512 Paths to the White House
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Also, we did a variation that used state-level probabilities to weight the tree. This gave a sense not just of the logical possibilities, but of the likelihood of each, which I liked. However, the FiveThirtyEight state-level probabilities are not fully independent, so you can't multiply them together to compute conditional probabilities. Perhaps next election!
This is interesting, are they linked in some manner to national polls, or is their something more nuanced?
Somewhat intuitively, the simulations themselves have concepts of "national movements", where a candidate can (with some probability) gain 1%, 2%, etc. across all states.
The state probabilities are then derived from how many simulations/total candidate A won. However, partly because these simulations actually had national movement effects, you'll find that odds of winning both Florida and Ohio (as in # simulations/total candidate A wins both states) are not the state odds multiplied (they odds actually should be higher).
That said, with the raw simulation data, the graphic could show probabilities for every combination.
(I don't mind if it would use only the naive approach and just multiply the probabilities. But it could be a problem if the final probabilities are very different when they are estimated with the correct method and the naive method.)
But thanks for the kudos. We should have some fun stuff for y'all on Tuesday night...
It's been a while since the Interactive News Team profile a few years back; I think we'd all like to know how a major night goes down in the newsroom for your team.
It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
The point of the campaigning process is chiefly to elect new representation, but secondarily (and closely so) to debate and test competing theories on the primary problems of the time.
In the electoral college model, the concerns of the swing states get the most attention, for reasons which are far too numerous and obvious to go in to. This is unfair to people that don't live in the swing states.
In the popular model, it's a bit subtle. At first, you think "well everyone's vote counts equally so everyone's concerns get counted according to the proportion of the constituents with those concerns." But this is not correct when you get down to the details.
If you're a candidate, you have to spend your resources in the most efficient way possible. Politicians do this (spend resources) by paying for messaging, spending their time campaigning in person and with volunteers/staffers, and by adopting policy positions (this is a resource in the political landscape).
In the electoral college model, the best return on your time, money, and issue consideration is found in the swing states, because everywhere else you have basically zero probability of success, which cannot be balanced out by any weight that electoral votes afford.
In the popular model, the best return is to target the largest population possible. People get divvied up into geographical regions no matter what---be it by local news network, regional speaking venue, or major political issue---and it's to these regions that our votes then become divided. In the popular model, the only places worth considering are those places with the largest populations, that still stand a chance of being easy to target with a single message, TV ad, or speaking appearance. If you're in a rural town, a candidate coming to speak to you only gets to speak to you, not to the nearest million voters. But in a city, the candidate that comes to you does get an audience of a million or more. So in the popular model, candidates will only bother to work for the concerns of those who live in population centers.
You get skewed either way. Personally, I think skewing toward regions with lots of people, even if they may not be the overall majority, is the best thing to do, but that's just my opinion, I don't have an optimal solution.
The problem is that "optimal" means that everyone's concerns get addressed in an equal manner, not necessarily that everyone gets an equivalent vote. The game theory involved is subtle and the emotions on all sides even more so.
"Skewing" a democratic political system towards regions with more people in them would be vastly, vastly preferable to our current system. A number of big warts in US policy can be explained, at least in part, by the biases and misincentives introduced by our election system.
Probably the most obvious is the federal government's support of corn ethanol: supposedly it's done in the name of energy independence, but in reality it's done because almost all US Senators believe that they're going to run for President one day, and none of them have to try to win an Iowa caucus with a vote against corn ethanol on their record.
Political views are not along a one-dimensional spectrum. As soon as you add another dimension, FPTP elections favor extremism according to the visualizations I linked to elsewhere in the thread (http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/).
In fact the more urban someone is, the more likely they are to vote Democrat. The more rural, the more likely they are to vote Republican. If you're targeting swing votes, you're interested primarily in suburbs and smaller cities.
My theory is that the value of government and getting along with very different people is forced on those who live in cities. And the feeling that government doesn't do anything for you is reinforced if you live in the country. Therefore people who live in urban areas are more likely to be Democrat, and people who live in the country are more likely to be Republican. (People do move and keep their political beliefs, but that trend is pretty much universal.)
(Ironically government spends more per capita on people who live in the country than on people who live in the city. But the spending is less visible to them.)
Of course that's just my theory. But the trend exists.
A recent podcast on the subject: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/10/rodden_on_the_g.htm...
Suddenly, U.S. transportation & communications infrastructure problems make a lot more sense. I knew the U.S. was a big place, but I vastly underestimated how spread out our population was.
The Electoral College also helps to avoid a national recount should the popular vote be very close.
Even so, you really want to consider the 'pain' associated with the unlikely event not the probability of the event itself. The pain associated with the recount within a single state is much less than the pain associated with a recount for the entire country, even if the national recount scenario is less likely (even much less likely).
The small states would never allow such a change to the constitution. (A presidential voter in Wyoming has almost 4 times the vote of a Californian.) But the big states may have found a work around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstat...
