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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Another similar tool, with very different visualization.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-ma...

That tool has been a total productivity drain on me since it was launched.

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.

Wisconsin too. Any of the states right around the tipping point, really, as you'd expect.

Interesting that the tool above makes it appear that Trump has a much longer journey to win, and this tool shows that if he wins FL and PA, he's 92% likely to win the election. Guess, as always, the lens you're using affects your interpretation of the data.

The difference is that the FiveThirtyEight tool is taking into account the coupling between the outcomes. They project Trump's odds of winning PA at 13%, so if he does win PA it's likely he's doing better than expected in other competitive races. The originally linked tool is just showing all the combinations of outcomes for these 12 competitive races.

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.

Winning both FL and PA when the polls show you down by 3 and 5.7 points respectively is pretty much the definition of a "long journey" statistically.

Part of the problem with the polls are their error bars. 538 hopes they’re eliminating those error bars through a number of different tactics - like averaging the polls. That should do something like increasing the N and decreasing the error. But that’s assuming the methods used to generate the surveys are themselves fully unbiased and representative of the underlying population. On the other hand, seasoned pros are saying if the polls are wrong this year then it’s time to hang up the towel on the polling profession entirely-some of the gaps are wide enough to be significant even with large error bars.

> On the other hand, seasoned pros are saying if the polls are wrong this year then it’s time to hang up the towel on the polling profession entirely-

I haven't heard anyone say that. Polls are always wrong, it's how wrong that is important.

Election polls are almost always right for the only ultimate answer that matters: who is going to win[0]. They also accurately predict the margin of victory. Same link. Polls, in general, are typically measuring tendencies or preferences, which they also (tend to) accurately capture. So saying they are always wrong doesn’t really make sense, as they are not trying to be right in an absolute sense. The error is with the reader who misconstrues what the poll is measuring and how it is doing so.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_Unite...

Edit: slight elaboration.

> Election polls are almost always right for the only ultimate answer that matters: who is going to win[0]. They also accurately predict the margin of victory.

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.

Even state polling in 2016 was pretty good, historically. The reason to think otherwise is that there was a specific error (non-college white voters swinging to R) that happened not to be tracked well (those voters don't respond as well to polling) nor accounted for (most pollsters didn't weight for education). And it happened to be most concentrated in a few states in the upper midwest that were close to the tipping point. AND it happened to be JUST ENOUGH to have predicted a very narrow (sub 1% in PA/WI/MI) win incorrectly.

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.

> Even state polling in 2016 was pretty good, historically. The reason to think otherwise is that there was a specific error (non-college white voters swinging to R) that happened not to be tracked well (those voters don't respond as well to polling) nor accounted for (most pollsters didn't weight for education). And it happened to be most concentrated in a few states in the upper midwest that were close to the tipping point. AND it happened to be JUST ENOUGH to have predicted a very narrow (sub 1% in PA/WI/MI) win incorrectly.

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-...

If that's the case, the pollsters have an easy way to regain trust in their methodologies. They can simply reweight their 2016 data to ensure education sampling matches the population and show that they now predict 2016 correctly. Have any of them done so?

People have done this analysis repeatedly, you just aren't reading it. And polling in 2018 was generally quite good. But again, there's nothing wrong with their "methodologies". Polling errors in 2016 were in fact not far from historical norms. Numerate consensus (c.f. 538) picked a likely but not certain Clinton victory and the result was an extremely narrow loss instead. That stuff happens.

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.

You're arguing against a straw man. I never said that polls are always wrong. My political desires don't hinge on the current polls being wrong.

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?

Here's the analysis.[1]

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...

Thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for.

> 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

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.

> Polls don't predict anything.

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.

> I was simply asking if it was verified by showing that weighting by education made the 2016 polls align with reality.

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.

The weights can be computed by comparing how often different educational levels appear in the samples vs. the population. They should not be wiggled in order to get a particular outcome.

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.

> 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.

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.

> If you want to fit a particular single result you can change how you handle any factor and get a perfect match.

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.

Uh... polls reliably predicted Trump's win in the primaries long before anyone in the pundit class believed it. For months and months it was explained away as simple name recognition. But he was ahead the whole time.

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.

> Just browse through the article history at 538

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.

Frank Luntz said it on Fox News on Friday.

