Topic: PoliticsIn election season, we regularly see references in the USA to "The popular vote" as well as nationwide polls comparing presidential candidates. These are self-destructive, and ideally should be curtailed.
There is no popular vote in US election law. People talk about one because newspapers add up the 51 different races that are done and publish a number. People make several significant errors about this number. They talk about a candidate "winning" or "losing" this popular vote, which of course is not correct -- you can't win or lose a race you're not even trying to compete in, and no candidate does so.
Instead what people are probably interested in is a different number, "What the popular vote might be, if the USA had an actual popular vote race which determined a winner." Many people would prefer a popular vote to the electoral college, for fairly obvious reasons. Problem is that the newspaper published number is not that number and may not even be close to it. It might be possible to try to calculate the theoretical number people would like to use to compare, but at present nobody does that.
Many countries don't have a popular vote but sometimes report it. In Canada, in the last election the Liberal party got 32.6% of the unofficial "popular vote," and while there are people who lament this, there's actually much less consternation over this than what it seen in the USA when the electoral college has an opposite sense than either the fake popular vote or even a real one. The Liberals rule with a minority but came close to the ful
|
