Electoral College Decision Tree
observablehq.com
observablehq.com
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-ma...
We have an extremely broken election system.
It means the polls were wrong. Which means, you'd have to reconsider the state-polls in all the other states with that new information: that the country is slightly redder than polls today suggest.
If Trump wins Florida, then there's a "hidden vote", so to speak, that's pushing Trump's victory. Once you add that hypothetical hidden vote to the rest of the states, it becomes a closer race.
---------
The question is whether or not you think there's a hidden vote for Trump. For all we know, there's a hidden vote for Biden this year: but we won't know that until the polls close and the votes are tallied up.
In the absence of knowledge, the best we can do is find indications of cross-correlations and model those.
There was a lot of analysis after the 2016 election cycle about the "shy Trump voter" hypothesis, and it really didn't hold up, and continues to not hold up with under the data available from this election cycle. It is completely unreasonable to postulate that the effect would be drastically bigger this year, after four years of Trump actually being in power and normalizing his status.
The main reasons to disbelieve the shy Trump voter hypothesis are that there's not a big difference in responses to live phone polls vs online polls, and that polls missed Senate and Gubernatorial races in 2016 by about the same amount as they missed the Presidential race.
Now, do people like me lean one way? "Get out of my face and leave me alone" people might plausibly lean toward Trump, but I wouldn't be dogmatic about it. Even more, I wouldn't claim that it's statistically significant.
Second, you said:
> It is completely unreasonable to postulate that the effect would be drastically bigger this year, after four years of Trump actually being in power and normalizing his status.
Um, what? We've had four years of the media relentlessly telling us how stupid, evil, and wrong Trump is, and how stupid and racist all his supporters are. We've seen the media twist the facts to support this narrative. (Yes, Trump does so also. That's not the point.) I would be astonished if there aren't a bunch of Trump supporters who aren't going to tell pollsters what they think. (No, I can't prove it. Even if it's true, I can't quantify it. But I bet that they're out there, and that there are a lot of them.)
The "shy Trump voter" hypothesis is not that there are lots of people who won't answer polls, but that there's a bias in the response rate and truthfulness of the responses received, and that pollsters are not able to accurately correct for that bias. So whether or not you answer polls doesn't speak to the validity or plausibility of that hypothesis. What is relevant is only the bit you say "might plausibly lean toward Trump"; clearly, your a priori opinion of that hypothesis is also fairly low.
> We've had four years of the media relentlessly telling us how stupid, evil, and wrong Trump is, and how stupid and racist all his supporters are. We've seen the media twist the facts to support this narrative.
You're talking specifically about the media that Trump supporters largely avoid watching and do not give any credence to. There's plenty of other evidence that Trump voters aren't ashamed of publicly expressing their support, and not much reason to believe that they would be much more shy about it when answering polls than when going about their daily lives.
The LA Times poll was one of few polls that predicted a Trump victory in 2016, the link has some details on the methodology:
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-polls-20161...
Basically, if you ask someone what they think about police brutality you might get ‘of course it’s wrong’, but veiling that question a bit into ‘how important are safe neighborhoods, strong law enforcement?’ will take you closer to the truth.
Not everyone is happy with the riots in America at all, they view it as crime and certainly don’t want that stuff anywhere near their neighborhoods. Or further, they might not want certain types in their neighborhoods. You see where I’m going? If you start to probe in this way, you’ll find your hidden Trump voter versus asking ‘Did Trump handle coronavirus well?’, which everyone well answer no to, but if the person doesn’t want black people in their neighborhoods as a hidden belief, your polls are going to be fucked (since that’s a closet Trump voter).
No one will ever say ‘social welfare is unfair because minorities leech off of it’, only your most shameless republicans will say it. But guess what, people believe this deep down. How can pollsters surface that belief without arousing suspicion?
Way too many states in the rust belt went red to act like some negligible dynamic was in play in 2016.
Just to note, I am a liberal, in case anyone thinks I harbor those beliefs. But how would you know? :p
I do find it rather humorous that people would claim this isn’t a thread where multiple people have been downvoted (in some cases to death) for stating or implying that they will be voting for Trump. None of the comments I’m referencing are particularly contentious, aggressive, or otherwise offensive, and yet here we are...
I don’t know what it’s effect is on polls, but in some parts of the country there is a definite reticence on the part of one side or the other to admit it.
Right now there are a tons of Florida polls and they are basically all within the margin right now.
There are plenty of polls.
The 2016 issue was that those polls were __correlated__. They were NOT independent polls, but somehow all the polls made the same mistake across the board.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our...
> Assumption No. 4: State outcomes are highly correlated with one another, so polling errors in one state are likely to be replicated in other, similar states.
> Basically, this means that you shouldn’t count on states to behave independently of one another, especially if they’re demographically similar. If Clinton loses Pennsylvania despite having a big lead in the polls there, for instance, she might also have problems in Michigan, North Carolina and other swing states. What seems like an impregnable firewall in the Electoral College may begin to collapse.
--------
Note that this post was written well before the results of 2016 were known. This was Nate Silver challenging the poll's assumptions back then. It was clear that "correlation" needs to be accounted for in people's models. That's the #1 issue regards to modern polls.
Lo and behold: Pennsylvania swung right towards Trump, and all the polls that were predicting a Pennsylvania win for Clinton were wrong. But not only that, it proved a bunch of other polls wrong in other states.
Such is the nature of Bayesian statistics: P(A, B) = P(A given B) * P(B).
P(A given B) should equal P(A) in an ideal world. But we live in a messy world with correlations: understanding B will change our understanding of other probabilities.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right...
Politics is extremely broken, yes. But I don’t think the electoral college is the fault.
As it stands today winner takes all makes big states like California and small states like Wyoming equally uncompetitive since there’s a snowball’s chance in hell they will ever flip majority the other direction. Proportionally allocating a state’s electoral votes would level the state by state playing field and align with popular vote, but you’d need either every state to agree or an amendment.
What's really annoying is how close we came to abolishing the electoral college, that 3 segregationists were able to halt almost univeral consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...
What you could do is do something like national popular vote weighted by electoral college delegates, because then you could get everyone but the swing states, and that would represent a majority. And then you're not disenfranchising half of both California and Texas.
Twice in the past two decades, the Electoral College has gone red when the popular vote would have gone blue, by a nontrivial margin. That leaves an avenue open whereby some state's legislators fall on their swords to fix that problem.
Whether it would stick is an open question -- they'd almost certainly face an angry campaign against them, and the swing back could undo it. So it's unlikely. But there is a route by which it could happen, since the state's benefit from the EC is mitigated by the distortion it causes.
EDIT: if you can get that many states to agree to it, then you could have just done a constitutional amendment. since all you need for that is for the states to agree, and the senate to agree. Senators come from the states.
So... if you can't get it passed that way, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Specifically:
>No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, ... , enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State
In this case, since such a deal is changing how the president is elected, and changing the balance of power between states and the fed, it could probably be seen as encroaching on federal power. So simply getting congress to pass a resolution approving it (which in theory would solve the "consent of congress") wouldn't fly like it would with an interstate compact dealing with something more mundane and less political like water rights, or mutual deal on air pollution between several neighboring states.
Disclaimer: IANAL, this is not legal advice etc.
2) the part that says no interstate compacts without express approval of congress
Uh, no. 38 states have to ratify an amendment in order for it to take effect. You can easily eclipse 270 electoral votes without getting the support of 38 states.
There is considerable debate about that.
> States are not allowed to make agreements with each other parallel to the system.
Yes, they are. In certain circumstances, such agreements require affirmative Congressional consent, though its questionable if the National Popular Vote "Interstate Compact" would meet the standards for requiring such consent, whether it would require only negative consent, or whether it would be outside of Congress' authority because of the assignment of the power of choosing electors.
> if you can get that many states to agree to it, then you could have just done a constitutional amendment
No, that's not at all necessarily even approximately true. For it to be effective, you need jurisdictions with a bare majority of electoral votes to implement it. For a constitutional amendment, you need 3/4 of states.
The minimum number of states to hit a majority of EVs is 16, as opposed to 38 for a constitutional amendment.
> since all you need for that is for the states to agree, and the senate to agree.
You don't need the Senate to agree to a Constitutional Amendment. You need 3/4 of state legislatures to agree. You can propose a constitutional amendment with 2/3 of both houses of Congress, or call a Constitutional Convention on the application of 2/3 of states.
Both proposal and ratification (presuming senators vote in line with their states, regardless of the House) have a higher minimum threshold than would be otherwise required for states representing a majority of EVs to assign electors in line with the national popular vote and determine Presidential elections that way.
No, what is broken is indirect election with voting power distributed by state (no matter how you allocate the electoral votes based on the popular vote in the state, whether its winner-take-all, by-congressional-district with winner-take-the-extra-two, or proportional allocation), since the basic model, irrespective of allocation, creates a intense systemic incentive for voter disenfranchisement within states, since by disenfranchising people in your state that aren't likely to vote like you, you not only nullify their vote (but reduce your states overall vote) as you would with direct election, but seize their voting power for yourself (well, at least, redistribute it among those you do not disenfranchise within your state.)
