“We may want to take a look at the whole Electoral College, which is seating a man for president who didn’t get the most votes,” said Sanders in an interview with USA Today. “This is something we need a serious discussion on. This campaign revolved around 15 states of the country, right? Battleground states. My state of Vermont is a strong Democratic state; no one paid attention. Wyoming is a Republican state; nobody paid attention to Wyoming. Is that a good way?”

Current popular vote counts show Clinton leading Trump by more than 750,000 votes. With election officials still tallying provisional, mail-in and absentee ballots, particularly in heavily blue states, many expect Clinton’s margin of victory in total votes to increase in the coming days, perhaps to as much as 2 million.

But thanks to the Electoral College, none of this kept Trump from securing a comfortable win on Tuesday. For the second time in the last 20 years, a Republican candidate is headed to the White House with fewer votes than his Democratic opponent.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...0c4b63b0db33a?

King Sanders is as pressed as us about this undemocratic practice.

Great, let's have the popular vote so that campaigns are focused on 5 states insead of 15.

I don't see him advocating for the use of the popular vote, either.

Before you laugh for no reason, educate yourself

http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/uscities_100.html

Only 10 cities have populations of over 1 million. Across all of them, the population is around ~25 million (less than 8% of the total population). If you remove unlikely voters and those who are underage, it puts it at less than 10 million, which is only ~7% of those who voted this year which had low turnout.

The rest are in the 200k-800k range and they spread across all 50 states.

A popular vote would also encourage those in "safe" states to actually vote, increasing the total number of those who vote and making the contribution from those 10 cities, and few states, matter even less.

That counterargument is silly. Yes campaigning at those particular states would be the most efficient but you're leaving 75%+ of the other votes off the table.

Also honestly why do people making it a matter of states as opposed to POPULATION centers? The people should decide, not the states. If a few areas have high populations, why don't they contribute their fair share in who governs them? You'd have to visit multiple locations in the big states like Texas and California. It's not about states anymore.

Given the impossibility of campaigning in every single city, the candidates would be forced to adopt measures that appeal to ALL Americans as opposed to their particular voting blocks.

To be fair, those numbers only cover the city proper.
24 million and 19 million people live in the metropolitan areas of NYC and LA.

Well he's being cautious. It would be a constitutional amendment so it would need a lot of approval.

True, but if you actually make it about metropolitan areas, the locations become far more diverse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...tistical_Areas

The top 10 metropolitan areas encompass more than 20 states.

The point is that this would no longer make it a matter of states, so trying to reduce it to "a few states only matter" is wrong. It would be about population centers, and yes their vote should not matter less than a vote from those who live in some backwater like Wyoming.

It makes no sense at all. The EC was made for ease of election processing, upholding the notion of the republic, and protecting the country from choosing the wrong leader by adding checks and balances.

The first is irrelevant now. The second matters less now that states are basically shells of their former identities, and if the EC truly cared about the third they would not elect Donald Trump.

But what it does is basically make candidates only visit the cities- why go to Cheyenne WY and get a few thousand votes at most when you can tour the huge metropolitan areas near the coast and get millions of votes out? Who would go to Maine or Colorado to campaign? The concerns of farmers living in small states like Iowa would be drowned out. The votes of non-city folk would be drowned out. State rights are still important.

I just wish there was a way we could make it work so that the popular vote has weight too, along with the electoral college. I think it's a bit archaic but shouldn't think it should be outright abolished.

Why would you suggest we use a voting system where every vote DOESN'T count, how is that a better solution?

Every voice should be heard, who cares where they are from.

My friends on the west cost in states like oregon and washington don't even vote because the election is usually called before they announce their state

I think we could have an electoral college with proportional allocation of electoral votes.

But then it would be pointless.

California has 55 votes with population 38.8 million.
Wyoming has 3 votes with population 500,000

California has 1 vote per 700,000
Utah has 1 vote per ~166,000

California would need more than 4x the electoral college votes to make it proportional.

Maybe a good first step is at least trying to make them more proportional. That is fine.

Well your example is flawed. They don't really go to Cheyenne to begin with. They just go to a few swing states and call it a day. while other states get barely any coverage. It's unfair to the democratic process.

You're downplaying the relevance of the rural/suburban areas. In total they still constitute a significant (if not major) part of the voting population than those in the metropolitan cities when added in full.

While the campaigning can be concentrated on major centers for efficiency's sake, the message of the campaign no longer has to solely appeal to the swing states. You'd have to actively court the rural population if you wish to win.

Also I get the point of states rights, but it's irrelevant. They retain their own systems of government. The president who represents all the people of the USA should be decided by the people of the USA, not the states.

The point of the dissent is that some states have a massively disproportionate say in who the president is.

You can make an argument that the USA should remain a republic, but the country has been moving towards a democracy for some time now.

People can miss me with this, but then people would focus solely on the urban cities and not on the rural communities. Well, majority rules. How can we have county level elections where the popular vote dictates the winner instead of how the the districts within that county voted? Why do we allow state elections to be determined by popular vote, but ignore how many counties were won?

If it matters on a state level, why shouldn't it on a national level? Should the rural community overpower the will of what the majority voted on? Doesn't sound very democratic to me. People's voices in big cities deserve a voice as well.

They do have a voice. You make it sound like all states have 3 EVs when California has 55 EVs, by far the most of any state, Texas has 38, New-York and Florida 29 and son on. They just have enough to maintain a fair balance with other less populated states.

That's the whole point though, you're looking at things at a state-by-state basis for a NATIONALLY ELECTED position. Each American vote = the same, ONE VOTE. Not half, not a third, but ONE WHOLE VOTE. That's a true democracy that is fair to what most want, not the few in selected states or areas of the country.

One vote in Texas = one vote in Iowa = one vote in new York = one vote in Wyoming = one vote in Colorado = one vote in Florida = one vote in Illinois = one vote in Maryland = one vote in Maine and so on. Nobody's vote is greater than their neighbor or fellow American. That's how it should be.

So, presidential candidates go to Texas and California and listen to the people there? No. They go to Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and the other swing states. Going by popular vote would eliminate that and that awful feeling of your vote not meaning anything.

Just be aware that you risk tearing the country apart and having deep divisions resurface. When smaller states joined the union, having the EC make sure that more-populated states like New-York and Virginia (which were the most populated at the time) could not impose their will on them was part of the deal.

It's already creating a divide when you have the electoral college contradict the popular vote. And now the popular vote will have HRC by more than 2 million votes but lose in an electoral college landslide? That's not democratic.