In short, the states that agree to the compact agree to proportion all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. (For example, if Romney wins the national popular vote, CA would give Romney all of CA's electoral votes.) The compact will only kick in once the states that have ratified it have 270 electoral votes (enough to win). It's already about halfway there at 132.
How crazy would it be to see campaigning in California and New York?
You'd still be in a winner-take-all situation with your vote, but on a national level rather than a state level.
I don't think this change would have the effect people imagine. At all.
Therefore your vote is not lost, it simply becomes equal.
This is far better than your vote actually being lost in the mass of California votes, since you, living in California, would still have some impact on the national outcome. And candidates, looking for popular votes instead of electoral votes, would have much higher incentive to campaign to all people, not just those in states where votes carry "more weight."
In all ways, this is more equal and more fair. Every election is a winner-take-all situation—it might as well be a winner-take-all situation where your vote actually has an impact independent of your state.
NY, CA and several other liberal states tend to have people who call themselves "conservatives" (folks like me). We tend to be libertarian leaning economic conservatives who don't identify with religious culture war stuff (war on christmas, the gays are gonna get you).
We get ignored since our vote doesn't matter. This leads to national candidates who are basically Democrats with a little bit of Jesus thrown in (e.g. Bush, Romney), albeit answering to different special interest groups.
I think your beef is more with the national security conservatives than the religious ones, religion is orthogonal to economic conservatism and often employed in its favor (megachurches hating on 'socialism', etc)
I'm referring to spending lots of money on subsidized medicine (Busy, Romney), assorted redistribution schemes (Bush, Romney), increasing the regulatory state (Bush), more executive power (Bush), opposing freedom of political speech (Romney), opposing free speech on the internet (Bush, Romney) and pushing/subsidizing real estate speculation (Bush, Romney).
Of course, military and entitlements need to be addressed as well but reducing healthcare costs is obviously a priority of his as is reducing military spending.
Maybe you should just vote democrat.
I guess more red states will get behind this if Obama wins the election, but loses the popular vote.
The "solution" under this scenario? If the election doesn't produce a candidate with 270 or more electoral college votes, the race gets decided by the House of Representatives. Can you imagine the reaction if Obama won the popular vote, but only received 269 EC votes and then the (Republican) House awarded the election to Romney?
There is precedent for this, of course. The 1824 election saw Andrew Jackson getting a plurality in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, but not a majority in either. Ultimately, a Congress hostile to Jackson would award to the Presidency to his arch-rival, John Quincy Adams. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...
In terms of worrying about deadlock, a simple popular vote total is far superior than any permutation of the Electoral College.
If Obama wins Florida, Romney has exactly 1 path to victory: winning every other swing state. If Obama wins Ohio, Romney has only 11 ways to win. If Obama loses Florida, Virginia, NC, and Ohio he could still potentially win if he wins the rest of the swing states, all of which he's slightly ahead in in recent polling.
Election day will be interesting, but that's what makes it hard to pundits to predict a Romney victory.
That's why even the most partisan pundits, even when everything's in their candidate's favor, keep claiming that "this is such a close race".
TBH the only way Romney is going to be contentious is through voter suppression, and that's been so heavily exposed in critical areas that it's not going to have any effect as long as the justice system holds its ground.
removes tinfoil hat
(BUT EVERYONE PLEASE VOTE IF YOU ARE ABLE, IT'S CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE)
Nate actually has a book about why this occurs and what it does to the conversation of politics in elections in the US.
Nate Silver, for example, gives Romney a twenty percent chance. That’s not bad. I would gladly pay $1,000 for a twenty percent chance to win a million.
Basically, don't confuse uncertainty about whether the polls are accurate with uncertainty about the election if they are accurate because if they're accurate then Obama will win.
Polls are conducted on landlines, which nobody uses anymore. What does that mean? We don't know. Obama has only a slight early voting lead after leading in it 2-1 in 2008? What does that mean? Probably that both campaigns made a push for it this time around and it's reflecting the populous at large, BUT some polling data suggests maybe this isn't the case?
Over the years in different elections in different countries I've heard this complaint [1]
> The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view.
Translation:
> It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority.
Also, this isn't just an election for president. There are Senate (in 2 out of 3 elections) and Congressional races, probably local races too.
But let me address the common "solution" for this "problem": the popular volte (for president). That is a terrible idea.
The electoral college doesn't only exist for the reasons of state rights (although that's a pretty big part of it). It exists to avoid a deadlock. The delegate almost without exception vote as their state did. The possibility of no decision coming out of the electoral college is practically zero.
For those of you who were paying attention in 2000, just look at what a mess Florida became. Now watch me get downvoted into oblivion (but that doesn't make me any less right) but the optional nature of the US voting system has resulted in:
- the left buying votes (cigarettes to homeless people, that sort of thing); and
- the right trying to disenfranchise groups that tend to vote left with such measures as removing the right of felons to vote (and even people who aren't felons).
HOWEVER, by the rules that were in place at the time of the election Florida was always a Bush win (seriously, please don't downvote siimply because you disagree). Even extensive analysis (by the likes of the New York Times, etc) after the fact supports this.
