How the Vote Broke, in Historical Perspective
From the inbox, an engineer who is directly involved in the technology for tabulating votes in a number of states sends this report on the historically unusual gap between Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote lead and Donald Trump’s electoral college margin. (Andrew McGill has been covering this issue for us since the election.) The engineer wrote over the weekend with this summary:
It looks as if Hillary Clinton will top the popular-vote margin in percentage points of President Carter in 1976, also JFK in 1960, three elections in the 1880s and James Knox Polk in 1844. And I should include the 2000 election as well.
That is, he said, a total of seven people will have taken the presidency with a winning margin that is smaller, as a proportion of the popular vote, than Hillary Clinton will probably end up having over Donald Trump, in defeat.
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Now, the background, in a note from this same reader a few days earlier:
I work in the election industry—on the counting side, not the political side. When I went to sleep on election night, Trump’s lead was a million votes and climbing. This was not my preferred outcome, but I accepted the selection of the people—only it wasn’t, as it turns out.
My calculation today gives Clinton a 2.5 million vote margin when everything is counted. (Vote-by-mail states count slowly—more paper handling for mail-ins. California has three million uncounted ballots, one million in LA County (3 to 1 for Clinton) and another half-million in San Diego County (3 to 2 for Clinton).) She may also pick up more votes in other vote-by-mail states out west—think Oregon, Washington, Colorado.
Read more from The Atlantic:
The Electoral College Was Meant to Stop Men Like Trump From Being President
The Unmistakable Signal Sent by Picking Jeff Sessions for Attorney General
This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