This is, of course, the intended effect of the EC and 3/5 compromise, with the original focal disenfranchisement being chattel slavery. But it works even more powerfully without chattel slavery, because then you don't have the voting power from the disenfranchised population deweighted the way the 3/5 compromise did.
They're all ways of making a decision. In the end the votes are tallied somehow, to some goal. We used to have different goals 100 years ago.
Distributing electors by state wasn’t the “intended effect” of the EC. Nobody proposed direct election of the President. The choices were between having Congress elect the President, and having a separate Electoral College. It arises out of the fact that the framers viewed us as a collection of separate states and so it made sense to do everything at the granularity of the state. The executive branch of the European Union is indirectly selected for the same reason.
As to the intended effect of the 3/5 compromise—what would have produced the result that some people want is for slaveholding Virginia to have won that debate, because it was the one that wanted proportional representation in both houses.
Neither of those is actually necessary because the states decide on their own how their electoral college votes are allocated. In principle Texas or California could allocate their delegates proportional to the popular vote of the people in that state.
Which might be in the interests of the people in that state, because then candidates would actually bother to solicit votes there. But you'd have to convince a local government controlled by one party to give about a third of the state's electoral college delegates to the other party.
If two states with 10 electoral votes each are both currently winner takes all, but one votes green and one votes purple; and if only the green state changes to proportional allocation, you move from a scenario where both parties got 10 votes each to a scenario where the green state went 6/4 for green and the purple state is still all 10 votes purple, basically kneecapping the green party.
Moreover, both of the parties are a product of the election map. If the map changes, it doesn't destroy one of the parties, it changes both of them, to get the balance back. If Republicans started getting 20 of California's delegates, Democrats would change their policies until they were getting those 20 back somewhere else. They'd stop pussyfooting around on climate change so they can save Florida from ending up underwater and put those 29 in the solid blue column, or dump a big jobs program in Ohio and get those, or start paying attention to the plight of the rural poor.
Or the Republicans would realize they could stand to lose some votes they currently have to get, stop being so inconsistent about at the same time claiming to want smaller government while never actually making it smaller, and actually gore somebody's ox.
You need 270 to win. 300 means you gave somebody something you didn't have to. 240 means you didn't give somebody something you did have to.
But that doesn't matter because the specific individuals who would have to enact is are just as much if not more beholden to their party than to the the people.
I agree with what you said about changing the parties policies though.
> If Republicans started getting 20 of California's delegates, Democrats would change their policies until they were getting those 20 back somewhere else.
So what you're saying is they'd change tack to not pay as much attention to California, which is supposedly going to benefit Californians.
The supreme court has said (over-simplifying here) that the right to delegate this legislative power to a popular vote is only constitutional when it adheres to 1 person, 1 vote weighting.
Taking into account votes external to that state likely violates this.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/09/10/winner-tak...
Neither that per-district system, nor my original popular vote proportional system, would require a parliamentary style of government. Indeed, under a parliamentary system, the executive would be chosen by parliament itself and there would be no need for the electoral college or even the presidential vote at all.
Not the people.
(Hopefully that's a less controversial statement than Romney's famous line).
> Taking into account votes external to that state likely violates this.
I don't see anything approximating an argument that National Popular Vote violates any rule that has been applied to Presidential elections (“one person, one vote” is a districting rule, which doesn't really apply to elections per se, and arrangements which do not treat all voters in the state equally—such as the 2 for the statewide winner plus one for the winner of each CD method of assigning electors, which more heavily weights votes in Congressional districts with lower turnout in assigning state electors—survive under current law, and NPV doesn't even have that flaw.)
What the supreme court has said, is that if any decision is delegated to a vote, then that vote must meet constitutional muster.
Using votes cast in another state to determine the results of what is a state election likely violates rights of voters within that state.
And those rights are not wholely the legislature's to delegate away.
It's essentially extrajudicial gerrymandering.
Separately, and coming from another angle- it likely violates the constitution's guarantee of a republican form of government.
Anything any government in the US does must meet Constitutional muster. I'd like you to cite the specific decision you think indicates that a decision to assign electors based on the national popular vote would not meet such muster.
> Using votes cast in another state to determine the results of what is a state election likely violates rights of voters within that state.
Based on...what? I mean, except that it has survived so far, I can see an argument to the bare Constitution that giving unequal voting power to different voters within the state, which the two to the statewide winner plus one to the winner in each Congressional district method clearly does, violates the 14th Amendment Equal Protection rights of the voters so disadvantaged. But I don't even see a Constitutional argument, much less actual voting rights precedent, that negatively impacts on NPV.
> It's essentially extrajudicial gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is drawing legislative districts, which is normally “extrajudicial” (since federal districting is expressly a power of state legislatures, and state-level districting is usually also a power of the state legislature, not the judiciary.) And gerrymandering is often legal and in many cases not even subject to federal review. Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019).
So saying it's “extradjudicial gerrymandering” is all of false, adding meaningless qualifiers to make it sound significant, and not supporting your argument that it is unconstitutional.
> Separately, and coming from another angle- it likely violates the constitution's guarantee of a republican form of government.
How? Based on what argument and applicable precedent?
Only if one prefers that the election always be decided by a margin of votes in a few rural swing states, rendering most voting irrelevant.
A system where all of the votes in all of the states mattered would be infinitely preferable.
And now, instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority. Due to capping the number of members of the House, those small-population states have disparate impact on federal issues.
The southern states benefited from emancipation, insofar as they gained seats in the house and electoral college (they got a 5/3 multiple on their prior proportions, which had only narrowly elected Lincoln pewar).
This redistribution of postwar power led to the disaster of 1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877, something we're still grappling with to this day.
One motivation for Jim Crow laws was to keep the southern voting-sampled portion of the south white and segregationist (in spite of the true distribution of local sentiment), while simultaneously benefiting from the larger population in magnifying their representation in national politics.
...
If I were dictator for a day, I'd make the number of house and electoral college seats directly proportional to the last-n-election-cycle-average of number of participating voters (not population!).
This change would flip the voter suppression script, which I think has been one of the more troubling developments in the last 100 years of our republic. It would also rightfully suppress the influence of the regions in this country that wish it was still the 1830s, but give them a path to return to influence that's contingent on uniting their polities.
We'd see states competing to make voting more accessible in a nonpartisan manner, because every state wants to have more representation in the electoral college and the congress, regardless of which party is in power.
This would force parties to actually represent their neighbors, whom they can safely ignore and suppress today.
With this change as an example, I think the Electoral College could actually be leveraged to steer our system in more inclusive direction. I'd love to simulate this version of history.
Sadly, it's more likely that both political parties are simply comfortable with the status quo.
The republican party thinks they can gerrymander and voter-suppress their way to power.
The democratic party thinks they can let the republican party self-destruct, since most of their tactics to hold on to power are illegal, especially as the demographics of our country's states become overwhelmingly out of their favor.
But regardless of which party you belong to, I think universal suffrage is one of those rare principles that every American grows up believing in.
As such, especially in 2020, it makes perfect sense to base federal representation on such a shared principle. It would definitely have the effect of moderating our society. It is a natural evolution of a concept we already have (proportional representation). It does away with the grimy roots of that concept (ceding representation to slaveholders).
So, maybe one day.
In theory, there is a (somewhat dated, given other evolutions in voting rights) remedy for that in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, though it can be hacked aroundt by selective criminalization (though that, in theory, is limited by Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment).
Unfortunately, neither of these has been very well enforced, especially Section 2.
Unfortunately, in the present political climate, any reasonable interpretation of these words that hurts the representation of states with regressive voting laws would be seen as an act of politics.
The nice thing about my proposed hack, is that it also incentivizes decriminalization, or at least allowing a broader class of humans in your state to vote. In this way, it doesn't matter if the 14th amendment is well-enforced, because it changes the goal posts.
So, while it might not give felons the vote (this would violate the 14th), it will encourage the dissolution of our current "justice" system that arbitrarily incarcerates people.
If your state incarcerates people for "driving while black", it is effectively diluting its representation in the congress and electoral college.
We've been misinterpreting words like "infringed" and "papers, and effects" for well over a century. The current climate while certainly non-helpful but I think there's a deeper root cause that keeps us from strongly enforcing the constitution.
I'd love to hear anybody poke holes in this idea. It's a recent one for me. I'm sure they exist, but I haven't come up with them yet.
Obviously, there's the incentive for fraudulent votes. But there's already an incentive for fraudulent votes, and it doesn't seem to cause much of a problem.
Also, it seems to disadvantage populations that have disproportionate bias towards non-voting. I’m thinking areas of lower socioeconomic status, even with as many pro-voting initiatives as can be, will still ultimately be undercounted.
