DFTBA

John Green, alongside with his brother Hank, started making videos on YouTube on January 2007, as a way to keep in touch with each other. 6 years from that, they have created a huge community of people, called "Nerdfighters", who work together towards decreasing "Worldsuck" (that is, the amount of bad things in the world) just by doing good things for others.

Very recently, the Vlogbrothers (as they are worldwide known now) started a channel called Crash Course, in which they post videos about academic topics such as Literature, Chemistry, Biology, History, and Ecology. This is a fun and interesting way of learning new things or adding knowledge about the topics you may be studying at school/university at the moment.

As this is a class of US History, I decided that it would be a great idea to post the list of videos that John Green has done about the matter, given that we have already seen all these topics in class.

A nation votes, Ohio decides

Today, in the United States of America, citizens are voting to elect their next President, as well as their congressmen for various states. However, not all votes are created equal. The two campaigns are spending big money on only a few states: the so-called "swing states" that will decide the election. If you are a republican living in New York, your vote does not count. The same can be said for a democrat living in Texas. 

This is due to how the electoral college works, as explained in the video above. The US uses a winner-take-all electoral system, where all the electoral votes from a state are granted to a single candidate if he gets just over 50% of the votes. 

This can lead to situations where the race comes down to a single state. For example, in the 2000 elections, the state of Florida gave the presidency to Bush after months of controversial recounts because the result was too close to call. This created a situation where 500 votes decided the next president of the US, regardless of the fact that Al Gore had obtained 500,000 more votes than Bush, on a national scale.

On this election, all polls seem to suggest that Ohio will determine the president of the new term. No Republican candidate has ever won the presidency without carrying this state. Depending on how Ohio decides, this might create another scenario where the president-elect does not have the popular vote. Jon Stewart, a famous comedian in the US, captures the irony of it on the video below and on his converage of the election night, titled "A nation votes, Ohio decides".

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Swing State Hell
www.thedailyshow.com
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