Wasting votes

I find it odd that people who claim to be liberal and believe in democracy would demonise people who vote third parties.  Especially since that is pretty anti-democratic and authoritarian behaviour to persecute people based on their political leanings.

One of the allegations is that somehow I "wasted my vote". Now, let's look at the result of the 2016 election.

Not the big 306 "votes" for Trump or the 232 "votes" for Clinton, but the real numbers representing the popular vote.

The Fact is Hillary Clinton won the popular vote with 65,853,516 (48.5% votes) to Trump's 62,984,825 (46.4% votes), but lost in the electoral college by receiving 232 (43.1%) of the electoral votes to Trump's 306 (56.8%) votes.


The fact is that the Electoral College is really where votes count, not the popular vote. But there is distortion even when the popular vote sort of aligns with the Electoral College results.

The problem is the anti-democratic Electoral College is not being discussed with all sorts of other silly theories being bandied about.

But, the bottom line is that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million.

Maybe my one vote might have changed the result, but the fact is that is not likely given the nature of the Electoral College.

I should have mentioned that one of the many attractive points about the Green Party is that it was talking about meaningful election reform.  They were also talking about how the duopoly has hijacked the elections. This hijacking is so bad that the League of Women Voters withdrew its sponsorship of the presidential debates in 1988 because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter.

But neither party is discussing the real result of the election, which is that Clinton won.

Personally, I know how I felt in 2000 when Gore won the popular vote only to be stripped of the victory by the US Supreme Court stopping the recounts

I don't regret the way I voted and would still do it again knowing the outcome.  In fact, I feel sorry for the people who appear to not realise that the loss was in the Electoral College, not the popular vote.

I think the people who voted for Clinton are the ones who wasted their votes this time.  And they will keep wasting them until real election reform becomes an issue. 

And one of the most important reforms is getting rid of the Electoral College.