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Electoral College Decision Tree

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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#241

Post by hellotomyrars »

speeder wrote: post #197
CyanLite2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perso…

The signature verification part was dropped by court. And to be honest I don't understand why.

The idea of it is kind of farcical to being with. How do you verify hundreds of thousands of signatures in the first place?

It might be a science at a forensic level for investigations, but at this scale? I don't think so.

Also while I'm not going to imply I'm a typical case, I am not capable of writing a consistent signature due to a neurological condition. I think I still deserve a vote.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#242

Post by [deleted] »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #224
roywiggins wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and then nobody bothered to watch as her chances drifted downward every subsequent day until the election... and they drifted down because the polls changed and the model got more information. It's not really fair to say the model was wrong- it just wasn't clairvoyant. Really, Trump won by a hair's breadth. 538 shouldn't have given him a huge chance to win- he just barely scraped through. It's a genuinely hard…

What should the number have been, then? The final results were essentially a tie with Trump winning the tie breaking coin toss. So 50/50 is right in hind sight. Te systemic error could just have been as easily in Clinton's favour as Trump's, so the number should have been smaller than 50% for Trump. Maybe not as small as 28%, but they weren't far off, IMO.

[deleted]

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#243

Post by roywiggins »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #224
roywiggins wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and then nobody bothered to watch as her chances drifted downward every subsequent day until the election... and they drifted down because the polls changed and the model got more information. It's not really fair to say the model was wrong- it just wasn't clairvoyant. Really, Trump won by a hair's breadth. 538 shouldn't have given him a huge chance to win- he just barely scraped through. It's a genuinely hard…

What should the number have been, then? The final results were essentially a tie with Trump winning the tie breaking coin toss. So 50/50 is right in hind sight. Te systemic error could just have been as easily in Clinton's favour as Trump's, so the number should have been smaller than 50% for Trump. Maybe not as small as 28%, but they weren't far off, IMO.

The votes coming down to a dead heat doesn't mean that, the day before, they were equally likely to win. Suppose there were 100 possible futures. In 90 of them, Alice wins, by a little or a lot. In 8 of them, Bob barely wins, and in 2, Bob wins comfortably. Maybe this is determined by rigged dice or something, to make it strictly mechanical: there's 100 possibilities, and we know what they are and how they're distributed.

Just because you end up in the 9/100 future doesn't mean that the "real" probability was 50%. It's weak evidence that Bob's win scenarios mostly didn't involve blowouts.

It's like barely winning a sprint against Usain Bolt: maybe he had an injury midway through. Doesn't mean that he and I were equally likely to win.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#244

Post by patentatt »

gen220 wrote: post #192
pchristensen wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thank you! I hope my government teacher would be proud. :) I'd love to hear anybody poke holes in this idea. It's a recent one for me. I'm sure they exist, but I haven't come up with them yet. Obviously, there's the incentive for fraudulent votes. But there's already an incentive for fraudulent votes, and it doesn't seem to cause much of a problem.

One additional thought: it may be appropriate then to have an option for a ‘present’ vote or the like to allow those who wish to protest their options on the ballot still be counted. I suppose that’s a write-in ballot, however?

Also, it seems to disadvantage populations that have disproportionate bias towards non-voting. I’m thinking areas of lower socioeconomic status, even with as many pro-voting initiatives as can be, will still ultimately be undercounted.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#245

Post by m0zg »

DennisP wrote: post #76
bryanlarsen wrote: post #24

Another similar tool, with very different visualization. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-ma...

That's going to be a fun toy on election night, as state results come in.

We've seen this show before though. It'll start with "Biden has 97% chance of winning" and end with Rachel Maddow and Chunk Yogurt crying on live TV. In fact, they could probably re-use this video to save money, and nobody would notice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G87UXIH8Lzo

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#246

Post by patentatt »

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…

I’ve never heard this explained quite this way. Thank you.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#247

Post by refurb »

bleepblorp wrote: post #91
rubidium wrote: post #77

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…

This arguement honestly sounds like “we need to change the system so my side isn’t denied power”. No doubt if the situation was reversed you’d be arguing for them.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#248

Post by naivedevops »

beerandt wrote: post #183
titanomachy wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that justify one vote per state? Wouldn't one vote per representative represent the will of the people better?

Because the constitution specifies that the several States (not the people) shall elect the president.

Just make the vote of each state proportional to the number of people who voted in that state.

Or change the Constitution.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#249

Post by sova »

standardUser wrote: post #116
googthrowaway42 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have been corrected. Based on what are you saying this?

A lot has been written about this. Here is a good recent article: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-pollsters-have-cha...

Have you ever met a pollster?

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#250

Post by noahtallen »

syshum wrote: post #236
tekkk wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other children comments noted, I think the biggest problem of the system is game theory wise that there is no considerable pay-off when voting in a heavily blue or red state. There should be either a two-tier system with points from winning a state and from getting the most votes, or just straight popular vote. Granted, in that case the smaller states would probably lose meaning but eh. Isn't that what democra…

>>> Granted, in that case the smaller states would probably lose meaning but eh. Isn't that what democracy is about? Which is exactly why the founders set up the electoral collage in the first place, because they had no desire for a strait democracy, nor do I democracy is 2 wolfs and a lamb voting on what is for dinner, I have no desire to live in such a system. I prefer a constitutional republic of independent state…

How does the concept of the electoral college protect the republic any more than a popular vote? It seems to be a layer of indirection rather than anything useful. If it was useful for preventing poor candidates, I feel it’s not working that well.

The effect it has is to amplify the voice of sparsely populated states. Do we actually think that these states are more qualified to decide what we have to dinner (or more qualified to protect the republic?)

I’m also unsure how breaking down the popular vote by district helps to protect the republic further. Why not just use the popular vote (or even better, RCV or approval voting) instead of adding these layers of indirection?

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