even if the voters from a single state total a majority of the overall election, their influence on the outcome is limited by their actual size. Fortunately, we don't usually see a major skew in voter turnout (most states have roughly the same turnout as a percentage of registered voters), but it could happen and the system shouldn't be exploitable by that.