To be clear: that's a republican pollster giving a message to republican-dominated media which was quite clearly intended to be encouraging to the overwhelmingly republican audience.

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.

538 hopes they’re _reducing_ those error bars. If they thought they were eliminating them, they wouldn't need to run simulations at all.

Fascinating isn't it? Makes you wonder why people in New York and California even bother to vote at all.

That's going to be a fun toy on election night, as state results come in.

> election night, as state results come in.

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.

Apparently Florida should be ready for pandemic adjustments to polling and still report nearly all of their results on election night. They’ve switched to mostly mail in ballots years ago and I think even count them as they come in or something - so they can be reported election night. Granted, it’s Florida. So sanity need not apply and we could get their election results from the SCOTUS.

Personally, I hope the early, in person voting decides the election on election night.

Not necessarily. There are several paths where a Biden win could be called early on election night. For example, Texas has a large fraction of early voting and a small fraction of mail ballots. So the chance that Texas can be called early is quite high. And if Texas gets called for Biden, then the networks will call the entire country for Biden.

You're right that if Texas goes blue, I think its safe to say that Biden won the election.

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.

Florida is one of the few states that are reporting mail-in ballots the night of the election. They've already started counting them and tabulating the results. After polls close, they press a button and it spits out the final results. With early voting getting nearly 60% of all registered voters in FL, I suspect we'll get 99% of precincts reporting FL numbers within 30-45 minutes after the polls close. Thus, I personally think we're going to know fairly quickly who wins the presidency.

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.

The signature verification part was dropped by court. And to be honest I don't understand why.

The idea of it is kind of farcical to being with. How do you verify hundreds of thousands of signatures in the first place?

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.

Washington uses signatures for our all mail in elections. When I’ve phoned in my signature (read just a line instead of something even vaguely resembling my usual mess) it has been challenged. I also forgot to sign/drop my ballot one time and had my wife sign it. That one was also challenged.

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.

This is my first time voting in Washington!

That’s interesting to know. what method do they contact you to and how big is your window to respond?

Is it farcical? Signature verification is the only thing they use in Maryland. You just go up and write in your address and sign. I don’t know how reliable signatures are but people assure me that not requiring ID is fine because there are signatures: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/poli...

> 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.

This says nothing about the process itself, just a simple statement that it works. Maybe an actual description of the process would be more convincing to me, but this by itself doesn’t mean anything to me.

My guess would be an inability on the part of those who wanted inconsistent signatures to be a valid reason for throwing out a ballot to show evidence that such a move would prevent widespread fraud, and a significant amount of data on the part of those arguing that signature verification would instead disproportionately throw out qualified ballots filled out by people whose signatures vary sometimes (my certainly does).

My hypothesis is signature verification where it’s minimally trained individuals doing the comparison seems quite open for inaccuracies. I couldn’t find any large scale studies though looking into this.

I’m 40 and trying to imagine what my signature looked like twenty years ago. Probably rather different.

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.

Agree strongly, also, nobody ever told me my signature was significant. I’ve never had a “signature” and nobody has ever told me I needed to. The scrawl on the back of credit cards used to be checked in 2000-2010 but not since, and even then I just scribbled.

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 not hard to imagine that many of those hard to read names historically just happened to belong to minorities. American states have a sordid history of using ambiguous laws for vote suppression.

Unanimously dropped by the State Supreme Court. Not one justice voted to require signatures.

Integrity theater exists to suppress turnout for the party that wins when people turn out to vote and is primarily supported by the party that wins by suppressing the vote. It only does this. It does nothing to lower the already insignificant amount of voter fraud.

We verify signatures as part of our service (online background checks).

It's an entirely human process and imprecise might be the best word for it.

If Biden wins Florida, Biden has very likely won the whole election, but if Trump wins Florida it becomes a toss-up. So I think we’ll only know the result early if it’s Biden.

I think it would need to be a lot closer than 2%. Obama won Florida by 0.88% in 2012[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_presidentia...

Sure, but to call it early requires a blow out.

A 2% victory would absolutely be called on election night. That's actually quite solid, and most states don't even allow for requesting recounts unless the tally is within 1%.

I'm not sure what you mean by "official" polls, but in 538's polling average Trump is only leading Texas by 0.5%.

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/...