My point was that Florida turned into a circus of trying to change the rules after the fact (eg what constitutes a vote, the whole dimpled and pregnant chad business). You just can't do that.
Imagine that circus on a national level with an incredibly close popular vote.
On a personal note, as someone who resides in New York, one of the most expensive media markets in a state that is safely blue, I appreciate the minimal amount of election ads.
Anyway, the electoral college is not the problem here. There are however two glaring problems (IMHO):
1. Voting is optional;
2. Elections are first-past-the-post ("FPTP").
The argument for (1) is that mandatory voting leads to uninformed people voting. I assure you that uninformed people are already voting.
Voter turnout nationally is something like 50% (IIRC). Of those 40% always vote Democrat, 40% always vote Republican and the 20% in the middle decide the election. So 10% of the population is deciding the election even key states.
The problem with optional voting is it creates the wrong incentives. Measures like voter ID, removing felons right to votes are a consequence of this. If voting were mandatory (as it is in Australia) then a lot of these problems go away. Also, in many parts of the US it is hard to vote with long lines. It should be moved to a Saturday but this difficulty is, in many places, a natural consequence of voting being optional. Election officials are partisans too so you shouldn't be surprised if a right-leaning official under-resources an area with a lot of poor people.
As for (2) the problem is that this reinforces a two-party system. A vote for a minor party is often a vote for the other side (eg voting for the Greens is a vote that would probably otherwise go to a Democrat so is effectively a vote for the Republicans).
Australia has a preferential voting system. Given a field of 5 candidates you number then 1 to 5. When votes are counted you allocate all the "1"s. The candiate with the least number of "1"s is eliminated and their votes are distributed to the "2"s. This continues until something has more than 50% of the vote.
This means you could vote [1] Green [2] Democrat [3] Republican and protest the Democrat candidate without losing your vote.
One last point, as much as people focus on key states deciding the election, the reality is that the states are on a spectrum based on the popular vote. If a Republican wins the popular vote by 8% or more they'll probably carry California, otherwise they won't. A Democrat will have to win by 5-8% to carry Texas. When the popular vote is close, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin are in play. Were it not close they wouldn't be.
Over time states change their "bias". For example, Florida is becoming more Democratic with retirees from blue states in the Northeast. California used to be a safe red state but is now safely blue. These changes aren't sudden and the variations possible are actually quite small.
Whatever the case, the popular vote at the national level would be a disaster.
You appear to be writing this off as a minor issue. It is not. If Mitt Romney wins 49.999% of the vote in any state, and Obama wins the rest, Obama is awarded ALL of that state's electoral votes. That hardly reflects the will of the people in the context of a national election.
IMO the solution, assuming there is a reason to keep the electoral college at all, is for each state to award to each candidate a percentage of its electoral votes commensurate with the percentage of votes that each candidate received in that state.
Federal.
This is good because it means that each state's interest is represented (though the fact that only swing states get the focus is something that should be addressed). I live in Rhode Island and I like that we get some consideration. Large low-population states are another consideration.
...and on posting my reply I see this was already addressed very well in an earlier reply to a parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4737359
National Basketball Association and Federal Bureau of Investigation obviously make sense. National Security Agency is a federal agency charged with security of the nation.
Another bonus of getting rid of FPTP is that there would be no "swing states" that get 90% of the campaign activity, all states would suddenly be roughly equally important.
The solution downandout is proposing is not at all like the solution cletus is proposing; the two did not arrive at "the same conclusion" and the difference between them is not only one of words.
And no the electoral college does not exist to avoid deadlock. Do you know what the chances of deadlock are in a popular vote of about 100 million people?
Oh and can you show me any documented case where someone gives homeless people cigarettes to make them vote for someone? How would that even work? You know you usually have to register before hand.
That's the funniest comment in this thread. I love the idea of history or truth as something established by consensus between newspapers. I don't mean to say that your conclusion is wrong but your method is somewhat lacking.
Um, not quite; you've misstated the conclusion of the news organizations' study of the uncounted ballots. In a much-expanded recount, according to the Times wrap-up piece in November 2001 [1], Gore might have won in a few possible scenarios, but only by a teeny, tiny margin at best (smaller than the margin Bush ended up with). Even that possibility depended on the different counties' election officials recounting the disputed ballots in the same way that the news organizations' independent auditors did.
The Times had endorsed Gore --- as it has every other Democratic presidential candidate starting in 1960 [2]. Yet the lead grafs of the Times piece were commendably explicit: "A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward. Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore."
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12VOTE.html
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/28/opinion/presid...
"But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots. "
So I am right.
Absolutely --- if by "Gore won" you mean that Gore might have pulled ahead, by around 115 votes, and been declared the winner, if all of the following had occurred:
(i) Gore had asked the courts for a full statewide recount, instead of the more-limited recount that he did ask for; * and
(ii) the courts had found sufficient cause to order such an expansive (and expensive) recount, instead of limiting the recount to specific areas where good reason had been affirmatively demonstrated; AND
(iii) in such a statewide recount, the various voting officials in Florida's 67 counties had (x) tagged the same specific 175,010 ballots as problematic as did the news organizations' independent observers, and then (y) reached the same conclusions about those ballots as did the independent observers. *
* As explained in the Times article
We can never know whether (ii) and, especially, (iii) would have occurred.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...