I really like the idea, but I'll volunteer to offer the criticism you'll probably hear.
If a state can give itself more power by counting more votes, then state governments which are confident that their dominant party will win will have a lot of incentive to allow fraudulent votes, and potentially a lot to gain.
For example, if the state government knows that 70% of voters will vote for the Yellow Party, then they can risk encouraging 10% of the population to cast, say, 4 extra votes (for their deceased grandparents), without worrying that the dreaded Purple Party might exploit this laxness and give Purple the win.
Combine that with some selective enforcement (so Purple voters know that, in practice, only they are at risk of prosecution for voter fraud) and the state will be able to magnify its relative strength compared to states that are more scrupulous.
So, if 80% of you 100-seat state votes, 80% voted X and 20% voted Y, you'd get 64 X's and 16 Y's.
This way, both parties are incentivized to vote. Instead of today.
In my opinion, it's harmful to our democracy that members of the "losing party" feel zero incentive to turn out on election day. It encourages disengagement and disillusionment, not to mention the polarization of the electorate.
In Germany, the "crazy parties" get some seats, so their voices are heard. It has a pacification affect on the mainstream parties.
The calculus of voter fraud will definitely change. But I don't know. In order for an individual to commit voter fraud, they have to believe that the benefit is worth the risk them as an individual.
And, for the individual, voter fraud would only "work" to the extent that they think everyone else will do it too.
I intuitively feel that voter fraud is a much bigger bogeyman than people make it out to be.
I think the bigger fear is corruption of the election commission; such that they turn a blind eye to or even contribute to voter fraud.
Of course, no system is incorruptible, and the test for acceptance shouldn't be perfection, but improvement over the status quo (this idea of iteration is the cornerstone of our constitution).
That being said, I'm not convinced that the voter fraud risk makes this proposal more corrupt than the system we currently have. Voter fraud is an easier problem to solve than voter suppression, IMO.
Once there is even a suggestion that some state might be increasing its power by encouraging voter fraud, there will be an arms race of other states trying to "counteract" this by encouraging their own voter fraud.
You've just taken all the complexity of counting people every 10 years and rejiggering the numbers, and now made it nightmarishly more complex given that you're transitioning into that system in the first place.
Furthermore, you're over emphasizing the structural elements (net representatives votes) instead of the important bit, that everyone has an ear to tug to get something listened to up high. You're entitled to an input. Not to skewing the structuring function to optimize for voter population density, neither directly via tinkering with the effective representation calculation, or indirectly via the change you suggested.
It's not a terrible idea to be honest, but there is a degree of simplicity to the way we do it now, and I have the feeling yours would be a hard sell to the average American, or even the above average ones without substantially more in detail analysis.
There were two initial proposals for Congress: the New Jersey Plan and the Virginia Plan. (Virginia, of course, being the leading slave-owning state.) Under both plans, the President would have been elected by Congress. There were concerns that having Congress elect the President would jeopardize separation of powers. So the Electoral College was created, with one elector for each member of Congress. It had nothing to do with protecting the interests of slave-holding states, but instead was designed to make the Presidency more independent of Congress.
Indirect election of the executive is somewhat anti-majoritarian, but also extremely common. Justin Trudeau was not elected Prime Minister of Canada by the general population. He was elected by about 80,000 eligible members of the Liberal Party, and became Prime Minister when the people elected other members of his party to the Parliament. I will add that the leading proponent of direct election of the President and the Senate was Andrew Jackson, strongly opposed abolition and was generally a horrible person.
Now, the New Jersey Plan would have allocated one member of Congress to each state. It was also supported by New York, Delaware, and Connecticut. Of those, only Delaware had a significant enslaved population. The Virginia Plan created a two-chamber legislature with proportional representation based on population. Yes, slave-holding Virginia was the one that wanted proportional representation. The Connecticut Compromise that led to the current allocation really was about small versus large states, not slavery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1790_United_States_Census. Large states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had few to no enslaved persons, and small states like Georgia and Delaware had significant numbers of enslaved persons.
The 3/5 compromise was designed to reduce the interest of slave-holding states. The number originated in an amendment proposed to the Articles of Confederation, which proposed to set the tax obligation for each state to the federal government "in proportion to the number of inhabitants of every age, sex, and quality, except Indians not paying taxes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise#Confed.... Virginia complained that this would count enslaved persons, thus increasing Virginia's tax obligations. Eventually, they settled on counting 3/5 the number of enslaved persons towards the state's tax obligation. That same compromise came up later in the apportionment context.
At the same time, don’t make the opposite mistake of assuming “everything your history teacher told you was a lie.” The New York Times made some bold assertions in the 1619 Project and has had to walk back some of the most fundamental assertions: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/nyt-1619-project-.... If you go through and strip out all the rhetoric based on factual premises that have been abandoned or debunked (even by the left, see: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-c...) what’s left is a really interesting take on aspects of history your AP US History curriculum doesn’t cover, but which doesn’t fundamentally contradict what you learned in school.
With respect to this particular issue: the AP US History curriculum correctly taught what the 3/5 compromise was (and it was what it was). And it also correctly taught that the Connecticut Compromise was about small states versus big states, not slavery. It was a slave-owning southern state, Virginia, that proposed proportional representation in both houses. And the small states that benefited from the structure of the Senate included both northern states and southern states.
The connection is also a weird thing to bring up today, because most of the small states that benefit from the structure of the Senate today were free states. Several, like north and South Dakota, were split up when admitted to break the power of the slave states in the Senate. Midwestern states like Iowa and Minnesota made a huge contribution to beating the south. Iowa sent troops to fight before the union army was even ready to go to war; they sent the largest percentage of their population to war of any state; and they had the highest percentage of casualties: https://valleynewstoday.com/news/local/iowa-played-a-large-r....
As it happens, on my fraternal grandmother's side we had family that fought in the Civil War for the Union from Iowa. One day I'll look all that up and figure out what units they fought in and where they're buried.
I'm not trying to say that "the EC was about slavery" is a correct narrative or even more valid than "it was about states". The point I'm trying to make is unrelated to the specific question about the EC and slavery. The point I'm trying to make is that there are hundreds of narratives for almost every historical event. Motivations that range from the smallest microhistory to the largest historical narratives. And that "APUS said it was about X" is going to miss a whole lot of interesting scholarship.
Again, I'm not trying to make any statement about the EC. I'm trying to make a broader suggestion about the limitations of high school history classes.
https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-61-70
As well as the anti-Federalist Paper 72.
Also keep in mind the Framer's never intended or expected the formation of organized national conventions.
The Electoral College had zilch to do with slavery besides momentarily (in that time frame) possibly benefiting from how Southern States populations were calculated, but look how that turned out.
Also, if you specifically look at what was outlined in the Federalist Papers, a Faithless Elector was a feature, not a bug. Political parties have completely ruined it by orchestrating to try to legally compel voting via data rather than by conscience and good sense, which fundamentally undermines the proof against a crowd pleaser, but ultimately incompetent actor the Framer's were trying guard against.
I can understand being upset that the Electoral College doesn't seem to be working as promised, but it's the byproduct if taking the screwdriver that is the EC as designed and trying to use it to turn a nut. There is a level of not being applied as designed. You aren't going to fix that without revisiting some structural assumptions. Also, no, I squarely do not buy the Anti-Federalist tune that crowds are somehow free from being shaped and manipulated more than a small number of individuals relatively randomly selected put into a position of deliberation.
People are collectively pulled down in the fidelity of collective reasoning by the damping effects socialization and large numbers, prone to passionate but ineffectual reasoning, and represent a great indicator that something need be done, though amazing at constraining a problem space through Wisdom of the masses, but terrible at managing the gory details for all of the shouting going on.
A person is smart, capable of forethought, reasoned, and generally best equipped when given several options of being able to justify which is better, and developing a workable solution that balances against a wide variety if pre-existing weighting factors.
The entire intent of the structure of our political process was to filter the energy of the whole, into paths of effectively achievable actions to be carried by a few such that the Nation could be driven without an undue on everyone. If you hate Jury duty, imagine how bad life would be if you had to be polled constantly on every decision needing to be made whether you knew anything about it or not.
The systemic disenfranchisement of the majority of the American population--through the electoral college, senate, and supreme court--is precisely why so much of American politics is broken.
Forcing the the majority to live under the rules set by a minority that has a completely different way of life does not lead to good outcomes.
The entire principle of popular sovereignty, as exercised through representative democracy, is that leaders are selected according to the wishes of the the majority of the people. Minority rule--no matter how it is codified or how long it has been in effect--is incompatible with this principle.
America can be either a country ruled by a Republican party answerable accountable only to rural interests or it can be a democracy. It cannot be both.