> Biden winning is not very likely, but it's also not a not very small chance

Coincidentally, that's pretty close to the odds that 538 gave to Trump winning overall in 2016.

TX and FL going blue? Have you seen the early voting? Rs are LEADING in Miami-Dade, a Clinton county. Voter registrations are crazy for GOP in FL and the D-R voter gap is only at around 130,000 (used to be 650,000 when Bush won FL in 2000) Other than polls, I have yet to see any indication that FL will go blue despite going red in 2016 and then electing an R Governor on 2018.

> Have you seen the early voting? Rs are LEADING in Miami-Dade, a Clinton county.

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...

That’s a 20 point lead for Biden, and the data above shows that Republicans are more likely to vote in person than Democrats. (1:2 margin among mail ins, and 1:1 among early in person voting).

Clinton won Miami Dade by 30 points (65-35) and still lost Florida by 1.2%.

"Leading" is incorrect, but modeling has assumed D's need a 70-30% advantage in mail voting. This is because of polling regarding COVID where R's are less worried about early IPEV and more likely voting on election day. The current numbers are nowhere near that, so I wouldn't be surprised if Florida is red.

Uh... whose modelling? We've never had a pandemic election, I think it's fair to say no one has any idea which demographics are more/less affected by an early voting drive. All we can say is that a whole lot of people are voting early.

Most people believe more Democrats are voting via mail (Trump had been criticizing mail voting).

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

>Most people believe more Democrats are voting via mail

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.

> It's not necessary to "believe" anything when it comes to Florida.

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.

The numbers disagree with your assertions.

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.

Thanks very much for posting this link. I'm interested in how other states are doing. It's nice that all of the states that publish data is aggregated here.

Be careful. Those counts are for registered party, not vote. R membership has been slipping in the last few years and an exceptionally high number of prominent Rs have endorsed the D candidate. This year, those ballots are likely to break more toward D votes than the party registration suggests.

The people you're calling "prominent" are essentially pariahs in the Republican party. Literally almost no Republican cares what they have to say.

Also, none of them are True Scotsmen.

TX has a better chance of going blue than FL.

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.

Most modelling puts Florida as about 52/48 Biden's way but Texas 60/40 Trump's way.

It would be a mild surprise if Biden won Texas. It would be astonishing is Biden won Texas without also winning Florida.

One of the best democratic candidates ever, Barack Obama, couldn’t win Texas.

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.

Retirees in Florida seem to prefer Biden to Obama, which is interesting.

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.

> 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.

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

For context, if Texas goes for Biden, then the 538 model predicts some amusing things. 1. The next most likely state that Biden could win is South Carolina at 25%. 2. The next most likely state that Trump could win is Ohio at 28%. 3. Biden would have the same chance of winning Mississippi as Trump would have of winning Iowa, 21%.

Calibrate your expectations accordingly.

It's more likely that Biden wins Florida and had enough margin in PA for it to be callable than Texas gets counted enough and is competitive for Biden.

It would be astonishing statistically if Biden doesn't have a good margin in PA or FL but is competitive in TX.

Biden will not win Texas.

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.

“Finished forever” isn’t really a thing. The parties realign. Texas was a Democratic stronghold until the 1990s. Beto ran close in a 2018 election against a Republican candidate supporting a historically unpopular Republican President, during the blue wave. But Greg Abbott won his election for Texas Governor that same year by a bigger margin than George W. Bush did in 1994. He won 42% of the Hispanic vote (Texas became majority-minority in 2011).

“Polls notwithstanding” what data do you use to justify your statement regarding the outcome of the election in Texas and 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).

I didn't say "probability". It's not going to happen. The polls are bullshit.

You said “Biden has as much chance of winning Texas as Trump has of winning California.”

What do you mean when you say “chance”, if not probability?

I mean neither event will happen.

All but 8 states can start processing ballots before election day. Unfortunately, 3 of those 8 are MI, WI, PA. So it may take longer for those.

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.

Madison Wisconsin pre-sorts mail in ballots by voting ward and has them taken to the polling places on Election Day morning and feeds them through the tabulator after someone cosplays as the voter to ensure the voter can't cast two ballots. I assume the same process is done for all the major metro areas. They'll be counted on time.

(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.)

> after someone cosplays as the voter to ensure the voter can't cast two ballots.

