Popular Vote Should NOT Be Used For Electing A President

Here’s What The Media Won’t Tell You About The Popular Vote

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For the past two weeks, the liberal media has been complaining about how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but Donald Trump is the president-elect.

As recently as Wednesday, Politico ran a story that Clinton’s lead in the popular vote had just surpassed 2 million votes — but Trump still held the advantage in the Electoral College.

What the media has failed to mention is that the general election doesn’t use the popular vote to determine the winner. Both candidates knew that they needed to get to 270 electoral votes to win.

For months, we saw projection maps about the “path to 270” and talk about “swing states,” with far less emphasis on the popular vote because the Electoral College was what really mattered.

But now that Clinton lost the Electoral College race, the media has fixated on the popular vote.

The Washington Post noted that even if we had a purely popular vote election, that would be no guarantee that Clinton would have won the vote by the same margin she did this year.

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“Under a popular-vote system, on the other hand, every vote in every state would count equally, and campaigns would be likely to devote substantial resources driving up turnout in these same states,” the article noted.

NPR noted that Clinton’s popular vote advantage was due in large part to California, which still had roughly 2 million ballots to process.

Think of the people (like me) who live in a state like New York, where they know that casting a vote for a Republican in the presidential election is utterly worthless because the state will always swing Democrat. (For the record, I did vote in the 2016 presidential election.)

However, if the election results were based on popular vote totals, that would provide incentive for many more Republicans in traditionally blue states to come out and vote, and vice versa.

The Electoral College exists for the same reason that we have the Senate — to give voices to people living in states that aren’t as large as places like New York and Texas — and California.

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Do you think the U.S. should continue to choose presidents via the Electoral College?