I hear a lot of people talk about how Trump didn’t get the majority of the vote and we should change to a popular vote system. Even Abraham Lincoln didn’t get the majority of the vote yet he moved on to be one of our most successful Presidents.
Why do we have a system that uses an Electoral College system where each state has an amount of votes reprehensive of their population. If you win the state you get all of the votes from that state. The reason is that we live in a democratic republic; we don’t live in a democracy. Democracies are terrible. A true democracy is mob rules, where 51 percent can take away the other 49 percent’s property and do whatever they want.
Of course, that is what some people want, to take away someone’s property that they want but are not willing to work for it. Take Bill Gates who has billions, it’s much more than he needs, why should we not have some of it? Just because he gives a lot away to needy people, he still lives in a great house too big for him and his wife.
Think about it, all those rich people and we have so many in need. Yes, it is true, that most of them earned it themselves but maybe they were just lucky. Sure we had a system that rewards hard work and good ideas but that does not help those who do not what to work at some 9 to 5 job or even one that might be 60 maybe requires 80 hour a week just to make more money. So let’s just let the majority of people determine who rules this country.
We were just lucky because our founding fathers saw that the masses would kill the golden goose that provided opportunity to those who would work for it. They realized that some people just want to take and not work for it. All we have to do is look around at those countries that took from the rich and gave to the masses. Soon there were no more rich and that was O.K. because they just started printing money.
Unfortunately, people began to realize that the money did not represent anything but colored paper and the country went broke. All the people went into poverty, those who were poor before and those who were once rich. Think about it do we want those masses in big cities to sit around and get paid while others continue to work? Do we want those masses to choose who is our President and not have our votes count?
By using the popular vote those masses would select the people, who promised them more stuff, just soak the rich! They do not want to work late or even pursue their dream by working late in their garage developing something great but they just want it all.
Our choice is free stuff until the money runs out or a system that rewards those who work hard, maybe has a great idea and works his or her behind off to make it a success. So far we have been blessed by our forefather’s dream of a democratic republic. A democracy may sound great but simply does not work, the big states with lots of people control everything. Makes you wish more people understood how and why this government works and why our forefathers set it up as they did.
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It is true that Abraham Lincoln did not get a majority of the votes in 1860, although he did get 55% in 1864. In 1860 there were three more strong nominees and the Republican party was running a candidate for president for the first time. Getting over 50% was unlikely for any of them. There have been 10 presidents who did not win a majority of votes. Five of those, including Lincoln, did win more popular votes than anyone else–a plurality. Like Donald Trump, there have been four other presidents who did not win a plurality–got fewer votes than an opponent; Quincy Adams, R. Hayes, B. Harrison, GW Bush, and Trump. Donald Trump’s plurality loss was five times more than the second biggest plurality loss, the Bush loss in 2000. Only two since FDR, Eisenhower and Obama, have won a majority of votes in two elections. Two of the last three presidents won an electoral victory while losing the popular vote. If we had been electing presidents by popular vote from the beginning, of the 45 presidents, only the five who did not win a plurality would have lost their elections. The first three were before 1900 and the last two have been in the 21st century. If that doesn’t give one pause to consider election alternatives, your motivation is something other than the best way to elect the best candidate. We can’t go back to the Founders for much help because they restricted the vote to an extreme. We’ve come a long way and there is nothing in the Constitution preventing the U.S. from revising its vote counting system to better match the times.