Elect a clown, expect a circus. This what the country voted for although I can't really say that because the loser got 3 million more votes. Only in this country does the winner get less votes and the loser gets more. No where else in the entire world would anyone put up with that.
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I've been too busy to stop by lately, but I have a few minutes now.
Actually, there's nothing unique about getting fewer votes, but still winning elections, especially in countries that have - for all intents and purposes - more than two parties in the running. In Canada, with three major parties and a handful of minor ones, governments are often elected with a popular vote in the mid-30% range.
If you equate the electoral college with seats in the House of Commons, all a party needs to do in order to form a majority* government, is to scrape by with a simple majority of the votes cast in at least 50% of the available ridings (seats). Meanwhile, if the opposition parties gain ALL of the votes in less than half the ridings, they're SOL. That's comes from a first-past-the-post system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
*A party can form a minority government with less than half the seats if they hold more seats than any other individual party. The opposition parties can combine their parliamentary votes on a bill to defeat a governing party - generally if it's a money bill, such as the annual federal budget, which is called a vote of non-confidence.
There have been many debates here over the last few years about changing to some form of proportional representation system, but it never seems to go anywhere. Why? Because it's a Catch-22 situation. While in opposition, parties clamour for change, but can do nothing about it. When in government, there is no incentive for the governing party to change it.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of people have (effectively) no voice representing their views in parliament, because there votes are thinly spread across hundreds of ridings, but not enough within an individual riding to send a candidate to parliament.
Hey, democracy is messy, but I'll take it over any other system. Sad to say, we rarely vote governments
in, we generally vote them
out.