That's clearly not the case as many systems (not just the US) seek to avoid "tyranny of the majority" and to protect the interests of minorities. Canada's senate does not use proportional representation either - that avoids the country being run by Ontario and Quebec at the expense of the other 8 provinces and 3 territories.
The designs you argue against were specifically implemented to provide a system of checks and balances to avoid a simply majority from unchecked rule. And this is doubly true in the US, where it's a "union of states", not just one massive country. A lot of those rules were put into place in order to get the states to join the US because otherwise they would have had zero say in the affairs of the country.
Those checks you want to remove are not a bug but a feature.
Other checks on the tyranny of the majority, like protecting the rights of individuals (in light of shared values) in the face of a majority decision to violate them is hard to characterize as tyranny at all.
Requiring legislation to pass two bodies with different weights is an interesting move which isn't precisely the former; it deserves a weakened version of the same criticism, and it is not entirely clear whether it pays dividends to make up for it. I agree with the implied premise that decisions are more likely to be good ones if they look good from more angles.
There is much ink spilled in apologia of the current system around how the needs and experiences of those in cities are very different than those of people in rural communities, and the system needs to avoid being blind to either. I don't think that's entirely misguided but it smells a bit of special pleading; there are other ways we can slice the electorate that would likely lead to comparable (or larger) differences in needs and experiences, and we don't change the weights in light of that.
Arguably this inherently favors conservatism as passing no new legislation will keep things the way they are. Progressives will, in most cases, need to get legislation or referendums through to make meaningful changes to the current system.
Florida seems to have figured this out. This election there is a referendum to require voters to approve all new referendums twice to try to decrease the number of successful referendums.
You're probably thinking of the senate. While very small states do have an advantage in the electoral college, it's not very big at all. The electoral college is largely an artifact of a time when the electors were directed by state governments, not state populations.
The brokenness of the electoral college is more about the winner-takes-all allocation of electors that is (usually) practiced. This makes the votes of people who live in divided states far more relevant than those of people who live in states where most people vote the same way.
Not really. The college disenfranchises Wyoming Democrats and California Republicans a similar amount.
It's the Senate that protects smaller states, since each state gets two senators.
No, the States of California and Wisconsin do that; the Constitution and the design of the electoral college do not mandate winner-take-all allocation, and not all states choose to do that.
(The EC structurally incentivizes it, perhaps, in the same way that it definitely incentivizes doing everything that the rest of the Constitutiona and laws let you get away with to more literally disenfranchise people by preventing them from being eligible or practically able to vote at all, but it doesn't actually do either of those things, it leaves it to the states to choose to do them or not.)
Possibly the systemic cause is the excessive influence of the presidency.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would turn the mechanism of the electoral college into a result equivalent to a national popular vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
The wikipedia article doesn't go into details about resolving issue around disenfranchised voters and vote counting, such as hanging chads or uncounted mail-in ballots. In other words, the compact states are binding themselves to a popular vote count that non-compact states have no incentive to get accurate.
Under the electoral college system, states actually come into play. There could be a case where a state grows large enough in population to get 51% of the electoral votes. If that state had a winner take all system, then that state would choose every president. It would 100% dominate, non of the other states would matter.
The electoral college is truly a terrible system, unless the founders wanted Florida to decide every election.
Just some quick googling, not a vetted source: http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/US_History_reader/Chapt...
Those populations looked similar and could have gone either way earlier (hindsight being 20/20, major industrial centers could have emerged in the south). The popular vote in that case may have never led to a Lincoln.
In other words, just because there’s a giant population in South with certain regional values, doesn’t mean you get to win every election. The same is true for coastal cities in America now. I do think certain states need more electoral votes added at this point like New York and California.
The same way you can fuck them with the popular vote today is the same way they can fuck you with it in the future.
I’m reminded of Churchill’s famous aphorism that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others which have been tried. Yes, it can go badly but it’s still the least bad choice.
"James Madison made the following comment about the Senate:
In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, the people ought to have permanency and stability.
— Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787"Not this year. With mail-in ballots, the ballots won't necessarily be finalized until a week or more after the election.
Its necessary due to COVID19. But it will be until multiple days after the election before we know the true winner. A large number of states will certainly be called on election night (because many states, such as California, are far from competitive).
But the battleground states may take some time.
But I also think that Texas going for Biden is very small: Trump is still leading by 2% or so by official polls. Its important to push Texas a little bit since there's a chance for victory.
In the most likely event: Texas goes red (as it has gone for the past several decades), and we're left wondering about Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as usual.
If Florida has an insurmountable lead on election night (like 5% or something), then Biden probably wins. But if its a 2% differential (too close to call by the media, and a serious counting effort starts to take place), like is currently projected in the polls, then Florida could very well drag out this election for a week or longer. Just like back in 2000.
https://data.tallahassee.com/early-voting-turnout/florida/
About 500,000 more D than R voters have voted early. This is a MUCH bigger gap than we saw in 2016.
Beto O'Rourke has registered 1.8 million new voters in the past 4 years in the state of Texas, 300k of those were registered in the past 2 weeks. Beto lost Texas by 200k votes.
And so far, TX has been killing it in terms of early-voting. About 75%(!!) turnout so far than what they had in 2016. And we still have 11 days left to go before E-day. Biggest turnout percentage in the entire country so far.
It would be a mild surprise if Biden won Texas. It would be astonishing is Biden won Texas without also winning Florida.
He won Florida twice. Biden doesn’t have Obama’s charisma, so he basically has to bet on Trump frustration to carry Florida.
This election is a total question of Trump exhaustion. If people are exhausted from him then we’ll see the toss ups turn blue. If people are more frustrated with lockdowns, riots, protests, race coming to the surface in America (a lot of people don’t like that it’s being exposed and talked about), immigration, then toss ups go red.
I don’t think the pollsters probing for ‘Did Trump handle coronavirus well’ is the right thing to ask, mainly because I don’t think likely right-wing voters fault him. The same way they didn’t fault him for any of his access-Hollywood tapes, etc.
They are more likely to fault social welfare, crime, wealth redistribution, immigration, globalization - the same way they did in 2016. If they aren’t overwhelmed by Trump’s aggressiveness, then why would anything have changed in 2020? Just because the age 15-30 crowd on Reddit and the media lean one way doesn’t mean things actually changed in peoples minds.
Demographics in Texas have changed a lot since 2012 when Obama last ran. Democrats didn't really compete in Texas then.
> aggressiveness, then why would anything have changed in 2020
Take a look at the polls. Even if you don't believe the numbers themselves.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/20/texas-hous... is a decent summary. It's most likely that Republican will win Texas, but Democrats have roughly the chance of winning Texas as Trump did of winning the election in 2016.
We have polls to test this, and while it shows Republicans generally thing Trump can do no wrong, lots of independents think the response has been bad. And some of these are right wing voters, because the 57% who disapprove given the question "Do Americans approve of Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis?" is much higher than his generall disapproval rate.
See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/coronavirus-polls/ and scroll down
Define "LEADING" please, because the actual numbers for voting in Miami-Dade county [1] as of today are:
Mail Voting
Rep 83,605
Dem 158,788
NPA 82,533 (NPA = No Party Affiliation)
In-Person Early Voting
Rep 61,273
Dem 61,548
NPA 35,296
Totals
Rep 144,878
Dem 220,336
In what way does that constitute Republicans "LEADING"?
[1] https://countyballotfiles.floridados.gov/VoteByMailEarlyVoti...
We do know how many registered voters from each party are voting in some circumstances.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/early-voting-number... is a decent overview
It's not necessary to "believe" anything when it comes to Florida. We have the actual hard number of ballots requested and returned, broken down by party registration. More Democrats are voting via mail. They're also voting in-person in equal numbers to Republicans, at least so far.
I think we are in agreement here. That's what my link shows.
My understanding is that not all states collect party affiliation when sending ballots though. It's possible I'm misinformed though.
Clinton won Miami Dade by 30 points (65-35) and still lost Florida by 1.2%.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_presidentia...
Some other states like PA aren't even allowed to touch mail-in ballots til the morning of Nov 3rd. That's millions of envelopes that have to be opened, signatures verified, and then the ballot itself has to be unfolded and flattened and then pushed through the tabulation machines. But we don't have to fully wait til those are official--we can tell by the party registration on the ElectionsProject website who won based on in-person voting plus party mail-in.
It would suck to have my vote thrown away because some overworked election worker looks at it for a second and decides the letter P is bent the wrong way compared to the 1999 version.
Learning that votes are thrown out based on this just shows how “special” the US system is. I assume historically they just decided “hard to read” names got thrown out.
It's an entirely human process and imprecise might be the best word for it.
It might be a science at a forensic level for investigations, but at this scale? I don't think so.
Also while I'm not going to imply I'm a typical case, I am not capable of writing a consistent signature due to a neurological condition. I think I still deserve a vote.
> Such signature comparison has long been deemed sufficiently reliable to legitimate absentee ballots and provisional ballots, and there is no reason to believe that it is any less reliable for confirming the identity of individuals voting in person.