It might not be the intention to avoid deadlock (I have no idea). But it could definitely happen. You don't need an even split for this to occur, just enough to require a recount, which in a popular vote might mean recounting every single vote in the country which would be a nightmare.
What do you mean? Tight popular votes at most require a runoff between the two most popular candidates. If anything, this [1] 2004 NYT article gives the traditional reason:
"The Electoral College's supporters argue that it plays an important role in balancing relations among the states, and protecting the interests of small states."
But it goes on to convincingly counter:
"A few years ago, this page was moved by these concerns to support the Electoral College. But we were wrong. The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate, which more than looks out for their interests. And there is no interest higher than making every vote count."
For the record, I'm not American either, but if I were I'd feel much better and meaningful during presidential campaigns living in, say, Ohio or Florida, instead of New York or Texas.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/opinion/making-votes-count...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_%28United_Sta...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_t...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_runoff_vo...
Preference between condorcet and range voting is a lot more murky.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_sel...
http://rangevoting.org/rangeVcond.html
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method
edit: I forgot to mention that all voting systems are subject to tactical voting, except for ones which are dictatorial or non-deterministic (and those are generally considered nonviable systems).
For ranked ballot voting systems, there's a difference in what kinds of tactical voting are possible, and in how likely it is for tactical voting to improve your perception of the outcome (baysian regret comparison of honest vs tactical voting). Ranked voting systems are not all equivalently bad simply because they're each subject to some kinds of tactical voting.
I think Condorcet is promising (among all the ranked-ballot methods) because the Condorcet principle is easy to agree with. The choice of cycle-breaking method is where the fault lines appear, but new cycle-breaking methods could attract a consensus.
Even if you have a federal electoral commission, the "foot soldiers" who will be working in the election booths will be the same people who is doing it now. (Based on what I know about the system in India, there it a election commission, who provides the administration and drafts Central/State government employees to carry out the elections). I agree that the net effect of such a measure will be positive, if there is more uniformity in the voting rules.
Having election day be a federal holiday wouldn't hurt.
Wait this doesn't happen now?!?!! WTF?
The Constitution doesn't mandate how electoral votes are allocated. Maine and Nebraska, for example, distribute the electoral college votes by congressional district. So the winner take all policy of most states isn't due to the electoral college itself, but how the states choose to implement it.
I'd argue that passionate people are more likely to vote. Arguably, they deserve to be heard, since they care so much about politics. On the other hand, they may be brainwashed idiots.
It also creates a lot more divisive candidates. Obama is a far-left (by US standards, in Australia or Europe he'd be center-right). Bush was far-right. You need to be extreme to win the primaries, and need to stay extreme to get your base excited enough to vote. Polarising candidates encourages debate (which is good), but also encourages group-think.
> As for (2) the problem is that this reinforces a two-party system. A vote for a minor party is often a vote for the other side (eg voting for the Greens is a vote that would probably otherwise go to a Democrat so is effectively a vote for the Republicans).
Once again, this makes it hard for a compromise candidate to win, and makes it hard for extreme groups to win anything more than a small percent. It's the worst of both worlds - less debate, and more extreme Presidents.
Supporting gay marriage and abortion rights are increasingly moderate positions, held by people who swing further left and right on a host of other issues. For example, Obama has been overwhelmingly willing to compromise with business to move other policy agendas (e.g., health care) forward—the far-left is quite unlikely to do this. There are plenty of other counterexamples to an unfounded claim that he is far-left. Drone strikes come to mind, to name but one other.
If he holds views and suggestions for policies that are actually far-left, please enlighten us.
When people have to vote, they will vote for things they are undecided on and it is likely that stupid things will play into the decision, like what the name looks like and whether it seems familiar. It doesn't make them any more likely to be informed about the candidates.
And if they have been "informed" about the candidates, the most likely corruptive force is our news media, which is biased (on both sides). Each radio and television station provides a "range of views" that on average lean toward their candidate or are carefully edited. If you can't trust the media to be unbiased (not that they ever were), who can you trust to give you the "real" scoop on the candidates? No one that I know of.
If people don't care enough to vote, they don't have a strong enough opinion on how things are going, then leave them alone. I don't want them choosing pretty names, and it is already bad enough that our views are so manipulated.
At least those that choose to vote are probably somewhat swayed by how well the government is doing, and how it is treating them and those they care about. Those that would be forced to vote aren't, or it is an even draw.
All of that said, I admit that I am an "undecided voter". I lean conservative, but I don't know who to vote for because I disagree strongly to some of the views of the conservatives. So, I might not vote this election, and I still care about the outcome.
