So Much for One Person, One Vote (How Oprah influenced the democratic primaries) | Hacker News Reader

So Much for One Person, One Vote (How Oprah influenced the democratic primaries)

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

5 pointsiseff16 comments

Is this really a surprise? If we wanted completely fair elections, there would be no unequal campaign funding, no TV, a 6 month pre-election gag, etc... etc... Anyone speaking to a group of people about the election gets more than one vote, not just Oprah.

Is there a story here? Blah, maybe I'm just bored.

Your completely fair election seems to involve making sure the electorate doesn't know anything about the candidates, which I suppose is fair in that we'd have to vote at random

I always found it annoying that campaign finance laws are so inconsistent: why do they seriously restrict people with lots of extra money, but not those with lots of extra time or influence?

Because money's the most liquid medium; the medium of exchange, in fact.

Then it's a lazy hack. Every law has a message, and apparently the message of this one is "It is perfectly okay to support a candidate as much as possible, so long as you use the second through nth most liquid medium, and not the very most liquid medium."

There are just so many negative externalities, here. Imagine a lawyer who can do something society thinks is worth $500 per hour. By lunchtime, he's earned enough money to make the maximum donation to Obama; thereafter, his next best bet is to do the kind of volunteer work worth about $10 an hour. He's running at 2% efficiency so we can feel like our political system is less corrupt!

Whether it's a hack is not something you can decide a priori. It depends how much more liquid it is than other mediums.

I'd be more annoyed with 529s. I can only spend $2300 per candidate, but then I can turn around and dump as much as I want into nothing but smear campaigns.

No, no, the "Do you have five minutes for Barack Obama?" clipboard-wielders are incredibly obnoxious.

That's another problem: if the average campaign knows that time is cheaper than money, they waste time relative to money. And the only effective way to overspend time in politics is to spend other people's time, too. We would have fewer street hasslers, push-pollsters, banner-wavers, etc. if we just treated time the way we treat money, and limited everyone to ten hours of thinking about politics per election cycle.

Just tell them you already support him and they'll go away. I had one of those guys going door to door asking for donations, so I just told them I donated $2,300 to Obama already and they left me alone. I got rid of them within 1 minute, and they didn't feel awkward by trying to persuade someone to give when they don't want to.

I actually don't plan to vote this election, my state will go Democrat no matter what, so if I do go to throw my vote away, I'll just throw it to Liberterians.

Because it's much harder to translate the product of crime into influence or time.

1) Uh, really? You think Obama or McCain would accept tens of thousands of dollars from the Gottis, if only McCain Feingold were repealed?

2) So what? Crime is already, by definition, illegal. If there is some benefit to committing a crime, shouldn't we create laws against the crime, rather than laws against the benefit. I mean, money from crime can also translate into money for nice cars, so restricting the sale of nice cars would discourage crime. But it would be silly.

would you agree or disagree with the statement "might makes right."

I would disagree. This sounds like a red herring -- I'm trying to point out that the current campaign finance laws are a bad way to combat corruption, not arguing that corruption is okay.

Here's the quick summary of a totally shit article: Sometimes endorsements work.

Not hacker news.

i hate to say it, but I left reddit to get away from the constant politics.

Interesting article, but would prefer to see more coding / hacking news :)

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