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Electoral College Decision Tree

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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#291

Post by throwawaygh »

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…

The founders set up the electoral college because a powerful faction of them didn't want the full collage of skin colors to be enfranchised, or even freed from slavery, in their new republic. Any other story is anti-historical hogwash.

History is what it is.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#292

Post by throwawaygh »

parsimoniousplb wrote: post #255
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.

> They have been corrected This sounds like something a soviet comission would declare after an accident. What went wrong and how was it corrected? You needn't know, it has been corrected .

These pollsters explain their mistakes and changes in methodology. Read, or stop opining.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#293

Post by bryanlarsen »

roywiggins wrote: post #243
bryanlarsen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distrib…

The "score" was 1,405,280 to 1,382,536. That was the count in Wisconsin. Looks like a virtual tie to me.

That's the information we have, and it's real, so it's much more valid than any poll which poorly samples a few thousand people.

Maybe it was a fluke result. But that's unlikely because the other Midwestern states had similar results. But a fluke in which direction? You don't know, so it's even odds in both directions.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#294

Post by akhosravian »

hellotomyrars wrote: post #241
speeder wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Washington uses signatures for our all mail in elections. When I’ve phoned in my signature (read just a line instead of something even vaguely resembling my usual mess) it has been challenged. I also forgot to sign/drop my ballot one time and had my wife sign it. That one was also challenged.

When challenged you have to reaffirm you submitted the ballot. You only “lose” your vote if you fail to respond.

YMMV but it seems to work pretty well here.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#295

Post by arok »

conanbatt wrote: post #270
confidantlake wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument never made sense. In a one person one vote system, the concept of a state never comes into play. It is a national election, states are irrelevant. Under the electoral college system, states actually come into play. There could be a case where a state grows large enough in population to get 51% of the electoral votes. If that state had a winner take all system, then that state would choose every presiden…

Everyone gets 1 vote, but not all votes are worth the same. That is true for any voting system.

To put it another way, all votes are equal, but some votes are more equal than others. That sounds vaguely familiar…

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#296

Post by remarkEon »

rayiner wrote: post #237
UncleMeat wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be careful about that. The College Board's APUS curriculum is heavily criticized by the americanists I know and it can be a grave error to assume that you've got the full picture from a high school textbook.

The debates are mainly about what is included and what isn’t. For example it’s very thin on Reconstruction and the end thereof; about the civil rights abuses under the New Deal; etc. There’s also debates about how to characterize certain things (for example Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric was called “bellicose” in a 2014 revision and that generated a kerfuffle.) So yes, don’t assume you learned all the history you need to k…

I appreciate your efforts here to re-expose what used to be a common understanding of this history.

As it happens, on my fraternal grandmother's side we had family that fought in the Civil War for the Union from Iowa. One day I'll look all that up and figure out what units they fought in and where they're buried.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#297

Post by dane-pgp »

jki275 wrote: post #283
srtjstjsj wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people you're calling "prominent" are essentially pariahs in the Republican party. Literally almost no Republican cares what they have to say.

Also, none of them are True Scotsmen.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#298

Post by dane-pgp »

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.

> I'd love to hear anybody poke holes in this idea.

I really like the idea, but I'll volunteer to offer the criticism you'll probably hear.

If a state can give itself more power by counting more votes, then state governments which are confident that their dominant party will win will have a lot of incentive to allow fraudulent votes, and potentially a lot to gain.

For example, if the state government knows that 70% of voters will vote for the Yellow Party, then they can risk encouraging 10% of the population to cast, say, 4 extra votes (for their deceased grandparents), without worrying that the dreaded Purple Party might exploit this laxness and give Purple the win.

Combine that with some selective enforcement (so Purple voters know that, in practice, only they are at risk of prosecution for voter fraud) and the state will be able to magnify its relative strength compared to states that are more scrupulous.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#299

Post by hellotomyrars »

rayiner wrote: post #260
hellotomyrars wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it farcical? Signature verification is the only thing they use in Maryland. You just go up and write in your address and sign. I don’t know how reliable signatures are but people assure me that not requiring ID is fine because there are signatures: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/poli... > Such signature comparison has long been deemed sufficiently reliable to legitimate absentee ballots an…

This says nothing about the process itself, just a simple statement that it works. Maybe an actual description of the process would be more convincing to me, but this by itself doesn’t mean anything to me.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#300

Post by hellotomyrars »

akhosravian wrote: post #294
hellotomyrars wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Washington uses signatures for our all mail in elections. When I’ve phoned in my signature (read just a line instead of something even vaguely resembling my usual mess) it has been challenged. I also forgot to sign/drop my ballot one time and had my wife sign it. That one was also challenged. When challenged you have to reaffirm you submitted the ballot. You only “lose” your vote if you fail to respond. YMMV but it s…

This is my first time voting in Washington!

That’s interesting to know. what method do they contact you to and how big is your window to respond?

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