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Electoral College Decision Tree

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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#161

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

rubidium wrote: post #77
greenpizza13 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory. We have an extremely broken election system.

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.

there are a few factors. there is the weighting ( how many electoral college votes per citizen) as well as how they get allocated. If California has a single voter more for Biden and Trump, it's the same as if nobody in California voted for Trump. If your state has 100 electoral votes and the voters are split 50-50, the fair thing to do would be to allocate those electoral votes 50-50. Instead it's all winner take all, making people further feel like their vote doesn't matter. The probability that your vote is the swing vote is so low compared to a simple popular vote for the vast vast majority of voters, so at least with regards to the presidency, they have a lot less reason to even vote.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#162

Post by srtjstjsj »

BurningFrog wrote: post #44
jstanley wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it seems obviously dumb that the electoral college has an even number of members? Wouldn't making it an odd number prevent this possibility?

In 1973 Sweden ended up with a 175-175 situation in parliament. After deciding 152 issues by lottery, the number was changed to 349. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Riksdag#Constit...

The US uses the Vice President instead of a lottery.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#163

Post by pchristensen »

gen220 wrote: post #134
alistairSH wrote: post #85

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…

Such a great and novel idea. I'm sure there are holes in it but the principle is excellent.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#164

Post by rubyist5eva »

WorldMaker wrote: post #135
jstanley wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it seems obviously dumb that the electoral college has an even number of members? Wouldn't making it an odd number prevent this possibility?

It seems even more dumb that in the event of a tie the House of Representatives is supposed to vote one vote per state as if it were a dumber Senate. The compromises that led to that setup are weird mistakes. I guess it is good that it is a rare event when the Electoral College ties.

Why is it dumb? The House of Representatives is supposed to proportionally represent the constituencies of the various states. The Senate exists to represent the state legislatures - though the 17th amendment changed that(and I personally believe it should be repealed).

It makes sense to me, as the House choosing the President is still a somewhat representation of the will of the people. It's also very similar to Westminster-styled parliamentary democracies choose their Prime Ministers.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#165

Post by rayiner »

dragonwriter wrote: post #95
bobthepanda wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC. As it stands today winner takes all makes big states like California and small states like Wyoming equally uncompetitive since there’s a snowball’s chance in hell they will ever flip majority the other direction. Proportionally allocating a state’s electoral votes would level the state by state playing…

> What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC. No, what is broken is indirect election with voting power distributed by state (no matter how you allocate the electoral votes based on the popular vote in the state, whether its winner-take-all, by-congressional-district with winner-take-the-extra-two, or proportional allocation), since the basic mod…

> This is, of course, the intended effect of the EC and 3/5 compromise, with the original focal disenfranchisement being chattel slavery.

Distributing electors by state wasn’t the “intended effect” of the EC. Nobody proposed direct election of the President. The choices were between having Congress elect the President, and having a separate Electoral College. It arises out of the fact that the framers viewed us as a collection of separate states and so it made sense to do everything at the granularity of the state. The executive branch of the European Union is indirectly selected for the same reason.

As to the intended effect of the 3/5 compromise—what would have produced the result that some people want is for slaveholding Virginia to have won that debate, because it was the one that wanted proportional representation in both houses.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#166

Post by srtjstjsj »

nick_gur wrote: post #65
standardUser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He "beat the odds" because most models were incorrect. They have been corrected. Are the models wrong again? Maybe, but it would need to be in a totally different way, and by a much larger margin than in 2016.

The models are wrong again. Take it to the bank and take it to Helmut Norpoth aka the Primary Model (primarymodel.com). Hasnt been updated since March but the author (@primarymodel16) recently tweeted that the decision still stands: Trump is getting re-elected. Also, the last person ANYONE should be listening to is 538/Nate Silver. People need to remember that before he was in politics, he used to be in sports bettin…

Primary "Model" just says that incumbent wins reelection and then opposition wins, and then cherry picks primary states to overfit corrections.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#167

Post by srtjstjsj »

foxhound6 wrote: post #78
vmception wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because people have caricatures of each other which are wildly inaccurate. If you talked to people you would understand that what they optimize for is not really related to the caricatures of them, its not the opposite of what "your side" cares about just completely different. When it is obvious that all the news comes from New York City and Los Angeles, and the world resyndicates that, while a large swath of…

> You would have bet the farm on the undervalued bet on the prediction markets. This is what's frustrating about sites like 538. They have Biden as an 87% chance to win. A betting site I frequent has Biden's winning odds as -180 (1.556 for Europeans). If they really believe the accuracy of their models, they should literally be betting the farm on a Biden win.

That's not how gambling works. You don't "bet the farm" on a single 87% chance event to win 1.5 farms.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#168

Post by bobthepanda »

jfengel wrote: post #137
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #111

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…

It's not impossible that some swing state would get a blue-leaning legislature to pass the NPVIC. That would cost the state some attention for the benefit of a better chance in close elections at the top. Twice in the past two decades, the Electoral College has gone red when the popular vote would have gone blue, by a nontrivial margin. That leaves an avenue open whereby some state's legislators fall on their swords…

This already happened. Colorado is suspended from the NPVIC pending a referendum to overturn its membership.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#169

Post by icegreentea2 »

bloody-crow wrote: post #145

The mere existence of this tool highlights the complexity and opaqueness of the electoral college system compared to the popular vote. You can't expect a layperson to have a somewhat accurate mental model of this probability breakdown and I believe it totally erodes their motivation to vote in the first place.

I don't think the electoral college is that opaque, or complex. It's certainly more complex then a straight popular vote. But consider that there are many many parliamentary systems in the world that have a degree of complexity and subtly on the same order as the electoral college (though the unequal sizes of states does mean the EC is more complex).

I certainly don't think the electoral college is a good system for modern day America, but I also think that it's blamed for far too many ills. For one thing, I really doubt that not being able to form a good mental model of the EC is in the top 4 reasons of voter apathy.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#170

Post by rhino369 »

kenjackson wrote: post #37
rayiner wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Biden will win by a big margin, but I suspect there is a lot more uncertainty baked into the polls than the headline number shows. Polling involves lots of assumptions and making adjustments based on expected turnout of different demographic groups and people with different voter registrations. 95% of people called do not take polls, so it’s not just a truly random sampling like people assume. This year, ther…

> It does not address the possibility that there are systematic methodological shortcomings in the polls. I think 538 does take this into account in terms of the uncertainty, which plays into their probabilities. I know they certainly talk about this.

They definitely try to. Whether they accurately model the risk is anyone's guess.
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