#and his name is Eward now as well :3

[keeps-ache]

Eward and Bella ~+~ !

[Credit to Flameteeth for Eward's Design !]

[helenarlett-rex]

Okay, I will try to explain this as best as I can, but even I don’t fully understand it because it’s an antiquated, bullshit system invented by a bunch of old, white, rich dudes who purposely designed it to make sure they, and people like them, stayed in power.

The American people don’t vote for the president. People think that’s how it works, but it doesn’t. What’s actually going on is people are voting to tell their state electors who they want them to vote for and then the state electors vote for the president. Each state is worth a certain number of Electoral Votes. For example, I live in Tennessee which is worth 11 votes. Each state is worth a different number of votes and it’s very disproportionate. For example Wyoming has 3 Electoral Votes, which when you consider the population, comes out to about 1 vote for every 135,000 people. While California has 55 Electoral Votes which comes out to about 1 vote for every 411,000 people. (Someone tank Adam Ruins Everything for doing that math on that for me.) Which means it takes 3 votes in California to equal 1 vote in Wyoming. Why is it like this? Because fuck you, we said so, that’s why.

Now as far as I understand, (and what I understand could be wrong because this shit is confusing enough already) after people vote all the votes in each state are added up. We’ll use my state of Tennessee for an example again... Tennessee got more votes for Trump (because we suck) than it did for Biden so Trump won Tennessee. That means Trump got the 11 Electoral Votes Tennessee is worth. It takes 270 Electoral Votes to become president.

So you are thinking, okay... It’s just a point game. Each candidate is trying to win as many states as he can to get 270 points and when he does that he wins... Well, no... That’s not exactly it... You see, those 11 Electoral Votes Tennessee is worth don’t go straight to Trump. Instead they go to our state electors, and the state electors then have those votes to cast for whoever they want. If you think that sounds like we are voting to give our votes to someone else so they can use them to vote for who they want, then, yeah... That’s pretty much what it is.

The state electors are supposed to cast their votes for who their state voted for. So it trump won Tennessee, then the state electors are supposed to use those 11 votes to vote for Trump. But here’s the thing... They don’t HAVE to... Some states have rules in place to punish electors for not voting for whoever won the state, but not all states have them. So even if Trump won Tennessee, once the 11 votes are given over to the Tennessee electors they could say, “To hell with that, I’m casting these votes for Kanye West instead.” And this is a thing that has actually happened before. Back in 2016 Hillary Clinton won the state of Colorado, worth 9 Electoral Votes, but not all 9 of those votes were cast for Hillary. Some of the electors in that state decided to instead vote for Colin Powell, who wasn’t even running for president. In 2004 an elector in Minnesota cast a vote for John Ewards.

(Thank you again, Adam. I didn’t know that one.)

John Ewards doesn’t exist. We can assume he meant John Edwards, who was running for Vice President under John Kerry, but yeah... He didn’t even vote for the president. He tried to vote for the Vice President, spelled his name wrong, and voted for someone who didn’t exist as a result.

So that’s how the Electoral College works. We vote by state. The votes are added up for one guy or the other. Then the amount of votes our state is worth is handed over to someone else and he takes what the state wanted under consideration as he votes for whoever the fuck he wants.

Voting in America is kind of like when your little brother wants to play Nintendo so you hand him an unplugged controller and let him THINK he’s playing while you are actually still playing yourself.