politics

Fwiw, this article title & description, like every other media source in existence in our current capitalistic hellscape that as it chases profits to the exclusion of all else, somehow converts even true statements into false ones (literal heroes like Ian Danskin's Innuendo Studios aside ofc, although that's probably why it struggles to find funding, b/c it doesn't "enrage" more than it informs).

Thus, that statement "the election will be decided by roughly 6% of voters in just six states" is the tiniest bit true, more than 99% false, and any way you slice it, is designed to make you angry. And therefore talk about and share it. As we are doing now.

Rest assured, all the votes will be counted (barring some other event where that somehow does not happen - meh, it's been known to occur before, see e.g. Bush in Florida where his brother was in charge of the counting process - but why would we think that a conflict of interest could be there!?), from all of the voters.

It is just that there is this statistical model that the authors are using, whereby states that usually tend to vote one way, are thereby expected to vote the same way that they have in the past - there is nothing guaranteed about that, though it is indeed likely. And that model predicts a tie in many states. Which will be broken by a much smaller number of voting entities than the full 100%. As is always the case - that's just what "tie-breaking" means.

A much more informative title would have been a lot more boring, with caveats scattered all throughout every part of it, and would say something like "Based on our statistical modeling predictive algorithm that even we did not bother to look at but our interns who work hard for very little pay, haha j/k it is no pay at all, tell us that we should be making forward predictions into the next quarterly review and are you even still reading fuck you all but also if you could send us money that would be great...".

But if they did that then their website could not use your click as the product to sell to the advertising executives, so that they can buy a thirtieth summer home.

TLDR: tie-breakers gonna tie-break, same as always. Probably. Maybe. They think. We'll see.

Edit: you also happen to be correct and the USA is not a democracy - we are rather a plutocracy where monied interests subvert the election process and get their way regardless of who wins - but that is a separate matter from the one that this article was trying to get us to click on and read.

Edit 2: I also entirely skipped over the Electoral College system, since that refers to the form of democracy, not whether a democracy exists in the first place. You can, and probably should, argue that it is a very bad form, that is less democratic "in spirit", but at least technically it does lie within the purview of democratic systems.