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Electoral College Decision Tree

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151–160 of 373 posts

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 P…

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.

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.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). Bu…

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.)

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ext…

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.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#154
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

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)

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#156
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

> 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.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 P…

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.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.)

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ext…

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 p…

Which part of the constitution says that?

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 P…

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.

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.

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