Sort of hoping Clinton gets in. Republicans already have the House and Senate.

This whole popular/electoral split has created quite the mess.

This is more or less a repeat of the Bush/Gore election where the same discussion over the Electoral College system became topical. Nothing came of that discussion and I would expect nothing to come of this one either in terms of abolishing the institution.

The institution was implemented to prevent "tyranny by the masses" because it was decided by the ruling elite that the American public could not be trusted in selecting their head of state. Naturally, the defense of the system will state that the Electoral College system exists to give sparsely populated rural areas their say in the election, but all excuses aside, the effective result is that the election boils down to a handful of generally otherwise irrelevant swing vote states, and that is not open to debate; the campaigns by both main parties reflect this reality directly.

What this is accomplishing however, is the increasing realization that the US citizen's vote does not matter in the presidential election. At best, it can foster belief that the system is not legitimate, or at least does not legitimately represent the majority consensus. Unless of course you happen to be the beneficiary of the system in which the popular vote was lost by your party where you can lose the vote, but still win the election.

Good luck to those hoping the Electoral College system is changed or abolished. The Republican party is in complete control of Congress and it's a system that works to their advantage.

Electoral college I think would be improved if we moved away from winner take all, and separated the votes like some states already do. Getting rid of it would result in coastal rule, and would disgruntle most of middle America.

How does it not matter? If we moved to popular vote, the minority vote would think their vote "doesnt matter". The electoral college was made to ensure the minority had a vote, just like our bicameral legislature was. America is built on compromise, not majority. Hell, even the Revolutionaries were the minority of Americans at the time.

It doesn't matter. We are not voting for a US president. We are voting for how the elector will vote. Even then they can go rogue and an entire states election process is worthless. If it is a regular vote then it doesn't matter what color your state is. Most people don't vote because they know their vote doesn't mean squat where they are. And this way the power isn't in the hands of a few people who may or may not vote the way their own state wants.

Mechanically speaking, the EC worked as designed, but not as intended. There should be a move to adjust the number of electors, to reflect some proportionality. People in partisan, non-swing states vote at much lower rates: rates that would have pushed the Clinton lead up significantly. That is effective disenfranchisement that could not have been foreseen. Beyond that, we are rapidly moving past the states vs. federal government issue, as it has become the US vs. the global economy. The EC is an aging apparatus in a world that moves and is connected orders of magnitude greater than the late 1700s.

On the vote recount... the President doesn't like it, the Clinton campaign doesn't like it, Trump doesn't like it, the electoral commissions of the states involved don't like it, Democratic operatives don't like it, Stein herself has said there's no evidence of fraud. The odds of this affecting the Presidency is 0%.

I personally think it's just an elaborate way for Stein to get the names, addresses, and email addresses of millions of liberals that the Greens couldn't tap into during the election.

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On the Electoral College, some comments:

1) Electoral college votes are supposed to be apportioned based on the number of House representatives in each state + the number of Senators. The number of House members has effectively been capped at 435 members since 1940.

This cap was not the original design, and results in distortion in the number of EC votes that states have.

2) The EC is not democratic, but it's not supposed to be. Much of the Federal structure is not democratic at all. There are other aspects of the system that are further from "one person one vote". The Senate is two per state, no matter how many people living in the state - and this is the only part of the Constitution that cannot be amended.

The undemocratic Senate is also responsible for approving Presidential appointees, and requires a 2/3 majority of the Senate to approve foreign treaties.

3) States have the ability to control how their EC votes are divvied up. Both Maine and Nebraska have taken some steps to introduce a more "proportional" outcome. More states should do this, and should experiment with all different kinds of processes. They could also increase the penalties for "rogue" electors.

4) For me, rather than eliminate the EC, I'd like to see an increase in House Reps, increased penalties for rogue electors, alternate voting, and longer voting times (say from midnight Wednesday through to midnight Saturday), the elimination of party names from the Ballot, and reinstatement of the right to vote for felons.

Alternate voting: people vote for two candidates. They put a "1" in their first choice, and a "2" in their second choice. All the "1" votes are counted, if no candidate receives 50% then the worst performing candidate is eliminated, and their "2" votes are added to the total. This is done continuously until one candidate reaches the 50% mark.

Whether this is done at the state level and the entire pot of EC votes go to the winner, or on a congressional-district basis (with the extra 2 going to the overall winner) could be decided by the states.

honor the vote. Trump should be President fair and square

at this point I would consider a recount extremely suspicious, because A) the media/elites don't want Trump in office and B) what would explain the massive descrepancy at this point? its all very ehhhh

I will say this though- the electoral college is extremely logical how it is now. If you did simply a popular vote and say, hypothetically, the majority of the country's popular lived in one state (like California), then magically California would get to dictate how the other 49 states live and operate.

The reason the electoral college operates as it does (people winning the entire state rather than just talling votes up everywhere) is so one portion or region of the country doesn't absolutely dominate all of the rest. It balances things a bit more in terms of the space vs. population debate by not strictly being a popular vote but being SLIGHTLY adjusted based on winning states totals and giving a LITTLE more value to the smaller states where fewer people live (even that is fairly reasonably distributed in terms of lower states not awarding a ton of electoral votes)

this would be disastrous though, possibly trying to take the win from Trump.

Don't like Trump and don't like Hilary, but the country would turn into an absolute nightmare if they tried to overturn his win. I'm not sure how someone could justify the logic in a miscount being that badly off considering he won in quite a few places seemingly by a lot and lost where he lost by quite a bit too. In the supposed hotly contested states I could have sworn he was up by hundreds of thousands (Florida? PA? Wisconsin? sort of forget).

Hilary should honor what she said before, in terms of accepting a loss fair and square. Something seems extremely fishy about the Green party stepping up to debate the result when it won't effect them and also for Hilary to support a recount when she claimed she was going to honor the outcome.

what concerns me is that a Trump win clearly was not something that the media/corps/elites favored and now magically a recount is garnering traction?

the vote should be honored at this point unless the gov wants millions of people freaking out. Honor how the electoral college plays out. THere is no way that Hilary magically has a hundreds of thousands of missing votes in the closely contested states when at this point like 99% of their vote has been submitted in.

Just accept the result at this point and the electoral college process. The amusing thing is if this is reversed next election you'll hear the opposite from the PC/media machine about a recount being unreasonable (for whichever party has the more streamlined corp friendly nominee then)

recounting this result is not an option. honor the process