When challenged you have to reaffirm you submitted the ballot. You only “lose” your vote if you fail to respond.
YMMV but it seems to work pretty well here.
That’s interesting to know. what method do they contact you to and how big is your window to respond?
I also tend to like 538's model. 538's model gives Trump an average vote share of 2.2% more than biden (more than the polling average because the model thinks the demographics and fundamentals favor trump) but still gives Biden a 35% chance of winning. Biden winning is not very likely, but it's also not a not very small chance.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/...
Coincidentally, that's pretty close to the odds that 538 gave to Trump winning overall in 2016.
Calibrate your expectations accordingly.
If Biden were to win Texas, the GOP would be finished forever. Polls notwithstanding, Biden has as much chance of winning Texas as Trump has of winning California.
Because if you look at the polls that’s ridiculous (probability of Biden winning Texas is orders of magnitude larger than Trump winning California).
What do you mean when you say “chance”, if not probability?
It would be astonishing statistically if Biden doesn't have a good margin in PA or FL but is competitive in TX.
If Biden has a decisive victory in Florida, it would be very reasonable to call the election the next morning (which would still be late night in the West).
Despite Florida being one of the worst most disgusting states in terms of suppressing the vote - DeSantis allowed county supervisors to start counting mail ballots basically immediately.
Over 3.3 million have already returned ballots and 1.3 have already voted in person.
Pennsylvania on the other hand... I don't think they can count ballots until after polls close.
But maybe we get lucky and there are enough in person votes, the margin is big, and polling shows no drastic changes in VBM then it will get called.
Even without Pennsylvania if Trump loses Florida and then loses the midwest, doesn't flip Nevada etc it will be called quick.
Basically I'm looking at Florida asap and very very worried about it...
I would have bet Trump was ahead 8 weeks ago. Now I think maybe Biden by a point or two max.
Florida will likely be an early sign, since those mail ballots get processed and counted early. IF (and this is a big if) Biden carries Florida on election night, then it's actually possible we know who wins that night.
(They verify a few absentee ballot envelopes for required signatures etc and then open up the envelopes, someone verifies the ballot is complete, and then mix the ballots together so the ballot is kept anonymous. Chain of custody here is clever and works well. It would still be possible to notify the voter their ballot was rejected.)
I'm sorry, what? This needs more explanation.
This is as described by a friend who had worked elections for years, this year will be my first. Should be interesting to see it in person.
Personally, I hope the early, in person voting decides the election on election night.
When I play around with it, the real 'turning point' states tend to be PA and FL. You can fill in the likely EC votes and the chances don't really change all that much. I mean, CA going Blue is not a surprise.
But when you fill in PA or FL for Donny, then the whole race changes. If FL or PA go Red, then Donny has ~1/3 chance, if one goes Blue, then it's 1/100 [0].
PA is unlikely to be called on election night. But FL is very likely to be called. So that is the one to watch. Just like every other election, really.
It's a great tool and I'd totally suggest spending some time with it. Kudos to the team that built it!
[0] Note that these models are updated all the time by 538 as new polls roll in.
Sure, Biden would win the election if Trump won PA and FL but then lost Ohio and Georgia. But what are the odds that Trump wins PA and then loses Georgia? Unlikely.
I haven't heard anyone say that. Polls are always wrong, it's how wrong that is important.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_Unite...
Edit: slight elaboration.
This isn't true in the US.
Your own link shows not a single result since the 1984 where the error was under 1% for both candidates.
They are usually somewhat accurate for the overall vote, but the results on state races haven't been great. That hasn't mattered until 2016 where it was a critical issue.
To wit: 2016 was a perfect storm. Swap any of those factors above and 538 would have been predicting a 50:50 race (instead of 70:30) at election day and Trump's very narrow victory would have been "correctly predicted".
Assuming that's going to happen again seems a bit like magical thinking to me. Remember that in 2012 the polls were "wrong" in the opposite direction (undercounting Obama votes by a bit) and no one cared.
Unfortunately a bunch of people whose political desires hinge on this kind of error being present in all elections and always to the advantage of "the other side" never want to hear this analysis and so repeat the nonsense that "polls are always wrong".
But they're not. They're just not as precise as we want. If the polls are exactly as wrong this year, and in the same direction, as they were in 2016 then Biden wins a solid victory. If they're as wrong as they were in 2012 then he wins a landslide with Texas and Georgia going blue.
I'm simply asking a question about whether the pollsters have corrected their methodologies. There was clearly something wrong in 2016 when they repeatedly failed to predict the GOP primaries and failed to predict swing states and even some states that weren't considered swing states in the general election.
You're right that I haven't read the analysis that you say exists. That's why I'm asking for it. Which pollsters have done the reweighting on their 2016 data and shown that they then align with reality?
Honestly, you're misremembering this. Polls were not wrong in 2016 like you think they were. Just browse through the article history at 538, they really are the best source for this stuff.
I did. They say the polls were wrong. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-...
You yourself said the polls were wrong because they didn't weight for education. Now you say they weren't. Are you walking back your original statement? That statement is what this whole discussion is about.
Polls don't predict anything. Poll-based forecasts are different than polls, and done by different people.
The major polls in 2016 conducted close to the election were well within the MoE of the actual results, so as far as polls go there is very little evidence that anything was wrong.
Some of the poll-based forecasts made errors like assuming independence of state-level deviations from polling averages woere independent rather than linked, which gave Trump a very small chance of victory; that doesn't accord with history, was called out by 538 before the election, and I doubt anyone is making that mistake again.
Semantic nitpicking. Clearly, my comment was about how well the polls reflected reality.
> Some of the poll-based forecasts made errors like....
You're making a different statement than the person I'm responding to, who said that the polls didn't align with reality because they did not weight for education. That is something that is easy to verify. I was simply asking if it was verified by showing that weighting by education made the 2016 polls align with reality.
Yes, I'm disagreeing; the polls in 2016 reflected the actual outcome very well (they were off, but not unusually far; the entire idea that there was an unusual error is based on overemphasis of fairly new poll-based predictors, especially one at the NYTimes, that painted an extremely high probability of a Clinton win based on a flawed prediction methodology which was separate from any problem with the polls.)
> I was simply asking if it was verified by showing that weighting by education made the 2016 polls align with reality.
If you want to fit a particular single result you can change how you handle any factor and get a perfect match. You'd actually need to test against a different set of real data than you used to determine the adjustment to validate it, not the same single result.
That's not how it works. Weighting education samples to match the population they were sampled from is not fitting a particular result.
> Yes, I'm disagreeing
Then your point is irrelevant to the question I was asking. newacct583 said there was a particular problem with the polls, and I pointed out that if the polls had that particular problem, there is an easy way to check. I asked if that check had been done.
To try and answer your technical question: yes and no.
I know why you think this would be easy to do. But this is harder to do than you're thinking because the problem with education was both weighting and sampling.
So, yes, you can play with the weights and get a corrected result. (That's literally just tautological though -- of course in a parameterized model you can wiggle weights around to give the perfect result when you already know what the result should be...)
But, no, that doesn't tell you about what the effect of increasing the sample of these voters would be, and improving sampling is the only real way to get closer to ground truth.
So, some pollsters are sampling larger numbers of less educated people and also weighing those votes differently. But no, we can't know what the combined effect of those two things would've been in 2016. Why? because we can wiggle around the weights post hoc but can't go back in time and resample. And the question about correcting without resampling is kinda uninteresting because the fact that you can get the correct result by just wiggling around weights is literally just a mathematical tautology.
Hope that helps.
nl linked to a paper showing that the analysis I asked for was done and did not have the affect that newacct583 claimed it would have.
It points out that (to quote):
As this report documents, the national polls in 2016 were quite accurate, while polls in key battleground states showed some large, problematic errors. (which is my claim: national polling is ok, state polls aren't great).
The education weighing issue is commonly accepted as the reason for the inaccuracy. The evidence for that isn't as strong as people assume.
Section 3.4 talks about the weighing issue, and shows some where reweighing worked:
Following the election, two different state-level pollsters acknowledged that they had not adjusted for education and conducted their own post-hoc analysis to examine what difference that would have made in their estimates. Both pollsters found that adjusting for education would have meaningfully improved their poll’s accuracy by reducing over-statement of Clinton support.
but also:
Despite this, it is not clear that adjusting to a more detailed education variable would have universally improved polls in 2016. Analysis of the effect from weighting by five education categories rather than three categories in four national polls (Appendix A.H) yielded an average change of less than 0.4 percentage points in the vote estimates and no systematic improvement.
It's worth noting that in previous elections this had never been the case before (which was why it wasn't done).
[1] https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/Reports/An-Evaluat...
Yes, this is a good summary, and I'm well aware of what went wrong. I ran a prediction project for a few years so I realise how hard this job is.
But just because it's hard doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize the issues.