I'm sorry, what? This needs more explanation.

They don't just stuff it through the machine, you get in line as is you were the voter, verify you're on the rolls for your polling place, check you off in the book, etc. No steps are skipped to ensure the voter can't show up and request another ballot and vote again.

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.

At least in NY, I don't see how this is possible because I can send in an absentee ballot and then invalidate it by voting on election day in-person. So I don't see how they can open any of the secrecy envelopes, let alone count any ballots, until they've determined if the ballot in the envelope should be counted, and they can't do that until they get the poll book back from my election site at the end of in-person voting. (But maybe NY is one of these 8 states due to this rule?)

Yep I'd guess NY is one of the eight. In NC they process in advance, and if I vote with both methods, they arrest me for a felony. The state attorney general and BoE had to point that out to everyone after Trump suggested people try it.

Florida counts quickly. Their absentees have to arrive before the polls close to count, and are counted right away with the day of votes.

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).

If we smash Florida and have enough data in Penn it will be called quick.

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.

Curious about why so many downvotes - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We've seen this show before though. It'll start with "Biden has 97% chance of winning" and end with Rachel Maddow and Chunk Yogurt crying on live TV. In fact, they could probably re-use this video to save money, and nobody would notice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G87UXIH8Lzo

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory.

We have an extremely broken election system.

538's map re-simulates with the assumption that if x's goes in y direction, it implies a certain correlation to other states behavior and remodels things.

I found the 538 tool to be a fantastic way to get the intuition for Bayesian probabilities. Wish I had this intuition in college.

You're not thinking like a pollster. Florida is currently projected to be Biden's win. So what happens if Trump wins Florida?

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.

That’s precisely how I viewed it as well. What I was saying is it’s terrifying that a swing like that implies a larger swing.

There are numerous anecdotal reports of Trump supporters refusing to answer polls or giving intentionally misleading answers. But it's inherently impossible to know how prevalent that phenomenon is. Pollsters can't force voters to respond or give truthful answers.

> But it's inherently impossible to know how prevalent that phenomenon is.

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.

Do you have a reference for a good analysis of that hypothesis? On the surface it would seem like a plausible explanation for the 2016 election results, but I don't know how we could prove or disprove it.

FiveThirtyEight published a well-sourced summary a month ago: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-supporters-arent-...

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.

First: There are lots of "shy" voters. I'm one. I do not have time in my life for every opinion poll that calls me to take 5 or 10 or 20 minutes of my time. Even more so when some of them are push polls. No. Just go away. You'll find out what I think when I vote.

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.)

> 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.

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.

There is some evidence from 2016 that shows you can determine a person’s values/beliefs, which is a better indicator of who they will vote for versus directly asking them certain questions.

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

> 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

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.

The polls aren't wrong and the state polls in 2016 weren't on the whole wrong either - one problem is there were too few.

Right now there are a tons of Florida polls and they are basically all within the margin right now.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/

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.

sure. but their post analysis says that national polling in 2016 was CLOSER than 2012. and state polls were even closer - but there weren't as many as this cycle

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right...

538's model has the (probably reasonable) belief that polling errors don't happen in a vacuum; if there's a polling error in one direction in a state, then other similar states probably have similar errors. Trump winning Florida would imply at least a 3.5 point error based on current polls, so not insubstantial.

The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system.

Politics is extremely broken, yes. But I don’t think the electoral college is the fault.

Not quite. The EC (along with the 3/5 compromise) was designed to protect the interests of slave-holding states, while also avoiding direct election of the president (ie, the people were too stupid to elect directly).

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.

Post-Civil War, it also incentivized voter suppression.

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.

Such a great and novel idea. I'm sure there are holes in it but the principle is excellent.

Thank you! I hope my government teacher would be proud. :)

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.

One additional thought: it may be appropriate then to have an option for a ‘present’ vote or the like to allow those who wish to protest their options on the ballot still be counted. I suppose that’s a write-in ballot, however?

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've long been in favor of the vote of no-confidence. I'm not sure what the system should do with it, (I'd like it to have some teeth) but alas, I'm uncertain as to it's efficacy.

> I'd love to hear anybody poke holes in this idea.

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.

> 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.

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.

