system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: You cannot assume Presidential popular vote results would be the same if there was no Electoral College

Campaigning is like test taking, there is value in knowing how to play the game that can get you extra points/votes.  For better or for worse, we see data become a larger part of understanding how best to campaign to win an election.  All of this must happen within a context of the rules, which is right now, winning a State awards you Electoral College (EC) votes, creating the case in which you can lose the popular vote but still win the Presidency.  We've seen this with Bush/Gore and most recently with Trump/Clinton.  


What I see crop up again and again, is the assumption that if the EC were abolished, that it automatically means reality would have played out such that the popular votes that occurred under the system of EC, would be the exact same.  This is a major flaw in logic and is results-oriented thinking.  If the rules are different, the game will be played different, and the outcomes will be different.  I am in no way suggesting Trump would have won the popular vote, simply saying things would have played out differently and that you cannot rule out the slim probability that he would eek it out.  A better example is Bush/Gore, as it was significantly closer in popular vote count.  


I think it's really easy to prove that campaigns would play out differently, in that there's more value in going to population centers to pick up votes.  It also activates disgruntled voters, like a Democrat in Oklahoma, or a California Republican, whose vote hasn't counted in decades.  These voters are heavily discouraged from casting a vote, but wouldn't be if the EC were abolished, thus proving pretty comfortably that the results were different.  


CMV: You can't assume that the Popular Vote under an Electoral College system is the same as the Popular Vote in a system without the Electoral College.
gpt
I agree that campaigns would be run differently, and that combined with new incentives to show up and vote could mean that the resulting popular vote might be different if the electoral college were not used. 

However, the popular vote from the election *was* the closest measurement of what we’d have seen without the EC. Spending time trying to change people’s opinions about something self-evident, when it represents your obvious bias, seems rather self-serving. 

The fact was that the previous presidential election was won only because of a set of rules designed to prevent some colonies from having more power than others, despite having more people. The rule set is arbitrary and reduces the value of some individual citizens’ influence in an election, compared to other individuals, and the people who feel like they lost that time will of course be griping about it. If it were the other way around, Trump supporters would be laughing at Clinton supporters claiming that if the EC hadn’t been there, she’d have campaigned differently and won anyway. Nobody can know for sure, but we do know for sure what the popular vote actually *was*.