My argument is that historically state level polls have always had issues but have rarely mattered.
> Remember that in 2012 the polls were "wrong" in the opposite direction (undercounting Obama votes by a bit) and no one cared.
Exactly my point!
If you look at the data on this, the state level polls had even worse accuracy. The average error was 1.6%, compared to 0.8% for national polls.
As you note, no one really cared.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2009/06/25/perils-of-polling-in-...
Luntz is a data guy. He believes polls, they're what he does. If he didn't believe the polls he would have said so. Instead he said that if they were wrong then polling must not work, which is what his audience wants to hear.
I certainly don't think the electoral college is a good system for modern day America, but I also think that it's blamed for far too many ills. For one thing, I really doubt that not being able to form a good mental model of the EC is in the top 4 reasons of voter apathy.
Finally, I would not defend the EC as a particularly good system, and certainly from a campaigner's standpoint, its particularly complex to navigate. But from an individual voter's standpoint, the mental model is simple. If you are in a swing state, you especially should vote. Parliamentary systems have concepts of "crucial ridings", which are quite similar.
Every vote, in every election, should count for something and not only be a participation point on all other levels than local because you live in a gerrymandered district in Chicago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster/Sainte-Lagu%C3%AB_me...
It is become itself a title of nobility in a way something the founders opposed.
With the consolidation of power, and congress' continual abjection of their responsibility to legislation (something BOTH parties are guilty of) and instead passing more and more power to the executive and courts the office of president and now the Supreme Court are considered more of a legislative body than the actual legislature. That is equal parts alarming and sad
Ideally the president should be one of the least important races a person casts for vote for, not the most important
There should be either a two-tier system with points from winning a state and from getting the most votes, or just straight popular vote. Granted, in that case the smaller states would probably lose meaning but eh. Isn't that what democracy is about? The most popular candidate should win?
Which is exactly why the founders set up the electoral collage in the first place, because they had no desire for a strait democracy, nor do I
democracy is 2 wolfs and a lamb voting on what is for dinner, I have no desire to live in such a system. I prefer a constitutional republic of independent states bound by a common defense, economic and legal system aka the United States of America
>There should be either a two-tier system with points from winning a state and from getting the most votes
Something like that be done under the current system in fact 2 states already do this by Proportionally allocating their electors instead of winner take all
There is nothing under the current system preventing a state from doing that
Personally I have always been in favor of Every congressional District being awarded by the popular vote of that district, which would leave 2 "At Large" votes per state to be given out based on the popular vote of the state.
The effect it has is to amplify the voice of sparsely populated states. Do we actually think that these states are more qualified to decide what we have to dinner (or more qualified to protect the republic?)
I’m also unsure how breaking down the popular vote by district helps to protect the republic further. Why not just use the popular vote (or even better, RCV or approval voting) instead of adding these layers of indirection?
At a basic level this would mean each state only got 1 vote no matter how many people where in that state.
As a compromise from that, the system of proportional representation was created. Originally this was designed at a time where the Senate was not elected by popular vote but instead the Senate was appointed by the legislatures of each state not by popular vote. Something I also would support returning to
The House of Representatives was to be the only pure democratic body in the US Government.
The electoral college part of State Sovereignty respecting that we are a Union of states. the 17th amendment reduced State Sovereignty considerably and IMO has lead to some very large negative effects including the politicization of court system but that is a whole other topic
Since at least the 1920's there has been a strong push attempting to reduce the power of the State government and centralize the power of the Federal Government. In short a strong push to transform the United States of America away from a republic of states, to a single universal government. To those wanting to transform the nation the preferred model is Direct Democracy one with no Natural or inherent rights, and no Constitution. To those people if the majority desires it, that should be the law of the land....
That is not a constitutional republic form of government. The attack on the Electoral College is a direct attack on the constitutional republic
As to RCV or other voting methods besides First past the post. That has nothing to Electoral College, you can implement RCV (which I would support as well) with out eliminating the Electoral College
History is what it is.
So IMO, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is much more likely than the majority of states go proportional with their EC votes (and even that is highly unlikely).
That's literally the one thing you cannot do, even by Constitutional Amendment (though arguably you can by two, but that's definitely hacking around the clear intent to exploit a possible loophole in the wording.)
OTOH, you could just explicitly give DC an extra electoral vote (or give either one or three or any other odd number of electoral votes to US citizens not resident in a state or D.C., or to any other particular US territory whose resident citizens are currently unrepresented in Presidential elections.)
Easier solution? Kill the cap on the House seats. Doesn’t require a constitutional amendment, doesn’t make a State out of DC (although I’m still onboard with returning it to Maryland, there is precedent for this as DC used to have part of Virginia), and it evens out representation in both the House and the EC without wrecking the Senate and the EC altogether.
Give the States a number of House seats per 50,000 people (preferably: per citizen), actually make it a range between 30K and 50K to make the number of seats as even as possible and always keep it an odd number. You get a House of 6Kish or so members, but the way I see it, that’s Congress’ problem.
You even out representation between the States so no one State is over or under represented in the House. You increase the cost of lobbying Congress. You effectively solve gerrymandering, it can still exist on the fringes but when medium to large cities can have between 4 and 9 Reps all to themselves it is much less of an issue and unlikely to have much of an impact on the election. You bring the House closer to operating on coalition politics.
Fringe benefits include the necessity for dorms and uniforms and satellite chambers for the House that members can vote from. You can even verify their identities through a combination of simple security measures and biometric sensors, similar to TouchID and FaceID.
Then for every additional House member, you also add one to the Electoral College. It’s not perfectly even because the Senate throws the equity distribution off, but it severely dilutes the EC count that correlates to the Senate.
Edit: I mixed up DC and Puerto Rico. Forget what I said.
DC does not have proper representation in Congress, and I think that’s a shame and worth addressing, but there is also a case to be made for Congress having some territory that it directly governs. Only problem is DC became cool and a place where a lot of people live. My compromise is to leave the city itself to be administered by Congress and the government it setup there, but to have Maryland administer elections and put DC back under Maryland law for civil, criminal and tax purposes.
In the case of the House, it's rare that all seats are filled anyways, so it can and has functioned with the equivalent of an even split between parties.
And for the most part, a delay on any given piece of legislation probably isn't as big a deal as a massively contested presidential election.
After deciding 152 issues by lottery, the number was changed to 349.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Riksdag#Constit...
Pretty crazy.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/10/21/what-happen...
Technically, no, because it's possible for electoral votes to be split among more than two candidates, or for electoral votes to be invalid and not counted, etc.
It's still a problem if no candidate gets plurality but not a majority.
If you made the House an even number, they might have ties, so then they would need a way to break ties.
If you gave DC fewer EC votes, then that just gives them even less representation, and they are already underrepresented.
The House can and does have ties, even with an odd number of members; members abstaining or missing votes in the House are more common in the House than the EC.
You could extend the same EC voting arrangement to, say, (to pick an odd number of territories) Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands as D.C. has now.
Or adopt D.C. statehood, in which case then you have an odd number in the House + an even number in the Senate + zero.
That would only add two, unless you also had a reapportionment act. Same with adding Puerto Rico as a state.
Edit: As pointed out below, this is wrong. Since DC already has 3, it would actually lower the number by one, so this would in fact give an odd number.
> The House can and does have ties, even with an odd number of members; members abstaining or missing votes in the House are more common in the House than the EC.
Yeah, but when that happens, they just vote again. The are never deadlocked from a tie.
> You could extend the same EC voting arrangement to, say, (to pick an odd number of territories) Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands as D.C. has now.
It would make sense to do this for Puerto Rico, whose population is greater than 20 states. But all the other territories are smaller than the smallest state, and that would give them outsize power.
> That would only add two, unless you also had a reapportionment act.
Absent a change to the fixed number of seats of full House members, it would subtract one; D.C. currently has zero Senators out of 100, zero members of the House included in the apportionment of the fixed 435 seats (it has a delegate, which is separate), and 3 electoral votes. Absent a change to the legislated size of the House, with D.C. statehood it would have 2 senators out of 102, 1 member of the House within the fixed 435 total seats, and 3 electoral votes. The total size of the EC would be reduced by one seat.
It makes sense to me, as the House choosing the President is still a somewhat representation of the will of the people. It's also very similar to Westminster-styled parliamentary democracies choose their Prime Ministers.
Or change the Constitution.
I'm not a programmer and taught myself D3 last fall. Amelia Wagenbruger (sp?) has a good book too.
what you can do pretty easily is use and modify examples that seem to fit your needs.
but synthesizing from scratch isn't something very attainable and has a much steeper learning curve.
Human Me: I saw all this stuff in 2016 and Trump still beat the overwhelming odds. (Yes 16% chance of winning is still a chance, I get it... there's just so much deja vu with all these visualizations and articles about his campaign imploding).
I grant you plenty of people have sufficient trouble understanding probabilities that they would mistake 86% for a lock, though.