Voter fraud is not currently much of a problem, because solid-red and solid-blue states don't have much incentive to allow it (since the ruling party is already confident of its majority), and swing states don't want to risk encouraging it in case the other side gets into power and uses it against them.

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.

And it works the other way, too. There will be a disincentive for Democrats in Texas and Republicans in California to vote. Their vote for their more favoured party would increase the congressional power of their less favoured party!

Yeah, I think the system would would have to go hand-in-hand with proportional representation (similar to how Bundestag seats are allotted in Germany).

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.

So you don't essentially get heard get heard until n election cycles after coming of voting viability age?

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.

> 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.

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.

I totally agree. It comes down to the legal definition of "abridged", "denied", and "crimes".

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.

>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.

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 wonder why no one's pushed for making representation based on votes not citizens or residents. That would incentivize states helping everyone vote. (But might also incentivize fraudulent counts)

I've thought of this before, but have no idea. It could be a lack of imagination?

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.

This is false for several different reasons.

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.

I remember reading about all of this in AP US History back in high school, and it's going to forever confound me that we seem to have uninstalled this history from our collective memory.

Narrative takes precedence over reality at this time.

You should be careful about that. The College Board's APUS curriculum is heavily criticized by the americanists I know and it can be a grave error to assume that you've got the full picture from a high school textbook.

The debates are mainly about what is included and what isn’t. For example it’s very thin on Reconstruction and the end thereof; about the civil rights abuses under the New Deal; etc. There’s also debates about how to characterize certain things (for example Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric was called “bellicose” in a 2014 revision and that generated a kerfuffle.) So yes, don’t assume you learned all the history you need to know.

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....

I appreciate your efforts here to re-expose what used to be a common understanding of this history.

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.

States aren't historical actors. People are.

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.

Try again. Read Federalist Paper 68.

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.

Protecting against the tyranny of the majority is just a politer term for enabling the tyranny of the minority.

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.

Protecting against tyranny of the majority simply by changing the weight of votes is replacing it with tyranny of the minority, as you say.

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.

The legislation not only needs to pass the Senate and the House, but also various committees and the president must also typically sign it. Each one of these hurdles reduces the chance of successful legislation which tends to favor the status quo. As noted by James Madison in someone else’s post, he thought the Senate should favor landowners over the majority “to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation”

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.

I think I mostly agree with what you've written, but committees in particular (while they're not exactly any one thing) seem mostly to work in favor of considering (and thus, ultimately, passing) more legislation than a body could consider if each bill had to be considered by the entire body before being discarded.

In this case, yes. But other rules like "60% to pass a law" are not tyranny of the majority. (Might be tyranny of the status quo, though.)

This arguement honestly sounds like “we need to change the system so my side isn’t denied power”. No doubt if the situation was reversed you’d be arguing for them.

The United States was founded on rejecting a system that vested lawful power with the British government and denied power to the colonists. Were the founding fathers wrong to declare independence to ensure that their 'side' was not denied power?

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.

leaders are selected according to the wishes of the the majority of the people

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.

> The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country.

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.

What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC.

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.

Another solution with potentially a clearer path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

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...

The biggest problem with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is that in order to get a majority of the electoral college delegates into it, you would need states to sign on who benefit from the existing arrangement. You can't get the swing states because the existing system makes them the focus of national politics and you can't get always-red states because the party that controls them benefits from the extra two delegates per state which go predominantly to that party. And together they're the majority of the electoral college delegates.

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.

It's not impossible that some swing state would get a blue-leaning legislature to pass the NPVIC. That would cost the state some attention for the benefit of a better chance in close elections at the top.

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.

This already happened. Colorado is suspended from the NPVIC pending a referendum to overturn its membership.

This among other reasons is why we a lot more states.

The biggest problem with it is that it's unconstitutional. States are not allowed to make agreements with each other parallel to the system.

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.

> The biggest problem with it is that it's unconstitutional.

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.

> if you can get that many states to agree to it, then you could have just done a constitutional amendment

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.

Which part of the constitution says that?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec...

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.

1) the part that specifically says the states shall choose their own presidential electors. The supreme court has said delegating this power to a popular (statewide) vote is permissable, but when delegated, the vote must adhere to 1 person 1 vote principles. A delegated-power that incorporates the votes of other states likely violates this principal, and is therefore unconstitutional.

