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Skeletor wants you to be safe after the election
(lemmy.cafe)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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So votes don't matter and we should all just stop bothering and accept whatever happens to us? Seems like a pretty bleak outlook...
You should definitely take the time to learn how the election actually works in the United States. Nothing illegal or unprecedented happened. The electoral college decides who wins the election, and their allocation is determined by the number of citizen votes in each state. Each state has a different number of delegates, so picking up wins in key states with a lot of delegates is important. Key states can win you the election, even if you lose the popular vote, as it did for trump. We don't live in a direct democracy, we live in a representative democracy, aka a republic.
Required reading for you
And the way that the electoral college was made is very much reasonable if you consider the history of the United States. When you realise that in the beginning, the US was very much like the EU is now, a loose federation of states, the structures that are in place make a lot of sense. The problem is that the US now views itself like a single unified nation instead of a federation of states, and those structures stopped making sense.
I was just thinking a few days ago about how we have always been a unified country during my life, but how it feels more like each State is its own little country lately. Especially with States like Texas and Florida moving hard in one direction, and States like California moving hard in the other. The confederation of States doesn't seem like a workable solution now though, because the federal government has amassed so much power. It would be sad to see us split apart too, after having been something fairly great for a long time. IDK if they still teach the Articles of Confederation in school anymore, but reading those really allowed me to understand our country's structure a lot better.
Votes matter but you also have a system in place, and if you're necking the 50/50 vote point expect that system to matter. Going to lala land and imagining a system that isn't how your system actually works doesn't fix anything.
Get more people to vote
Discourage 3rd party bait picks that will never get elected because they don't even have a local/state/anything presence
As an added bonus, you'd probably need to get people more interested in house/senate elections if you actually wanted to do anything about the electoral college. Cause it's not being changed at the presidential level.