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Comment by M_Grey | Hacker News Reader

Look at the numbers; they're still a vocal minority, they're just ones who vote as a bloc and have the geographic advantage. Trump got less than Romney after all.

The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the voting process, the winner is always going to be decided by a "vocal minority".

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> The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the voting process

Are you surprised by that? Properly voting costs a lot of money. I spent hours researching my options and another hour just walking to and from the voting dropoff location. When you add up all the time it takes to research an election and vote, multiply that by your personal time value of money, multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook, the individual voters cost/benefit is abysmal.

I'm amazed so many people actually do vote.

"multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook"

No you can't just loop that in there. The cost of walking to and from the polling location, fine, but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy. I waited in line for over an hour before work. If I extrapolate my salary out, I paid probably $10 worth of my time to vote. Considering that is once every 4 years, that's not much to live in a democracy where we get to vote to choose our representatives.

That would be a good response, except you can still live in a democracy without voting. You're just accepting that generally a plurality of the voting population will make a reasonable decision rather than saying you need to take part in that yourself every time.

I'm not sure how this is related to the cost/benefit of voting? Yes you can not vote and still live here. And? (I'm not trying to be argumentative, just don't understand).

I think it's a reply to your description of voting as one of "the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy". You don't, strictly, have to pay that cost.

Have you seen Trump's EPA pick? We're all going to pay one way or another.

Ah I see. Thanks

> but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy

Not really, we could randomly choose a few thousand people to vote and it would be practically just as effective without all the costs of having everyone vote. Better yet, you would probably get a better sample of the population too since it would not be biased towards people who normally vote.

You'd need perfect security... I mean perfect, or that would be a trivially easy system to control. The irony that the government subject to such a process would be needed to ensure the sanctity of that process should not be lost on you.

True, but our current system is more like security through size in that we hope the sheer number of votes drowns out voter fraud.

They both have problems and I'm not saying one is totally better than the other.

Can you expand on having to walk an hour to the 'voting dropoff location'? Firstly, do you mean where you actually vote and secondly is this an urban location?

I'm interested as having lived in two countries with different electoral systems (UK and Australia) and in urban and rural locations I never had to walk more than a few hundred yards to a polling booth (urban) or I could park pretty close (rural).

I also noticed that news coverage of the election was showing very long lines, is this a typical experience for voters in US?

> the winner is always going to be decided by a "vocal minority".

I hope, this is taken note. The job of a representative democracy is to get a representative. We could just use the concept of sortition - randomly sampled voters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

As it should be, if you're not passionate enough to get to the polls and stand in line for a few minutes then you shouldn't have a voice in the election.

I'm not sure that being ruled by the most passionate is actually that effective. It seems to me that passion and a lack of intelligence seem strongly correlated. It's easy to work someone who can't see the broader picture, up into a frenzy than it is to convince people with complicated and diverse views into that same frenzy. It is frankly, why the Republican party could toe the same line for decades, echo that on radio stations and TV chat shows, and consistently whip their base into a frenzy over a predictable handful of issues. By contrast Democrats had to appeal to a fundamentally more diverse base with a similarly diverse set of issues, less open to sloganeering.

There is an essential asymmetry when you value passion over knowledge of the issues, intelligence, and education.

"It seems to me that passion and a lack of intelligence seem strongly correlated"

This is actually categorically false, see the book Peak by Anders Ericsson for more information on this: https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp...

people who are passionate are MUCH more intelligent and knowledgeable about issues and it's been proven.

You forget that the GOP fractured and there was a neocon candidate whose vote would have gone to Trump otherwise.

A couple hundred thousand votes difference is a tie. It's bad weather in Texas or California turning off a quarter million voters and ending up with the same result.

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