2) the part that says no interstate compacts without express approval of congress

> you’d need either every state to agree or an amendment.

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.

Well no state would actually do that of its own free will because it would disadvantage what parties they actually voted for.

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.

But it would benefit the people of that state, because it would force both of the candidates to give the people of that state more of what they want, since that can now make the difference between California's 55 electoral votes going 30 to one candidate and 25 to the other, or 45 to one candidate and 10 to the other. And Presidential elections have been decided by less.

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.

It wouldn't really benefit the people of that state.

> 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.

>But it would benefit the people of that state

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.

Only within the internal context of that state, though. Apportionment based on factors external to the state is likely unconstitutional, based on the voting rights act and resultant scotus decisions.

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.

> 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.

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.)

Deciding how to apportion electors falls squarely within the rights of a state legislature. There's no need for proportion of popular vote to correspond to electoral votes.

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.

> What the supreme court has said, is that if any decision is delegated to a vote, then that vote must meet constitutional muster.

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?

Under the principle of "1 person, 1 vote", it would also seem impermissible to assign electors in a "winner takes all" way. Indeed, there is a campaign to test the constitutionality of states doing this:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/09/10/winner-tak...

It is the sovereign State (1 entity) casting its electoral vote, so splitting the vote makes less sense than a single winner. We're not a parliamentary style government.

If a state is one entity, it should have a single vote. Instead, there is a college of electors, and those electors should at least reflect the electoral outcome in the nominal congressional districts that they represent, as in Maine and Nebraska. (I know that's not how elector assignment generally works, but I think it's just as valid an interpretation as your "1 entity" view).

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.

The constitution literally says the States shall choose the president.

Not the people.

States are people, my friend.

(Hopefully that's a less controversial statement than Romney's famous line).

> What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC.

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.

> This is, of course, the intended effect of the EC and 3/5 compromise, with the original focal disenfranchisement being chattel slavery.

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.

I’ve never heard this explained quite this way. Thank you.

Lots of negative descriptions there. But even with one-man-one-vote, the winning side seizes the voting power of those voting for the loser(s).

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.

> The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system.

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.

> The college disenfranchises Wyoming Democrats and California Republicans a similar amount.

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.)

This argument never made sense. In a one person one vote system, the concept of a state never comes into play. It is a national election, states are irrelevant.

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.

At least it's better than the situation we have with the Senate, where a voter in Wyoming is 68 times more represented than a voter in California. We are seeing the damage from this right now: the minority is having their way in Supreme Court appointments.

"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"

Eh, we had a bifurcation of slave states and free states, and a legacy of that in the segregated south. Do you know what would have happened if the majority of the population lived in those states? You’d have a racist executive branch for decades. Popular vote working exactly as you want, but you wouldn’t be singing the popular vote tune when what’s popular is not stuff you believe in.

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.

What you say is true, but why do you think the present system is better? Arbitrarily weighting different people doesn't really make any sense unless you think it somehow gives more weight to correct or better people.

> Popular vote working exactly as you want, but you wouldn’t be singing the popular vote tune when what’s popular is not stuff you believe in.

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.

Everyone gets 1 vote, but not all votes are worth the same. That is true for any voting system.

To put it another way, all votes are equal, but some votes are more equal than others. That sounds vaguely familiar…

Welcome to voting systems.

That seems like an odd claim to me. In a nationwide popular voting system, what votes aren't worth the same?

The marginal votes to win an election. Those are so valuable that define most political platforming.

Instead it allows the smaller, less populous states to have outsizes influence.

Possibly the systemic cause is the excessive influence of the presidency.

there are a few factors. there is the weighting ( how many electoral college votes per citizen) as well as how they get allocated. If California has a single voter more for Biden and Trump, it's the same as if nobody in California voted for Trump. If your state has 100 electoral votes and the voters are split 50-50, the fair thing to do would be to allocate those electoral votes 50-50. Instead it's all winner take all, making people further feel like their vote doesn't matter. The probability that your vote is the swing vote is so low compared to a simple popular vote for the vast vast majority of voters, so at least with regards to the presidency, they have a lot less reason to even vote.

But the electors of the electoral college are still not aligned with equal representation because of the various state populations.

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 current system, aren't states binding themselves to an electoral college vote count that unscrupulous states have no incentive to get accurate?

>The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system.

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.

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