Really, Trump won by a hair's breadth. 538 shouldn't have given him a huge chance to win- he just barely scraped through. It's a genuinely hard problem when the popular vote is very close, since the electoral college throws a huge chaos wrench into everything.,
Just because you end up in the 9/100 future doesn't mean that the "real" probability was 50%. It's weak evidence that Bob's win scenarios mostly didn't involve blowouts.
It's like barely winning a sprint against Usain Bolt: maybe he had an injury midway through. Doesn't mean that he and I were equally likely to win.
That's the information we have, and it's real, so it's much more valid than any poll which poorly samples a few thousand people.
Maybe it was a fluke result. But that's unlikely because the other Midwestern states had similar results. But a fluke in which direction? You don't know, so it's even odds in both directions.
Interestingly, in 2016 they thought Trump was more likely than the betting markets did. Betfair had him on about 22%. So if they were betting they'd have made a profit.
This year the situation has reversed. Betfair has 35% for Trump, whereas 538 has him on only 12%. So they'd be betting on Biden.
So yeah, a lot of people seem convinced that since the pre-election polling showed Trump at a disadvantage last time, we'll see an identical surprise victory this time. I personally think that makes as much sense as leaving your umbrella at home on a day with a 75% chance of rain because the last time there was a similar forecast, no rain fell.
I get that 538 is an HN favorite, but they are too damn politically biased for their own good.
1) https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pund...
I don't see where you've said anything that comes close to supporting such a strong assertion.
2016 was FiveThirtyEight's third time forecasting a presidential election. Getting one of those three "wrong" when they gave themselves slightly less than one in three chances of getting the 2016 election "wrong" doesn't seem at all surprising. It sounds like you're demanding that FiveThirtyEight make their forecasts deliberately underconfident but still expecting them to call the correct winner every time.
How was that problematic?
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
A sibling comment brings up a batter, and I think that's a great analogy. A good batter has a batting average of, say 0.273. Nobody is shocked when they hit the ball!
538 gave a similar chance to Trump. He hit the ball.
> While the errors were nationwide, they were spread unevenly. The more whites without college degrees were in a state, the more Trump outperformed his FiveThirtyEight polls-only adjusted polling average,1 suggesting the polls underestimated his support with that group. And the bigger the lead we forecast for Trump, the more he outperformed his polls.2 In the average state won by Trump, the polls missed by an average of 7.4 percentage points (in either direction); in Clinton states, they missed by an average of 3.7 points. It’s typical for polls to miss in states that aren’t close, though. The most important concentration of polling errors was regional: Polls understated Trump’s margin by 4 points or more in a group of Midwestern states that he was expected to mostly lose but mostly won: Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
If the errors had been random rather than systematic, it would have been statistically quite unlikely for Trump to have swept all of those midwestern states.
Of course, the polls themselves also acknowledge the chance of a systemic error. They're reported similar to +/- 2% 19 times out of 20. They make no claim that the 19/20 of multiple polls are not correlated.
But their key insight is that polling errors are often correlated, and not just statistical sampling errors that can randomly offset in either direction.
Sure, but even the worst poll-based prediction outfit isn't just aggregating poll results and using the uncertainty based on sample size to determine the probabilities of different outcomes.
Pretty much all of them are using some model derived from the past relationships of polls to election results, which will, to a greater or lesser extent, capture systemic polling error that is not unique to the current cycle in the model.
Well, 538 model took into account historical evidence that election differences from polling averages between states are strongly correlated rather than independent; arguably, that's an effect that exists in part because such deviations are in part due to systemic errors (though the particular systemic errors may differ from cycle to cycle) in the polling, rather than pure sampling error.
Based on what are you saying this?
I refuse to believe relativity until Einstein gives me a personal audience. Gravity, for that matter, is wholly unbelievable unless Galileo will sit with me under a tree. This is how the scientific method works: you must personally meet the scientist in order to believe anything they say. :)
But seriously, I have no idea what point you're trying to make here. I've met geneticists but have never met a virologist. Does that mean I should have more belief in the existence of DNA than in the germ theory?
Running the actual experiment requires a real election. Polls were more accurate in 2018 than in 2016, but we haven't yet had a presidential election with updated methodology. And presidential elections are different from midterms.
Again, of course you can construct a polling methodology that gives a pre-determined desired result (including the exact results of any particular election). This is called fitting a parameter.
And, again, the fact that you can tweak the weights on 2016 polling data so that the polls predict the right result is literally just a mathematical fact. And an uninteresting fact at that.
But you can't run a real experiment to test the the effectiveness of a new sampling method without actually holding an election.
I'm not even making any particular claim about the accuracy of polls this year.
I'm literally just saying that the fact that you can fit a model to give a historically correct answer on historical data that used one sampling method doesn't necessarily tell you the accuracy of a forecast that uses a different sampling method.
TBH, if we were talking about an advertising campaign, this wouldn't even need to be said out loud (or, if it did, the team member who didn't understand would be PIP'd ASAP).
> but the polls are not conducted by district but are conducted by "statewide random polling" which is about as useful in a country with an electoral system such as the US as the popular vote count. That is, not at all.
That's just false. Nearly every state allocates its electoral college votes based upon the state's popular vote. Hypothetical 100% accurate polling of the state's popular vote will absolutely tell you who gets the EC votes in at least 48 states. No?
Re: the distribution of the popular vote within each state, high-quality state polls DO weight for geography. But, again, you don't need to know
Also, the last person ANYONE should be listening to is 538/Nate Silver. People need to remember that before he was in politics, he used to be in sports betting but because his "models" were so terrible, he got pushed out of the industry. Nothings changed and he is still as wrong as ever.
If HN wants some high quality punditry, look at People's Pundit and their shows, Barnes Law (20 year election better wbo has never failed to make a profit in a cycle), and Cotto Gotfried. Stay away from the Nate Silvers and the Nate Cohns, terrible data and terrible forecasts.
That website's subtitle is "forecasting presidential elections since 1912". What does that even mean? Is Helmut 120+ years old? Or does he mean "fitting" instead of "forecasting"?
BTW: Helmut's model was jut wrong in 2016. Its prediction -- the actual statistical forecast the model actually made -- was that Trump had an 87%-chance of winning the popular vote. That was its forecast -- of the popular vote, not of the electoral college. Its electoral college forecast was then conditional on its popular vote forecast. The actual core quantitative prediction the model made was in fact wrong. Literally, the primary model got the right result by accident.
Of course, Helmut retroactively claims that because he got the EC right it doesn't matter. Which would be somewhat reasonable if:
a) that's how the model actually worked (it isn't -- the model's core prediction was about the popular vote and it was wrong), or
b) he didn't make exactly the OPPOSITE corrective about his model's performance whenever he talks about 2000, where he always stresses that it at least got the popular vote right even though it got the EC wrong.
Why does this matter?
First, Helmut's model isn't as good as he claims it is even on historical data. He moves the goalposts from year to year.
Second, Models that get the right answer for the wrong reason are usually over-fit to historical data. They should be taken with a grain of salt in years where their core feature set might behave differently that in previous years. (E.g., a year in which the model's main predictive feature -- primary results -- were cut short due to a 1-in-100-year pandemic).
Anyways, there are a lot of other contrarian/first-principles models that back-test well and predict a (D) win. Of course, no one cares about those this year. But they might next time around if the polling-based methodologies predict an (R) win.
FWIW, I tend to agree that the polling aggregation models are "meh" and should have way more uncertainty than they currently do. Mostly because a) I think turnout is much more correlated between swing states than those models typically assume and b) I don't think aggregating polls is actually all that useful.
Basically, everyone in election polling is making educated guesses and everyone in election polling over-sells their certainty.
Also, re: betting markets. Through a combination of bets on state-level results, you can construct positions that pay out if EITHER Democrats win the popular vote OR Republicans win the electoral college. The odds of Republicans winning the popular vote but losing the college are basically zero. I guess my point is just that there are lots of idiots betting on elections and you can trivially construct (small) sure-to-win positions.
Hispanic vote numbers are wrong this cycle (too high of support for Biden in the models). Might not matter, I'm still expecting a Biden victory.
This sounds like something a soviet comission would declare after an accident. What went wrong and how was it corrected? You needn't know, it has been corrected.
Opining without doing any research is lazy and undermines good conversation. Your exchange with GP literally amounts to a "uh huh / nuh uh".
Name-calling, FWIW, is even less productive.
>> you needn't know, it was corrected
There were long reports on what went wrong (and what didn't) in 2016 polling.
For example, https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/Reports/An-Evaluat...
More importantly, there are explanations from pollsters about what they changed and they speak openly about remaining possible sources of uncertainty/error. See e.g. the quotes in this article: https://www.newsweek.com/how-pollsters-changed-their-game-af...