But even with mandatory voting you could argue that it is a fairer representation even if it forces people who don't care to choose a side. Democracy is about trying to capture what te people want, and "the people" means everyone, not just those who care. Idiots have equal voice to nobel prize winners, that's the democratic way.
FPTP is the real problem though. You could keep optional voting but just switch to pretty much any other vote tallying system and get better leaders. FPTP is mathematically guaranteed to bring out the worst in politicians.
Plenty of other countries use a straight popular vote and they somehow manage to avoid all of the problems that EC proponents say the popular vote would cause. It seems obvious that if we were building the country from scratch today, the EC would never even be considered, let alone enacted.
The main problem I see with the electoral college is that it forces the candidates to focus on winning the votes of just a few swing states, instead of the entire country. If the president is supposed to represent the needs/wants of the whole country, shouldn't everyone's vote count equally to decide who takes office?
Translation:
> It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority.
Nonsense!
The least you should have done is actually reply to my post rather than do a drive-by with your own imaginary conclusions. Here it is:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736105
This --and the statement you refer to and mangle-- has nothing to do with me (or proponents of an alternative approach) getting their way. You almost make it sound like a childish whine to which I take offense.
This is about having fair and intelligent elections. Elections today feel like you are watching five-year-olds blame each other for who broke Mom's flowers. It's idiotic at best.
Candidates should not be allowed to engage in stupidity. Talk about your platform, ideas and approach. Leave the other guys alone. Let me decide based on who you are and what you say you are going to do.
This is also about making it possible for anyone to run for office. I said in another reply that someone like Stephen Hawking has zero chance to run for office today. In this media-driven election system we seem to have looking good, speaking well, being able to crack a joke, sing and dance seems to be a requirement. Do you know how many super-smart people have the personality of a brick? Maybe not that extreme, but I hope you get the point.
And, how about money. If you don't have or can't raise a billion dollars, forget it. Again, tons of incredibly gifted people don't stand a chance. They wouldn't even get off the line. That is wrong.
The electoral college also means that Independent candidates have an almost zero chance of winning the presidential election. Zero. States like California have a significant number of independent voters. I was talking to one the other day and he said something akin to "My vote really doesn't count. In order to feel like it counts I have to choose to vote for either a Republican or Democratic candidate.". How fair is that system.
A popular vote, devoid of state lines and with rules aimed at reducing the bullshit factor would allow the very real possibility of having more than two choices. It should allow almost anyone to run and be heard.
There's no reason why it couldn't start on a website where candidates --hundreds of them, thousands of them-- stated their platform and start being filtered two years in advance of the election. Don't have a computer? Want to participate in the process? Go to a library and use on of the computers there. I find it funny to note that some of these purportedly disenfranchised voters are walking around with iPhones, driving SUV's and watching satellite television on their 50 inch LCD TV's.
I agree with you on the point about mandatory voting. I lived in Argentina for a number of years and watched how mandatory voting is twisted and turned there for candidates' benefits. They'd literally buy votes through all sorts of giveaways. What's worst is that the people being manipulated are the poor and uneducated. The ugly truth is that they just follow the carrot.
The opposite of this is that absolute morons are allowed to vote in either system. Voluntary voting does not guarantee that informed people will vote any more than it guarantees that votes are not being bought. I've had conversations with people who absolutely floored me. One guy was in absolute awe of the government because, as he put it, "they are so smart that they can predict eclipses and shit like that. Anybody that can do that is incredible". Another person, who happens to be the daughter of a friend of mine who has a PhD in Physics didn't understand and couldn't get her head around what the national debt means to her. She obviously didn't follow in her fathers footsteps, at least in the math department.
How do you fix this? I don't know. I know it isn't popular to say that not everyone should vote. If people are required to pass a test to obtain a driver's license, why shouldn't they be required to pass a test every year in order to be able to vote? They can actually kill more people with their vote than by not knowing how to drive a car. Not so? How about the religious morons who vote across hard religious beliefs and against issues of health, science and progress that could save millions of lives? Before anyone goes off for this comment, I am not a Democrat or Republican. I hate aspects of both parties and like aspects of both.
The electoral college is just not good any more. The same is true of the way we allow these campaigns to be run and funded.
I don't understand this line of thinking. Do you believe Steve Wozniak would make a better president than Steve Jobs? Leadership often requires a strong dose of charisma and moxie. Those geniuses without people skills make great advisors.
You might want to go back and research presidents before television and the internet. Some of the most effective ones had pretty shitty personalities and habits. Today they'd never make it.
My only argument is that we are probably keeping a lot of really good candidates from participating in the process because the focus is on whether or not you look great and do well in a talk show and give it to the other guy in a debate rather than what really matters.
Here's an imperfect analogy. I've been sailing since, well, forever. I'll go out in almost any weather because I have confidence in my abilities. As long as the boat is in good shape and can handle it, I can. I am also pretty good at sailing when there's almost no wind, when you really have to optimize things to generate propulsion with almost no power available.
