I've often been irritated by people who treat "majority rule" as a simple and inviolable tenet of democracy. Any familiarity with the theoretical or practical aspects of elections (let alone theories of government) will quickly show that this is absurd.

Put simply, the number of votes cast for each candidate does not reflect "the will of the people" or any other semi-mythical concept with innate validity-- in fact, the way that people cast votes reflects how they interact with a given electoral system. This is just a special case of the maxim that data have no meaning independent of the method used to generate them.

I hope that serves as a good introduction for an essay over at Huffington Post (Popular Vote claims "just a myth") discussing why the popular vote total is completely irrelevant in Presidential elections, and why attempts to legitimize (or delegitimize) the individual elections based on popular vote tallies is essentially arbitrary, and consequently amounts to a dangerous perversion of the democratic process.

The core message of the essay is this:

The Rules Determine the Goal; the Goal Determines the Strategy

And I might add, "the strategy determines the tallies"

P.S. Since the essay focuses on the 2000 election, we might add that the "popular vote" argument was not the only argument used to delegitimize the outcome of that election.

Cross posted to Swords Crossed