All of this is a quick google search away, and anyone who has actually paid attention to polling knows exactly how polling has changed in the past 4 years. It's literally impossible to read anything on this topic without knowing that polling firms openly talk about methodology changes. Therefore, your original comment was either intentionally misleading or profoundly uninformed.
NB: You can absolutely agree or disagree with their methodological choices, especially around "shy Trump effect" and whether Trafalgar-like "what do your neighbors think?" questions make sense.
But even if you disagree with their choices, _it's plainly untrue to say their attitude is "you needn't know". To the contrary, they're quite open about how their polling methodology has changed._
Are you willing to defend with evidence and reason your initial claim that pollsters haven't explained what they have/haven't done to try and correct polling methodology? Or are we just going to name-call like we're 12 year olds on a playground/irrelevant partisan zombies in the internet comment section?
This year, there are some truly weird things happening. For example, Trump is losing ground along seniors while gaining ground among non-white voters. He is polling 10-20 points better among Hispanic people in Florida, for example, than in 2016. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-losing-ground-.... Trump is significantly outperforming Romney or McCain among non-whites, and significantly underperforming among seniors. Polls do lots of adjustments based on assumptions about e.g. voter turnout by race, and I don't know if pollsters have really gotten their arms around this situation.
The explanation of the "16% chance Trump wins" got a little unscientific in the media last time. To be precise, that's the probability that Trump wins based on the statistical distribution of the different polls and the margins of error within polls. (Roughly speaking, it's "measurement error.") It does not address the possibility that there are systematic methodological shortcomings in the polls. Both things happened in 2016: there was a significant chance of Trump winning anyway, but there was also systemic errors in assumptions regarding low-propensity voters, voters who haven't gone to college, and undecided voters. Pollsters have seemingly fixed those errors, but that doesn't mean there aren't other ones.
Yes, it does. FiveThirtyEight's modeling includes sources of uncertainty beyond just the margin of sampling error of the individual polls.
They've tallied up how much the polling consensus erred for past elections, and have found that while it is not consistent which direction the polling consensus will err for a give election cycle, it is possible to quantify what is a typical size of polling error. Or to put it another way, which methodological shortcomings matter changes from one election to the next, but that doesn't stop you from estimating how big an effect it is likely to have.
Assuming that the polls are likely to be collectively wrong by some amount is why the FiveThirtyEight forecast's probability distribution is so wide, with their 80% confidence interval for Trump's electoral college vote total currently spanning roughly 120 to 280.
(They also include uncertainty factors for how much the true state of the electorate's opinions could shift between now and election day, but those factors are fading out of the forecast model as election day approaches.)
I think 538 does take this into account in terms of the uncertainty, which plays into their probabilities. I know they certainly talk about this.
Not too surprising. Many Hispanic in Florida are Cuban, and republican. There are two Cuban US senators (Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz), they are both republican.
Hispanic people are not a single voting block, due to their diverse cultural backgrounds (black, white, Indigenous South American, mixed, rich, poor)
If you talked to people you would understand that what they optimize for is not really related to the caricatures of them, its not the opposite of what "your side" cares about just completely different.
When it is obvious that all the news comes from New York City and Los Angeles, and the world resyndicates that, while a large swath of America that actually matters cares about different things, it is easy to tell why the models fail.
You would have bet the farm on the undervalued bet on the prediction markets.
This is what's frustrating about sites like 538. They have Biden as an 87% chance to win. A betting site I frequent has Biden's winning odds as -180 (1.556 for Europeans). If they really believe the accuracy of their models, they should literally be betting the farm on a Biden win.
I mean, maybe they are; how would you know? (Though it would seem vaguely improper; not sure about the journalistic ethics take on this but it's at the very least not a great look.) Presumably the money a few 538 employees could bet wouldn't shift the betting markets very much.
Maybe it's simply not a good idea to analyse this in terms of chances of winning because we will witness just 1 event but the probability says that in 400 years we will have 16 Trump presidencies.
It's very counterintuitive, I don't know how to think of it. It's like saying that %99 of StartUps fail but that stat is meaningless to the individual startups(meaningful to govt & investors that will have to deal with 100s or more startups).
From subjects perspective, their own startup have %100 chance of success and Trump has %100 chance of winning.
Maybe these "chance of winning" statistics should be compiled by examining the roadblocks to the success.
This is just going to be 2016 all over again where somehow polling = "the correct prediction" when none it is taking into consideration the voting record of the electoral college. Just a general consensus among a biased selection.
Can you clarify what you mean? Wisconsin never went for a Bush, and other than Trump's win in 2016 it's been voting for Democrats in presidential elections since Reagan. What electoral college record and red majority are you referring to?
And even if you reject all polling evidence, why is that one Trump win indicative of a solidifying shift toward Republicans, as opposed to expecting a reversion to the mean and Wisconsin going back to being a generally blue state?
If I told you "there's a 30% chance of rain tomorrow" and it rained, you probably wouldn't accuse me of being wrong (based on that one data point at least).
Biden is currently up +10, though this will drop before election day. Hillary ended up winning with 48.2% vs 46.1% - +2.1 points equaling 2.8 million votes more than Trump. Biden will most likely double that number, and yet still easily lose the election.
The system we have is amazingly broken.
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
Especially if you live in Michigan, Arizona, Virginia, or North Carolina.
If Biden wins Florida, then it's a >99% chance of a Biden victory.
But if Trump wins Florida, it's a 58% chance of a Biden victory.
So Florida is essential for Trump, but not for Biden. Biden has a 70% chance in Florida.
So I wouldn't say the fate of the world rests in the hands of Floridians. However, an early Biden win in Florida could allow networks to call the election on election night rather than having it drag out for weeks like it otherwise might.
The 538 model factors in the outcome of Flordida's election with its own belief about the other states results. This is why if you select Biden wins Texas, the model believes the national result likely in landslide territory, the Biden expected electoral college outcome goes up +70, even though Texas only has 38 electors. If Biden wins Texas, he also probably wins in Georgia or maybe even Arizona.
Or think another way. The largest number of states that can be blue and red still wins is 4. There isn't any combination of any combinations where 5 of selected states are blue and red can still win.
To calculate actual probability don't look at just the number of read leaves to number of blue leaves. You need to take into account probability of each of the state being blue or red. I am too lazy to calculate it but at first sight red outcome seems extremely unlikely.
That said Florida does have a large number of electoral college votes and can swing, so it makes sense as a a choice of the designer.
I mean trump flipped an affluent blue white people electoral vote. I can assure you these aren't the people unemployed due to covid and that they are still voting red which basically means trump will win my state again.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/22/us/politics/t...
Do you also only think that crimes happen only if it gets reported? Meaning if 50 burglaries happen to 100 people but only 2 people reported it, does that mean the burglary rate is 2% or 50%? This is why I don't bother with these worthless metrics as I'll explain in the next paragraph regarding trump.
Did you ever wonder why a lot of people don't publicly come out as trump supporters? They have very liberal friends that they don't want to lose because they said they'd vote for trump. That sentiment still lingers here. Most leftist people who argue against trump vehemently do so in a way that these regular folk that end up voting for trump keep it under wraps because they're too scared to publicly say anything.
Just because the "numbers" shrank, doesn't me the actual voters did. There is a lot of societal pressure involving politics and only on the left is it worthy of breaking a friendship over. This is why many white liberals who voted trump keep their mouths shut.
But I guess my point here is that it seems like the NYT feature was based on an honest analysis of data from something called IPUMS, which Wikipedia tells me is "the world's largest individual-level population database", not a just "schmuck reporter" with a baseless hunch or something.
It'll be interesting to revisit pieces like this on November 3 (or whenever all the votes are tallied) to see if any of them turned out to be good predictors or not.
Based on this middle school level of understanding of polling and crime statistics, I'll skip the rest of the comment, but thanks.
I like the diagram, but it seems like a lot of superfluous words are going on in the "English translation" at the top.
How about "If Biden wins Florida and New Hampshire, Biden Wins" ?? It doesn't matter if "Trump wins Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nevada" in that case, so its just meaningless.
------------
Another example:
If Trump wins Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and Arizona but Biden wins Georgia, Wisconsin, and Iowa then Biden wins
Clearly, the "Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and Arizona" statement is meaningless in this example. All that matter is "If Biden wins Georgia, Wisconsin, and Iowa, then Biden wins".
However, considering this is a side project, I understand why they didn’t try to build every feature. It’s much better to publish something in a timely manner than to spend so much time polishing it that you miss the relevant deadline!
As far as I can tell, the "neat calculation" is:
* "If Trump Wins, then the list of states that Biden won are meaningless"
* "If Biden Wins, then the list of states that Trump won are meaningless".
> However, considering this is a side project, I understand why they didn’t try to build every feature. It’s much better to publish something in a timely manner than to spend so much time polishing it that you miss the relevant deadline!
I can agree with that. But I'm still going to try to offer helpful criticism when the projects hit the 1st page of Hacker News!