I see lots of people at the marina who come out with the latest gear. They look good. No, they look great. Beautiful shirts, and marine coats and boots and brand new lines on the boat, perfect new sails and all the gear sparkles. But they can't sail worth a damn. They motor out of the marina, put up the sails, go around and around a few times and motor back in. All show and no go. Don't even ask them to go sailing at night. They'll piss in their Gucci pants.
These people show well, talk the talk and seem to walk the walk but are worthless as far as sailing is concerned. I know this all too well, I did an island crossing one time with one of these folks and it nearly cost me my life as I was hanging on to the boom while reefing in a storm 'cause the idiot didn't know how to keep the thing into the wind.
My point is that the system we have in place today gives zero room to those with real expertise. Look at Obama as one example: Not one company would have hired him to even run a cookie baking operation in 2008. Yet, he got the country to run. Are we morons or what? And how about little-Bush? Do I even need to get into how moronic it was for someone like that to be on a ticket? And, Sarah Palin? Really? Are we all a bunch of lobotomized robots or is it the system?
My admittedly flawed ideas straight from utopia seek to change things up so that other people, those who can really sail, might have a chance to get the helm. It should not cost a billion dollars to run for president. We should use the Internet to allow lots of people to participate in the contest and let voters engage in a fact-based search that takes a whole year. It's almost like these dating services that don't let you meet in person or see pictures of each other until successful and valuable interaction has taken place over a period of time.
Anyhow, it will never happen. Politicians have too much invested in keeping their sweet rides going. I swear that some of these people would be selling used cars if they didn't have an opening into politics.
It is always the states near the middle that matter. This is because if you are going to lose the election anyway, losing by a smaller electoral college margin doesn't help, and conversely, if you are going to win anyway, winning by a larger electoral college margin doesn't help. Candidates campaign to maximize the probability that they reach 270 electoral votes. That is why Obama and Romney are campaigning a more in Ohio than they are in Florida even though the polls are closer in Florida than they are in Ohio. Florida is a toss-up, but if Obama wins Florida, he probably also wins enough slightly bluer states like Ohio to win without Florida.
Also, California or Texas flipping would require an absolutely massive popular vote landslide. Probably at least a 15% margin.
In any case, as I read this, you have the top comment on this thread. It'd look better in that spot without the obsession about how people vote on it.
The President is not the President of the people. It is the President of the States. Only the States have a vote. In fact, for most of its history, the State governments voted directly and there was no popular vote for President. In modern times, they allowed people to have a say in who their State government votes for but it is still only people controlling the vote of their State. They have no say in how people in other States choose to vote for President.
When people complain about the Electoral College, what they are really saying is that they want to eliminate the concept of States voting for President. For better or worse, the idea of the President being the Executive of the States is so foundational to the US Constitution that you'd basically have to throw out the US Constitution and start over. The only representative in Federal government people were supposed to have is their Representative; in recent decades people vote for other Federal positions as well but it is only to decide how their State will apportion its votes rather than voting for the Federal position directly.
If I don't vote for President, why is the President allowed to shoot my dog on suspicious of marijuana possession?
If you don't vote in Brazil a lot of the things you normally do involving the government become complicated until your pay a fine and fix your status. Anything involving government issued IDs to social security and unemployment benefits are cut off until you "regularize" your status by paying the fine for not voting.
My biggest complaint is that the system forces even Brazilians living abroad to vote, which is a big pain in the ass when you are abroad since you aren't aware of elections (it's easy to forget) and you need to find the nearest consulate and figure out how to vote. Every time I've returned to Brazil I've had to go and fix my status by paying the fine for not voting in the elections that occurred while I was out of the country.
The only problem with this nifty tree is that it must be followed in order to determine the outcome.
Oh wait, I didn't realize the boxes at the top were selectable. I guess that allows out-of-order traversal.
Only thing I'd like to see added to this is using url hash to bookmark the result set so I can share it.
I believe on real problem is the state's voice is not heard in DC and a lot of crap is done that is not in the State's best interest. I wish they would repeal the Seventeenth Amendment so people would concentrate a lot more on the State's politics. Or perhaps, replace the senators with the sitting governor. Then the Senate would think about the state's budget and regulation burden before passing things.
The vast majority of the states are winner-take-all, which presumably reduces but doesn't eliminate the possible ways to split 538 down the middle, but some states either only have a single electoral vote or use mechanisms which can divide their electoral votes between the candidates.
So, yeah, every election has this chance. Probably isn't going to happen though. This is conjecture, but I'd hazard a guess that a Bush v. Gore style dispute over a single large state which holds the balance of the election is way more likely than an actual numerical tie where the House would choose the president and the Senate the VP.
That Wikipedia article talking about the 1800 tie is pretty awesome.
Considering every time you hear a story about politicians trying something insane, it seems to be about the House of Representatives, I think that is exactly why a tie sounds scary.
Barring external events, you can probably put a fork in it.
Sadly, if you don't already have money there, your transfer is unlikely to go through until after the election.
I fully understand that the popular vote option has its issues (focusing on large population areas, etc.). However, a lot of this can be mitigated through legislation and regulation of the process.
