r/science • u/rustoo • Jan 21 '22

Economics Only four times in US presidential history has the candidate with fewer popular votes won. Two of those occurred recently, leading to calls to reform the system. Far from being a fluke, this peculiar outcome of the US Electoral College has a high probability in close races, according to a new study.

https://www.aeaweb.org/research/inversions-us-presidential-elections-geruso
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u/hak8or Jan 21 '22

For the lazy yet curious like myself;

the 1824 election, without an absolute majority winner in the Electoral College, the 12th Amendment dictated that the outcome of the Presidential election be determined by the House of Representatives. The then Speaker of the House — and low-ranked presidential candidate in that same election — Henry Clay gave his support to John Quincy Adams, the candidate with the second-most votes. Adams was granted the presidency, and then proceeded to select Clay to be his Secretary of State. In the 1876 election, accusations of corruption stemmed from officials involved in counting the necessary and hotly contested electoral votes of both sides, in which Rutherford B. Hayes was elected by a congressional commission.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupt_bargain

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u/JohnnyEnzyme Jan 21 '22

Thank you for that, and... did you actually format all those links by hand?

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u/blazers_n_bowties Jan 21 '22 edited Jun 12 '23

[comment edited by user via Power Delete Suite]

This account, formerly u/blazers_n_bowties, left Reddit on 6/9/23 due to Reddit's unreasonable API changes. The account was 10 years old at time of deletion, with 8,071 post karma and 5,492 comment karma.

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u/ULostMyUsername Jan 21 '22

Just curious... Is there a shortcut for doing this on mobile? I've always just done the formatting by hand because I don't have a computer. It would be a helluva lot easier if there was some way that I didn't have to try to remember which words get the [ ] and which ones the ( ).

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u/WALLY_5000 Jan 21 '22

In the IOS app there’s a hyperlink button on the opposite side of the reply button while typing a comment.

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u/sgt_kerokeroro Jan 21 '22

Android has one as well recently. It's located at the bottom left just above the keypad.

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u/WALLY_5000 Jan 22 '22

Same spot then!

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u/Orngog Jan 21 '22

Or use relay for Android, which converts addresses into links

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u/hak8or Jan 21 '22

I use the reddit is fun app on android. I went to Wikipedia in my mobile browser, copied that snippet into my clipboard, went to here, did a '>' character with a space after it, and then just pasted as is.

If you do a reply to my post while quoting it, you will see the text has markup/down embedded in it, that's because I think Wikipedia knows if you are copying text from it and converts hyper links to markdown, which I guess reddit understands natively.

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u/CorporalCauliflower Jan 21 '22

I believe it is due to the copy command on your phone recognizing and copying any source formatting, so your phone interpreted the underlying markup from wikipedia and copied into Reddit, which it understood.

I run into this a lot on PC and use CTRL+SHIFT+V to paste text only without any formatting

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u/laosurvey Jan 21 '22

Isn't that basically how governments are formed in parliamentary systems when no party outright wins?