Hacking the Election
Since the start of Trump’s presidency, there have been rumors of Russian meddling in the election and collusion between Trump’s staff and the Russians. Multiple sources and investigations have led to the conclusion that the Russians had interfered in our election, an idea so outrageous and upsetting to Americans that it has remained in the news cycle for two years. However, with all of these talks of the social networks connecting the Russians to America in the time leading up to the 2016 election, we must realize that there were multiple other factors in place when it came to the election and the founding fathers may have been the ones to put Donald Trump into office.
Since the writing of the constitution, the president has been chosen not by the citizens, but rather by the electors who are voted on by the citizens. The electoral college has been put in place such that a voter in Wyoming has a tremendous amount of power compared to a Californian. Additionally, in the cases of 2000 and 2016, the winner of the electoral college vote has differed from the winner of the popular vote, leading to a president that was less popular than his opponent. This leads to an interesting strategy for candidates, who instead of campaigning in front of the general public, campaign in “swing states”, those of which are divided and have a large effect on the outcome of the election, due to the winner-takes-all aspect of elections. Each state has a number of electors, a payoff for a specific candidate if he or she receives the majority of votes in that state, and a population of voters needed to win these electors. The campaign manager of an election must strategize in such a way to maximize this payoff while considering that specific state’s voting history.
I personally have always wondered whether this so-called Russian meddling played by this strategy for the US election or whether citizens were targeted at random for this social media meddling or whether the Russians took this into account while trying to influence the US election.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-trump-election-timeline.html?rref=collection%2Fnewseventcollection%2Frussian-election-hacking&action=click&contentCollection=politics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection
http://aws.cricketmedia.com/media/20160712172634/Game-Theory-Electoral-College.pdf