The Electoral College and the Knapsack Problem
mike.place
mike.place
I suppose what you mean instead is that each side gets one round, and the new goal is for the democrats to create a distribution which the republicans cannot win by moving people around.
I believe that ends up being identical to the knapsack problem since you now simply have the democrats wishing to maximize their margin in each state based on its number of EVs; in fact, I think that's an even more straighforward knapsack problem than the one in the article since we don't have to take the complement.
Perhaps you meant something else entirely different, in which case I don't think you described it clearly enough.
Republicans would need orders of magnitude more people to move
There seem to be one or two people who are taking this as a serious idea. Stating the obvious; it is faster and cheaper for political parties to change their policies to things people will vote for. Nobody is an [Party X] because they were branded at birth.
The reason the margins are so close is because the politicians are purposefully doing just that, and it is knife-edge which does a better job. 2008 and 2012 represent colossal failures by the Republican party to campaign effectively/Obama was an election winning machine.
It's amazing the divergence between the policies that the US population supports and what gets enacted by their government and that's down to a lot of hard work and low morals on the behalf of the Republican party.
2/3rds of voters who approved of Trump in 2016 think Obama is a Muslim. That's truly impressive work and should not be dismissed as an accident.
All of the polls show that Republicans and Democrats are not that far apart on non social issues. Trump went after people who wanted to “protect their culture”.
Yeah, but the implication in calling Obama a Muslim was that he was also sympathetic to Islamic extremism (see: the meme that he "founded Al Qaeda",) and that he was possibly a Manchurian candidate (after all, why would he hide his Muslim status if he didn't have nefarious motives?,) and that was just a variation on the theme of "angry, violent black man" scaremongering.
Remember that the Republicans tried to paint Obama as a radical Christian black separatist at first through guilt by association with Bill Ayers and the fiery rhetoric of preacher Jeremiah Wright. That didn't stick, so they pivoted to "secret Muslim" in order to take advantage of post 9/11 xenophobia.
None of it was intended to speak to any part of the populace that didn't already consider "Muslim" a pejorative by default.
Honestly, I’m as far as you can get from Trump’s base, but all of the Democrats scare me as being too far left. I would love to see a Democratic President and a Republican House (the Senate approves judges, etc.). The fewer laws the government can pass the better.
Caring about climate change and a belief in regulation and social welfare is the Democrats' entire purpose, it's what they're selling. UBI is a "pocketbook" issue, as is socialized healthcare and loan forgiveness.
I agree the Democrats fail utterly at communicating this to mainstream and rural voters, though.
You can believe in social welfare without burdening business with social policies -- i.e. don't increase minimum wage but increase access to the Earned Income Tax Credit and make it easier to get. The same with healthcare, don't force businesses to provide it, the government should provide it. If it takes higher taxes to do it -- I'm okay with that.
I'd love to host some of y'all in California here in Atlanta to help turn our state blue again. Your state doesn't need your votes, but ours desperately does.
We're going to draw the district lines this election that will impact the next ten years. Seriously, please help us undo the gerrymandering and win two Senate seats.
(Atlanta isn't half bad, either!)
Now if you don't actually establish Georgia as your legal residence, that's a whole other animal. But there's nothing stopping someone who rents in LA from ending their lease, moving to Georgia for 6 months, working remotely and voting in the GA election. And what they do with their life after the election is their choice.
Is this a moral gray area? Yea, probably. Is this a legal gray area? No, it's pretty well settled.
https://www.vote.org/voter-registration-rules/
https://www.infoplease.com/us/government/elections/residency...
> Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote— Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
While it would be legal to switch your residence to a different state to vote tactically, it is definitely against the law to pay someone to do that (and to be paid to do that, too).
Update: It’s also unclear that enticing someone to move and paying them to do so falls within that definition, because you’re not paying them to vote or withhold a vote. They’re free to vote, or not, as they see fit.
- it would probably cost more than you think per person to get someone to pick up their life and move to a state of your choosing
- it's not clear ahead of time how many people you need to get to move
- it's not even really clear ahead of time which places you want them to move to. How many people would have guessed that moving Democrats to Wisconsin ahead of 2016 would be the most efficient path?
1. How would you verify a moved person voted a particular way?
2. It cuts both ways... there are are billionaires on all points of the political spectrum.
3. If you're a billionaire, why would you even care that much? Politics has an effect on your bottom line perhaps, but there's simply nothing that's inaccessible to a billionaire. To that point, the politics common people are really not that important except when it can impact business.
The Koch Brothers' political network supposedly budgeted $889M for 2016 campaigns [0]. Clearly, some billionaires care quite a bit. Whether they're zealots or expected a positive ROI for their businesses, who knows.
Clinton + Super PACs spent $1,184,100,000 on the 2016 campaign [1]. Divided by 77,747 = $15,230.16 per person. All other problems aside, it seems within the realm of possibility that a PAC of Billionaires could raise enough money to move enough people to sway an election.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/us/politics/kochs-plan-to...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...
Inversely that could pay for a couple of months of a staffer on the ground going around and trying to convince locals to change their vote. That feels like it could go a bit further than the 1 vote the $15k buys.
And if a group of Mega Billionaires expecting a positive ROI believed they could lock up an election by convincing ~77,747 sympathetic voters to move, how much more money do you imagine they'd be willing to deploy?
A better exercise would be to look at this map [0] and figure out how many people need to be moved to traditional swing states to assure a win for either side.
I am starting with this angle because the coastal elites live on the coasts which are blue, and we are assuming they want blue.
The numbers probably arent that high and if you also imagine that there is some herd immunity to adding more blue ideology people in, then you might get more to flip as well.
I’ve been wondering if blue people moved to those places would see different needs of the people there and begin voting red. They came for their civil rights causes that they have been assuming republicans consciously think about and choose to undermine, but notice something completely different.
If they can disguise it as something else - "Temporary relocation grant to help small communities" or some other made up name, and then ensuring that everyone involved understands the real reason, but nobody leaks it out. But that seems morally and legally wrong. Otherwise, they could just hand out restaurant coupons or prepaid credit cards to local people asking them to vote a certain way? That's cheaper than paying moving costs, rent, and finding jobs for all those people to come from another part of the country.
The preferences are not as strong I suspect. If someone out there offered tens of thousands in relocation packages, stipends, other assistance, I imagine a lot of people would be joining that party, whatever the party is.
"Go tell this org that you are voting this way and you need help moving and you get $50k to move to Georgia" you don't think the party won't find a lot of "helpers" all of the sudden.
At that point that's not very different than handing out coupons or gift cards locally.
Just like you can wrap up the relocation package in a language that makes it "legal", can wrap up handing out gift cards in a similar language. "We just want you to go out and vote, here is a restaurant card, and a free Uber trip, and a free, an amusement park ride tickets,..." etc but you can reach a lot more "voters"t that way.
[0] https://www.cato.org/blog/dollars-vote-2016-election This analysis gives ad spend as $3-20 per candidate per vote. Assuming only 20% of voters were undecided, the marginal cost can't be more than $100.
I haven't thought this through completely, but I think I'd expect the opposite. Gerrymandering works by designing districts in which your opponent wins by huge margins (among other things). Close races can happen for lots of reasons, but they don't generally happen in an situations we recognize as gerrymandered.