6 ms·

Damn, I wish I lived in one of the states that gets to choose our president.

ck2 14y ago
Trust me you do not want. Watching TV or the radio is impossible without being inundated. It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
- gwright 14y ago
  A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    There are other voting systems that should yield less catering to the extremes: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
  - drewrv 14y ago
    So what? Why should some peoples vote matter more than others?
    - leif 14y ago
      It's all about what kinds of questions get discussed and addressed during campaigns. 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.
      - lbarrow 14y ago
        The game theory is not complicated at all for a first-past-the-post election with two candidates: candidates will cater to the median voter. There's even a theorem proving it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem "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.
        nitrogen 14y ago
        From the article you quoted: The assumptions include a majoritarian election system in which political views are along a one-dimensional spectrum. 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/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/).
        Zakharov 14y ago
        Adding another dimension doesn't make a difference; adding another candidate does.
        Evbn 14y ago
        What is the median point of a polygon?
        nitrogen 14y ago
        The existence of only two candidates is a side effect of assuming that political opinions lie on only one dimension. The Median Voter Theorem also seems to ignore the polarizing effects of our two-party primary system.
  - raldi 14y ago
    Most of the country doesn't live in high-density areas. If you only catered to urban voters, you'd lose in a huge landslide.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      More than half the population lives in an urbanized area of > 200,000. This includes suburbs of larger cities but not rural areas or small cities.
    - thaumaturgy 14y ago
      You aren't kidding! I was skeptical about this, so I checked. Given the list of urban population areas from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_are... and a U.S. population estimate of ~312m, you run out of urban centers with >1m people (at #42, Salt Lake City) before even reaching half of the U.S. population (131,980,346)! To put this into some perspective, San Juan, Puerto Rico would be an attractive stop for an aspiring U.S. President (at 2.1m people), if they had the right to vote! 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.
    - gwright 14y ago
      I think the problem would be that the focus would not necessarily be on urban voters (they are pretty dependable Democratic votes) but on very specific swing-voter geographies. This is also an issue with the existing Electoral College but is mediated by the fact that the smallest geographical unit (in most cases) is an entire state. The Electoral College also helps to avoid a national recount should the popular vote be very close.
      - raldi 14y ago
        Statistically, the odds of an election being close enough to require a recount is infinitesimally smaller with a single nationwide pool of 300 million voters than it is with 50 smaller pools. In other words, getting rid of the Electoral College would make recounts far less likely.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    So you're saying that even the election system artificially subsidizes sprawl in this country?
    - lbarrow 14y ago
      It's not so much that it subsidizes sprawl as much as it subsidizes low-population states. They aren't quite the same thing: Delaware is reasonably densely populated, but it benefits quite a bit from the electoral college.
nostromo 14y ago
It may actually happen in our lifetime. 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_Interstate_Compact 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?
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  So instead of your vote being lost in the mass of California or New York votes, it would just be lost in the much larger mass of national votes. 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.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    It would not appear to, but in effect, it would make the entire election simply based on popular vote. 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.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      What specific concrete difference do you see happening in that case? What does it mean to "campaign to all people"?
afterburner 14y ago
Don't forget you choose your House and Senate reps. Those are vital for actually passing laws.
icelancer 14y ago
Why? So you could be bombarded by ads and annoying campaign propaganda while you cast a still-statistically insignificant vote?

ck2 14y ago

Trust me you do not want. Watching TV or the radio is impossible without being inundated. It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.

gwright 14y ago
A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.
- nitrogen 14y ago
  There are other voting systems that should yield less catering to the extremes: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
- drewrv 14y ago
  So what? Why should some peoples vote matter more than others?
  - leif 14y ago
    It's all about what kinds of questions get discussed and addressed during campaigns. 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.
    - lbarrow 14y ago
      The game theory is not complicated at all for a first-past-the-post election with two candidates: candidates will cater to the median voter. There's even a theorem proving it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem "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.
      - nitrogen 14y ago
        From the article you quoted: The assumptions include a majoritarian election system in which political views are along a one-dimensional spectrum. 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/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/).
        Zakharov 14y ago
        Adding another dimension doesn't make a difference; adding another candidate does.
        Evbn 14y ago
        What is the median point of a polygon?
        nitrogen 14y ago
        The existence of only two candidates is a side effect of assuming that political opinions lie on only one dimension. The Median Voter Theorem also seems to ignore the polarizing effects of our two-party primary system.
- raldi 14y ago
  Most of the country doesn't live in high-density areas. If you only catered to urban voters, you'd lose in a huge landslide.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    More than half the population lives in an urbanized area of > 200,000. This includes suburbs of larger cities but not rural areas or small cities.
  - thaumaturgy 14y ago
    You aren't kidding! I was skeptical about this, so I checked. Given the list of urban population areas from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_are... and a U.S. population estimate of ~312m, you run out of urban centers with >1m people (at #42, Salt Lake City) before even reaching half of the U.S. population (131,980,346)! To put this into some perspective, San Juan, Puerto Rico would be an attractive stop for an aspiring U.S. President (at 2.1m people), if they had the right to vote! 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.
  - gwright 14y ago
    I think the problem would be that the focus would not necessarily be on urban voters (they are pretty dependable Democratic votes) but on very specific swing-voter geographies. This is also an issue with the existing Electoral College but is mediated by the fact that the smallest geographical unit (in most cases) is an entire state. The Electoral College also helps to avoid a national recount should the popular vote be very close.
    - raldi 14y ago
      Statistically, the odds of an election being close enough to require a recount is infinitesimally smaller with a single nationwide pool of 300 million voters than it is with 50 smaller pools. In other words, getting rid of the Electoral College would make recounts far less likely.
- rayiner 14y ago
  So you're saying that even the election system artificially subsidizes sprawl in this country?
  - lbarrow 14y ago
    It's not so much that it subsidizes sprawl as much as it subsidizes low-population states. They aren't quite the same thing: Delaware is reasonably densely populated, but it benefits quite a bit from the electoral college.

nostromo 14y ago

It may actually happen in our lifetime. 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_Interstate_Compact 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?

waterlesscloud 14y ago
So instead of your vote being lost in the mass of California or New York votes, it would just be lost in the much larger mass of national votes. 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.
- calinet6 14y ago
  It would not appear to, but in effect, it would make the entire election simply based on popular vote. 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.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    What specific concrete difference do you see happening in that case? What does it mean to "campaign to all people"?

afterburner 14y ago

Don't forget you choose your House and Senate reps. Those are vital for actually passing laws.

icelancer 14y ago

Why? So you could be bombarded by ads and annoying campaign propaganda while you cast a still-statistically insignificant vote?