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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

> You know, like literally half the people in the country?

I have no opinion on Musk or the rest of your comment, but as a simple matter of factual data it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population) and four decades since they had any significant support.

For a good while Republican voters have been less than half the country and were it not for the uneven weighting of geographic areas and a domination of party controlled gerrymandering oportunities they would have even less political success than they have seen.

That's just simple psephology fo you.

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This response seems to be spinning a narrative that Democrats have a significantly broader support in the US than Republicans, but I think that is somewhat misleading. Independents have stronger support than either of the major parties.

Here is some data going back to at least 1988: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388781/political-party-preferen...

I am in no way suggesting that US Democrats have broader support.

I am stating that the US Republicans do not have the support of "half of the US"; either by half of total population, half of eligable voters, or half of registered voters.

US Independents should have stronger support but that's not really going to put much of a dent in what's iteratively evolved to become a two party bicameral political system thanks to the shortcomings of repeated "First past the post" voting.

What was a bright idea hundreds of years ago hasn't scaled well and converged to unrepresentative gerentopoly.

> but as a simple matter of factual data it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population) and four decades since they had any significant support.

That certainly comes across as you suggesting that Democrats have broader support. Intentional or not, I found your comment misleading by not incorporating the substantial size of independents.

In 2022, the nationwide popular vote for the House of Representatives was 54,506,136 for Republicans and 51,477,313 for Democrats. By percentage the Republicans won 50.6% of the vote and Democrats won 47.8%.

Leaving aside the non primary year figures you dug up;

the US Census Bureau estimated that in 2020, 168.3 million people were registered to vote in 2020 .. that 54 million voting Republican falls well short of cracking half the registered voters, let alone eligible voters.

I’m addressing the standard you originally set in your comment:

> it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population)

This is false; the “percentage of entire voting population” that voted for Republicans in the House of Representatives in 2022 was not only a “slight edge” over the percentage voting for Democrats, but an outright majority.

The fact that Republicans won a majority of the popular vote for House seats also means that their control of the House is not, in fact, a product of “uneven weighting of geographic areas and a domination of party controlled gerrymandering oportunities” [sic] as you claim. If you apply the percentages of the popular vote to the number of seats in the House, you’d expect Republicans to control 220 seats and Democrats almost 208 seats. In actuality, the Republicans won 222 seats and the Democrats won 213, meaning both parties got “extra” seats (at the expense of independents and third parties) but the Democrats got more. Moreover, it’s not accurate to say the Republicans are unique in benefitting from the gerrymander. In Illinois, Republicans won 43% of the popular vote but less than 18% of the seats thanks to a Democratic gerrymander. Meanwhile in New York, the courts actually threw out an attempted Democratic gerrymander and as a result, the GOP gained three seats and the Dems lost four.

The original comment that I addressed was (paraphrased) "Republican voters are half the country".

I looked only at Presidental elections which have the greatest turnout, these have rarely seen a 50% Republican showing in total active votes in recent decades.

Including the mid term elections we see even lower voter engagement which helps the Republican showing in active votes, sure.

However of all the people that could vote in the US (those eligable), or even of just those people that indicate they'd probably vote (registered), it's still the case that well short of half the country votes Republican.

That the same can be said of US Democrats (although they generally in recent decades have had the edge in total active votes) - but it still remains that well short of "hal the the country" supports the Republican platform - they don't have a popular mandate.

I need a double-shot of copium, stat!

This is missing the point so badly that I don't know where to begin. The point was that Elon Musk's political views are neither extremist, nor rare: they are shared by roughly half of the people in the US. To take that statement and try to refute it on the basis that it is not exactly half of the voting population, but merely a rough approximation, is either a sign of incredibly ill will, or a very bad case of autism.

well if you have single-day voting and hand counts they could easily win almost all states and whatever you call the popular vote wins.

So, .. only if the system is gamed to favour the affluent that can take a day off and have well serviced voting areas then?

FWiW I'm an outsider of the US election system, it's a hot mess with multiple shortcomings that restrict franchise .. and the US Republicans appear to be more skilled at restricting access to democracy to particular demographics.

That's genuinely a horrible argument and there is no redeeming quality about single day voting. And you're implying electronic machines are being hacked, a claim for which you have no evidence.

It is interesting to think about which systems are untrusted until verified truthful, and which systems are trusted until verified false.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

The only thing that makes me doubt electronic voting is the relative lack of distributed counting and thus audit-ability.

That said, I rank conspiracy theories on how many people would be involved in carrying it out, and the idea of a malicious voting machine system capable of having votes altered would take too many knowing participants at various levels of the tool chain.

I would welcome learning more or else implementing more "spot audits" of results in order to minimize the likelihood of any changing of votes.

How many people do you think it took for VW to produce fake engine emission results?

The weakness in your ranking mechanism is you think you have an idea of the number of people needed. To paraphrase Feynman: You mustn’t fool yourself and you are the easiest one to fool.

My own heuristic is expect some fraud or error in every system. The more there is an incentive for fraud the more likely there is fraud. It need not be partisan: could be something like the postal worker hiding mail instead of delivering it. Not finding some minor level of fraud is like a “100% voted for Saddam” announcement—not likely true.

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