Opinion: Just count all presidential election votes equally already

To the editor: A cornerstone of our democracy is that each citizen has the right to vote and that every vote counts. However, as a resident of California, my vote was “wasted.” For my vote to count, I would have to do an impossible calculation of which states might help my candidate win the required electoral votes and then move to one of them and vote there. (“Clinton won as many votes as Obama in 2012 — just not in the states where she needed them most,” Dec. 9)

We want more people, including young people, to vote. Yet we have a complicated system that can result in your vote being “wasted.”

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, but she did not win the election. Isn’t it time to simplify and just make every single vote count?

Joan Horn, Carlsbad

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To the editor: Considering President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral vote win while he fell short in the popular vote, it might be good to remember an election in which voters were even more polarized: 1860.

There were four major candidates in that election, and Abraham Lincoln received 180 of the 303 electoral votes but just 39.8% of the popular vote. If Stephen Douglas, who ran second in the popular vote but a distant fourth in the electoral college, had been the nominee of a unified opposition, it is unlikely that Lincoln’s percentage would have changed appreciably.

However, when the votes of the three losing candidates are combined, they would still not have been enough to obtain a majority in the electoral college; Douglas would have received about 100% of the vote in the states that soon seceded, while Lincoln would have had moderate majorities in his states. And virtually everyone who supported Clinton and, I think, most of those who supported Trump would consider that a good thing.

Bill Quade, Granada Hills

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