Here's a random set of ideas:
- Candidates are only allowed to visit each state capital once. That's it.
- Candidates are not allowed to trash the other candidates. They are only allowed to discuss their views.
- Candidates are awarded an amount of money to run their campaigns. No external contributions from any source whatsoever. None.
- Candidates must participate in detailed interviews for a period of several weeks. Some of these interviews are aired in national networks and the rest made available online.
- Candidates are obligated to participate in detailed debates
- Television networks are prohibited from endorsing or communicating bias
- The publication of poll data is illegal
- A candidate must post a huge bond. If he or she is found telling lies they end-up in prison and have huge financial consequences.
- Campaign promises are recorded and signed in a document that is publicly available. A politician that does not deliver on promises made is exposed to financial and criminal liability. Don't make promises you can't keep.
- Public endorsement of any candidate is illegal. They have to float and survive on their platform and track record.
- The incumbent is not allowed to campaign in any way at all. His or her opponents cannot trash him/her. The incumbent can only rely on having done a good job and kept promises. People will vote and want to keep someone who is doing a good job. The only thing they are allowed to do is announce their running for office and participate in scheduled debates or interviews.
- Politicians are limited to serving in public office for a certain period of time, perhaps ten years. After that they must return to private life --no connection whatsoever to government and politics-- for five years before they can run for office again. This is to infuse balance and perspective and not have a race of politicians, by politicians and for politicians.
There are probably a number of other interesting ideas out there. What we have it horribly broken in many ways. It'd be nice to see real dialog and actions to change it.
Most of the rest of your points are arbitrary things that nobody could be in a position to judge, like "trashing" the other candidates. Publishing poll data being illegal? A politician is a criminal if they don't align with promises? What about compromises or emergencies?
What happened to free speech? Who would be in a position to judge any of these restrictions and how would they not eventually result in tyranny?
I feel like you're trolling... this doesn't sound democratic at all.
Only can use government money to campaign (and not their own)? Can only visit state capitals once? Candidates obligated to participate in debates? Are you suggesting candidates have to become slaves to the process in order run for office?
On top of that, you expect government officials, the same ones put into office by this process to be the ones deciding whether someone is "biased" or not and who "didn't deliver" a campaign promise. Your proposals, if enacted, would probably generate a horribly corrupt government, where every politically motivated person would take every chance to destroy opponents through legal processes until an establishment party has so permeated the government they're basically a dictatorship.
As much as I'd like to believe this post was made in jest, I feel like you're taking cues from Hugo Chavez.
- Historically, the majority of presidents have been rich and white. How do you fix that?
- Candidates make heavy use of propaganda, there is no accountability to what is said. Is censoring information (i.e What China's PRC does) any different from glutting all forms of media with YOUR information so other information is harder to find? This (among other things) was how Berlusconi came to power, and stayed there in Italy.
- Industry getting involved in matters of state... is this any different from Church and state? Should the same 'fix' be applied?
What those restrictions are, I don't know, but I do know that we should be able to brainstorm without being accused of taking cues from Hugo Chavez.
Can you imagine if an "election oversight board" penalized a candidate for "unfair communications"? Jesus, that would be tied up in courts for years.
"The consequences, the judges made immediately clear, were serious. “Allegations of an illegal practice in elections,” they wrote in their full judgement, “have what are in effect penal consequences.” As such, the May election Woolas won by 103 votes was declared void, and he was barred from the House of Commons and any elective office for three years."
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/ryan-gallagher/woola...
Slander and content of speech is tough to regulate because it's not black and white. I think we should still kick around ideas that try to control blatant lying but I understand how unrealistic that could be.
Personally, I think limiting campaign spending might work. Again, still extremely tough subject to solve but the current trend isn't good for our democracy.
1. corporate campaign spending will likely not corrupt the political process
2. as we can see since the ruling, very very little independent expenditures are coming from corporations. it's still mostly rich people paying for the commercials, which is what it was like before
3. the FEC and the idea of these regulations are completely flawed
4. there is no way that these laws will scale passed TV and broadcasting, even though they purport to regulate speech online as well.
5. people should be exposed to as much speech as possible, and it should be assumed they can come to conclusions that fit within their interests. Especially in a world where it becomes increasingly difficult for campaigns to sway voters even with billions of dollars of speech.
> Today, 30-second television ads may be the most effective way to convey a political message. [...] Soon, however, it may be that Internet sources, such as blogs and social networking Web sites, will provide citizens with significant information about political candidates and issues. Yet, §441b would seem to ban a blog post expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate if that blog were created with corporate funds.
> Yet, the FEC has created a regime that allows it to select what political speech is safe for public consumption by applying ambiguous tests. If parties want to avoid litigation and the possibility of civil and criminal penalties, they must either refrain from speaking or ask the FEC to issue an advisory opinion approving of the political speech in question. Government officials pore over each word of a text to see if, in their judgment, it accords with the 11-factor test they have promulgated. This is an unprecedented governmental intervention into the realm of speech.
