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Comment by daleco | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't we talking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal example? Another issue of the Electoral colleges is that a candidate could target only a few amount of people (70k according to the documentary) for changing the course of the election. Even if this has been fixed by Facebook. Shouldn't it be considered as a major flaw of the election system?

Source: "The great Hack" - Netflix doc.

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Why is it that the Cambridge Analytica "hack" is even an issue? The reason is because the data was used to get an "evil" republican elected. The exact same tactics were used to get Obama elected, and nobody seems to be complaining.

It’s harder to manipulate millions of people rather than 70k.

You’re right, it was also used to get Obama elected. It’s still wrong.

Though Obama won the popular vote, too, by 8% and 4%, respectively. Obama would still be elected under these changes.

Indeed, the system Harper Reed built for the 2012 Obama campaign was widely hailed at the time for how it personalized campaigns to each individual voter, by building a big data store about every voter in the US:

"Those apps include sophisticated analytics programs like Dreamcatcher, a tool developed to "microtarget" voters based on sentiments within text."

"All of the data collected through various volunteer interactions and other outreach found its way into Narwhal's data store, where it could be mined for other purposes. Much of the data was streamed into Dreamcatcher and into a Vertica columnar database cluster used by the analytics team for deep dives into the data."

[1] from Ars Technica: Built to win: Deep inside Obama’s campaign tech https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/built...

This seems to over-abstract the issue by treating the content of each campaign as irrelevant.

> The Great Hack

I found the title to be self-fulfilling. That documentary was awful! It's just a tag along the journey of a smart narcissist to cover her ass.

I didn’t like the lady either, she’s was definitely doing it for the money.

One aspect of the Electoral College is that it's a built in corruption firewall.

Right now, if an election system is "compromised" (electronically, corrupt officials, etc), it will affect that precinct, the local elections, possibly the state-wide races, and rarely the Presidential.

With a simple majority vote, a compromise anywhere in the system - adding or removing votes - impacts the system as a whole.

Other democratic countries are doing just fine without an electoral college.

Most of which are Parliamentary systems which are very similar structurally.

In those cases, you don't directly elect a Prime Minister either. You elect an MP in little winner-take-all elections and then the party (or coalition) gets together and elect the PM from their own ranks.

It's not quite 1:1 with an Electoral College but it's not direct democracy either.

Which countries are direct democracies?

Because using psychology to manipulate voters isn't new. And all of a sudden we're supposed to find it outrageous?

The problem is the relatively small number of voters that need to be convinced.

Yes, it’s not new to manipulate people, the low cost for high efficiency is new. Clinton had almost 3M more votes than Trump. It would be much more expensive to manipulate 3M (1% us population, 1.2% voters), rather than 70k (0.02% pop, 0.028% voters). If winning the election is about properly manipulating 0.04% of the voters, that’s very scary and not working as initially designed.

Edit:math

Really, whether or not it's new or old is a complete red herring. As is whether or not it has historically helped on candidate or another. The issue is whether or not it's a vunlerability.

Complaining that "it's always been that way" is like saying, "We've been pwned that way for a decade. Why should we fix that security hole?"

I find it incredible that people don't look at elections with the same critical eye that they do software security systems. The other cool thing is that all of your candidates for president are chosen by proxy vote! So as long as you can subvert the people who have all the proxy votes, you can choose who can even enter the election! Heck, you can stuff up both sides just for giggles. How much is the POTUS worth? Surely billions.

Yes, billions is right.

That's why I've always found "the Russians stole the election with $100k of Facebook ads!" comical.

Both Facebook and Putin wish they could get that kind of ROI.

in some states electors are legally bound to vote for the popular majority from the state. I thought I had read this was true almost universally though it appears some states don't have this rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016...

Maybe if Clinton had bothered to campaign in the Rust Belt, she would have won. Trump's politics was aimed at industrial workers, and Clinton thought she didn't need them to win. She bet wrong.

But maybe it's better that candidates don't need the Rust Belt to win? How many voters are there, compared to places like LA and NYC?

Lots. The Rust Belt is heavily populated. We're talking about tens of millions of people in a region stretching from upstate NY to Illinois.

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