"Nobody" Won in 2016

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 08:18:04 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

I've seen a bunch of complaints about Hillary winning the popular vote. This is my take on that.

Votes for Hillary and Donald from: http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president

Eligible voters and number who voted from the top line of the table at: http://www.electproject.org/2016g

Total eligible voters: 231,556,622
Number who voted: 134,760,705
Didn't vote: 96,795,917 (41.8%)
Hillary: 61,324,576 (26.4%)
Donald: 60,526,852 (26.1%)

So if it's the popular vote that you're focused on, "nobody" won, by a large margin.

If I were to add in all the people who were too young or otherwise ineligible to vote, 330 million minus 134.8 million, "nobody" got 59.1% of the vote, and Hillary and Donald 18.6% and 18.3%, respectively.

Hillary won by a small margin of the popular votes counted, but we'll never know the numbers for the absentee ballots. They don't bother to count them unless there are enough to change the outcome.

But popular vote is not the rules of the game. The Electoral College chooses the US president. I consider this a good thing, since it prevents a handful of large liberal cities from governing the entire country.

If popular vote were the name of the game, the candidates would have focused on the big cities, and the results would have been different. Different how? I don't know. Neither do you.

If you don't like this, you can try to get a Constitutional Amendment passed to change it, but you'll have to convince a large majority of states to go along. Good luck with that.

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