Christelle, one of the aides for Fran has just dropped a bombshell in my belief lap.
I was explaining to her how the system of so-called democracy in the UK was not democratic at all due to the different sizes of constituency populations and the iniquitous completely non-democratic 2nd chamber.
I went on to say that the USA presidential elections were not always correct, that Clinton garnered more votes than Trump in his so called victory.
She then said it is the same with the presidentials in France. Surely not, is it? I thought that Macron won the overall vote against Le Pen. Was I wrong to think so?
It’s a problem wherever there are constituencies and not a straight count of votes.
If person A wins a majority of constituencies, and therefore the overall election - but does so in low population constituencies whereas person B wins a lower number of large constituencies it is quite possible to lose but get more votes overall.
Fiddling with boundaries to favour one candidate over another is “gerrymandering”.
As to France in 2022 Macron got 18,768,639 votes compared with le Pen’s 13,288,686, in 2017 it was 20,743,128 vs 10,638,475
The US senate must be one of the worst of that sort of distortion. California has about 40 million and Wyoming about 600,000. Both have two senators. There are several other low population states in the south (Kentucky being one ?) that are Republican strongholds. Never seen a figure for how many votes each party got in the senate elections, but it’s probably heavily skewed.
Edit : Of course, it’s the same for the Presidential election.
I think the logic behind the US system was that as a Federation of individual States, it was fairer for each State to have equal weight in the electoral and legislative process, regardless of size, wealth, or population.
That probably made sense in the early days when most western States were extremely thinly populated compared to the East Coast.
If you think of the US as a homogeneous “nation”, then votes per State makes a lot less sense.
Whether you see this as good or bad is also a matter of your political persuasion - the more industrialised and heavily populated coastal States tend to vote Democrat, while the rural ones go Republican.
Plotted on a map this makes it look as though the US is predominantly Republican.
However, as they say, land does not vote - people do, so if you re-plot the data to make it proportional to numbers of voters it starts to look like this:
The republican vote is mainly in poor rural areas.