My point is that what we see today is an abomination. Perhaps the system put into place when this country was founded made sense at that time and for a number of years after that. I really think it makes no sense at all today.
The Obama and Romney spent TWO BILLION DOLLARS in their campaigns and who knows how much PAC's spent. This is obscene. Particularly at a time when so many people in our country are suffering.
Today you can't run for office unless you can raise a billion dollars. Period. That's what it takes. That means that there are a lot of truly intelligent people with great ideas that are financially banned from the process. Want to talk about the 1%. About wealth inequality? Let's talk about the 0.01%, the handful of people that can raise a billion dollars and, effectively, try to buy the presidency.
Sick.
Candidates ought to be restricted to presenting their platform and ideas. They should not be allowed to trash the other candidates with impunity and, yes, lie right and left. What we end-up with today is something I see in my house every day with my little ones: "Daddy, he broke the flower!"; "No, I didn't, she pushed me"; "Nooooo, he said a bad word". Oh, please, stop it!
I'll self-appoint as an intelligent voter. I think you might be one too. The problem is that not everyone is. And the system we have in place allows candidates with money to use drive-by media techniques to cause outrage and indignation on the average voter with the aim being to gain a vote and take it away from the competition. This is criminal.
There are other issues here. If you are not "cool", speak well and present well you have zero chances of getting elected. Before someone goes off thinking that I am attacking Obama, stop it! This is a general statement that is party and candidate agnostic. Steven Hawking --or someone like him-- could never become president. Never. That is wrong. Is being president about looking good and speaking well? Not at all. It shouldn't be, anyway. It should be, among other things, about their ideas, track record, experience and ability to make tough decisions.
I want to get down to an election system that removes all the five-year-old crap from the process and focuses on ideas and accountability. If you can't guarantee that you will come through with a promise, then don't promise it. State it as you idea and explain the challenges you might face making it happen.
Hugo Chavez? Please, stop it. We should be able to discuss an issue like the failings of the electoral college system without resorting to insults, right?
That sounds like a dictatorship.
> Steven Hawking --or someone like him-- could never become president.
FDR and polio.
Anyways, the fundamental problem with your proposal is that every candidate is still going to be inclined to act as close as possible to how they currently act while still staying with in the rule established. They will want to do this because that is how they get votes. The problem is the electorate not the candidates or the system, the people get the candidate they collectively want, and in many ways deserve.
So, you want to ban free speech in an election?
Let's say Bill Clinton wants to appear at a pro-choice rally in Ohio, in the run-up to an election. Can he do so? Can he talk about "extremists" who are trying to ban abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, and for medical reasons? He won't mention Obama or Romney, and might not even refer to their exact positions (attacking a straw man is more fun anyway), he's just a guy exercising his right to speak about political issues.
Can Republican supporters fund an ad about the dangers of socialised healthcare?
What is "communicating bias"?
>- The publication of poll data is illegal
I'm not even sure what problem you are trying to solve. Can parties conduct opinion polls for internal use? Can they talk to people in the mall about what issues they care about?
>- A candidate must post a huge bond. If he or she is found telling lies they end-up in prison and have huge financial consequences. > >- Campaign promises are recorded and signed in a document that is publicly available. A politician that does not deliver on promises made is exposed to financial and criminal liability. Don't make promises you can't keep.
So, you want candidates to deliberately be even more vague than they already are?
unequal distribution of wealth == unequal distribution of money == unequal distribution of power != democracy
Take for instance, this one:
- A candidate must post a huge bond. If he or she is found telling lies they end-up in prison and have huge financial consequences.
Laws like this, for instance, are used to great effect in Singapore to suppress alternative parties. The party in control uses the threat of bankrupting the other candidate to make it impossible for them to basically run a campaign. And god forbid they talk about the Yew family!
Intrade http://electoralmap.net was pretty accurate in 2008. Also predicting an obama victory.
1. Give the democrats Wisconsin (I don't know why people are treating it as a swing state)
2. Give the democrats Ohio
3. Give the democrats any other state (except New Hampshire)
Basically, as long as Obama takes Ohio, Obama wins.
Walker's recall showed how red the state is, once the people outside Madison and Milwaukee actually vote. (Disclaimer: I live in Madison, and commented to others that I didn't realize Wisconsin had turned red.)
Obama is back in Madison shortly, but he really needs to head up to the north of the state. Unless he thinks he can carry it by getting the vote out in obviously blue areas.
On the other hand, I don't think he can sway people in two days, so getting people excited where he knows a vote will be a vote for him might be the best bet.
If you wanted to reform elections in the USA then you would have to start to curb the direct influence of corporations on the elections, compared to that the electoral college is a minor detail.
The problem is that the whole system is too shallow. And that starts at the electorate and extends to political pundits and the media. If you magically sucked money out of the system tomorrow then we'd be absolutely no better off. Neither individuals nor the media would suddenly decide that it's important to discuss the real issues and be open and honest. No, it would still be the same old popularity/celebrity contest and the same old "gotcha" game.
I really think you should take the time to watch this video, understand it, let it sink in and totally mold your brain around it.