Who Won The Presidential Vote in Louisiana?

Everyone loves the United States Presidential election right? Where everyone is always really calm and easygoing for a couple months. Or maybe not.

Some people cannot wait until the election is over. They are tired of the ads, the constant news coverage, the fighting on their social media, the fighting in their family, the annoying coworkers...they done with it all.

But even the people who are annoyed by the Presidential election often find themselves inside a poling booth. While voter turnout is never anywhere near 100%, there's still decent turnouts for Presidential elections ever four years.

However, not every vote is created equal when it comes to the Presidential election. While the US relies on "popular vote" to elect Senators, members of Congress, Governors, Mayors...pretty much everything, the "popular vote" doesn't decide the President of the United States.

The method the President is elected by is called the "Electoral College". Which is a system that was created at the end of the country's original Constitutional Convention as a way for states with large numbers of slaves to increase their power. At this point in the country's history, those who were eligible to vote in the US was very restricted. In fact, during those original Presidential elections, the only votes cast were from pre-selected members who gathered together to cast their votes.

But the reason slave-owning states fought hard for the Electoral College was so they could count the people they "owned" as the state's overall population, and could get credit for those people when they used their voting power.

Realistically, when the Electoral College was put together, the country's framers didn't have things like "political parties" in mind, and would probably be dismayed that not only are there political parties, but that our country has coalesced around just two. This isn't hyperbole either, in George Washington's Farewell Address, he issued a dramatic appeal to avoid creating political parties. That was in 1796!

Over the next 225 years, the country has retained the racist origins of the Electoral College, and forced a two-party political system into it, against the will of our founders. But it hasn't been without challenges.

There have been about half-a-dozen aggressive challenges to the Electoral College, including a movement in the 1960s that nearly succeeded. Some of these challenges have been in the courtroom as well, arguing that the Electoral College is unconstitutional, because it effectively throws out every vote cast by a US citizen who votes against the majority of their state.

However, until a real change takes place, the popular vote for President doesn't matter. Which means the electoral votes from Louisiana will go to the state winner every cycle. Here's what that has looked like for every election since 1900...