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Electoral College Decision Tree

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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#301

Post by mrgordon »

dllthomas wrote: post #252
bleepblorp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Protecting against tyranny of the majority simply by changing the weight of votes is replacing it with tyranny of the minority, as you say. Other checks on the tyranny of the majority, like protecting the rights of individuals (in light of shared values) in the face of a majority decision to violate them is hard to characterize as tyranny at all. Requiring legislation to pass two bodies with different weights is an i…

The legislation not only needs to pass the Senate and the House, but also various committees and the president must also typically sign it. Each one of these hurdles reduces the chance of successful legislation which tends to favor the status quo. As noted by James Madison in someone else’s post, he thought the Senate should favor landowners over the majority “to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation”

Arguably this inherently favors conservatism as passing no new legislation will keep things the way they are. Progressives will, in most cases, need to get legislation or referendums through to make meaningful changes to the current system.

Florida seems to have figured this out. This election there is a referendum to require voters to approve all new referendums twice to try to decrease the number of successful referendums.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#302

Post by tome »

dane-pgp wrote: post #298
gen220 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% o…

And it works the other way, too. There will be a disincentive for Democrats in Texas and Republicans in California to vote. Their vote for their more favoured party would increase the congressional power of their less favoured party!

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#303

Post by dane-pgp »

beerandt wrote: post #177
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you’d need either every state to agree or an amendment. Neither of those is actually necessary because the states decide on their own how their electoral college votes are allocated. In principle Texas or California could allocate their delegates proportional to the popular vote of the people in that state. Which might be in the interests of the people in that state, because then candidates would actually bother to…

Only within the internal context of that state, though. Apportionment based on factors external to the state is likely unconstitutional, based on the voting rights act and resultant scotus decisions. The supreme court has said (over-simplifying here) that the right to delegate this legislative power to a popular vote is only constitutional when it adheres to 1 person, 1 vote weighting. Taking into account votes exter…

Under the principle of "1 person, 1 vote", it would also seem impermissible to assign electors in a "winner takes all" way. Indeed, there is a campaign to test the constitutionality of states doing this:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/09/10/winner-tak...

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#304

Post by dane-pgp »

205guy wrote: post #172
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

But the electors of the electoral college are still not aligned with equal representation because of the various state populations. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would turn the mechanism of the electoral college into a result equivalent to a national popular vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... The wikipedia article doesn't go into details about resolving issue around d…

Under the current system, aren't states binding themselves to an electoral college vote count that unscrupulous states have no incentive to get accurate?

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#305

Post by pedrosorio »

jki275 wrote: post #281
bryanlarsen wrote: post #87

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.

Biden will not win Texas. If Biden were to win Texas, the GOP would be finished forever. Polls notwithstanding, Biden has as much chance of winning Texas as Trump has of winning California.

“Polls notwithstanding” what data do you use to justify your statement regarding the outcome of the election in Texas and California?

Because if you look at the polls that’s ridiculous (probability of Biden winning Texas is orders of magnitude larger than Trump winning California).

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#306

Post by nl »

Fezzik wrote: post #290
nl wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, seasoned pros are saying if the polls are wrong this year then it’s time to hang up the towel on the polling profession entirely- I haven't heard anyone say that. Polls are always wrong, it's how wrong that is important.

Election polls are almost always right for the only ultimate answer that matters: who is going to win[0]. They also accurately predict the margin of victory. Same link. Polls, in general, are typically measuring tendencies or preferences, which they also (tend to) accurately capture. So saying they are always wrong doesn’t really make sense, as they are not trying to be right in an absolute sense. The error is with t…

> Election polls are almost always right for the only ultimate answer that matters: who is going to win[0]. They also accurately predict the margin of victory.

This isn't true in the US.

Your own link shows not a single result since the 1984 where the error was under 1% for both candidates.

They are usually somewhat accurate for the overall vote, but the results on state races haven't been great. That hasn't mattered until 2016 where it was a critical issue.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#307

Post by nl »

runawaybottle wrote: post #269
nl wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most modelling puts Florida as about 52/48 Biden's way but Texas 60/40 Trump's way. It would be a mild surprise if Biden won Texas. It would be astonishing is Biden won Texas without also winning Florida.

One of the best democratic candidates ever, Barack Obama, couldn’t win Texas. He won Florida twice. Biden doesn’t have Obama’s charisma, so he basically has to bet on Trump frustration to carry Florida. This election is a total question of Trump exhaustion. If people are exhausted from him then we’ll see the toss ups turn blue. If people are more frustrated with lockdowns, riots, protests, race coming to the surface…

> I don’t think the pollsters probing for ‘Did Trump handle coronavirus well’ is the right thing to ask, mainly because I don’t think likely right-wing voters fault him.

We have polls to test this, and while it shows Republicans generally thing Trump can do no wrong, lots of independents think the response has been bad. And some of these are right wing voters, because the 57% who disapprove given the question "Do Americans approve of Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis?" is much higher than his generall disapproval rate.

See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/coronavirus-polls/ and scroll down

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#308

Post by syspec »

rayiner wrote: post #5
atonse wrote: post #2

Nerd Me: This is a really nice use of this visualization. Human Me: I saw all this stuff in 2016 and Trump still beat the overwhelming odds. (Yes 16% chance of winning is still a chance, I get it... there's just so much deja vu with all these visualizations and articles about his campaign imploding).

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…

> He is polling 10-20 points better among Hispanic people in Florida, for example, than in 2016.

Not too surprising. Many Hispanic in Florida are Cuban, and republican. There are two Cuban US senators (Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz), they are both republican.

Hispanic people are not a single voting block, due to their diverse cultural backgrounds (black, white, Indigenous South American, mixed, rich, poor)

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#309

Post by newacct583 »

nl wrote: post #306
Fezzik wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Election polls are almost always right for the only ultimate answer that matters: who is going to win[0]. They also accurately predict the margin of victory. Same link. Polls, in general, are typically measuring tendencies or preferences, which they also (tend to) accurately capture. So saying they are always wrong doesn’t really make sense, as they are not trying to be right in an absolute sense. The error is with t…

> Election polls are almost always right for the only ultimate answer that matters: who is going to win[0]. They also accurately predict the margin of victory. This isn't true in the US. Your own link shows not a single result since the 1984 where the error was under 1% for both candidates. They are usually somewhat accurate for the overall vote, but the results on state races haven't been great. That hasn't mattered…

Even state polling in 2016 was pretty good, historically. The reason to think otherwise is that there was a specific error (non-college white voters swinging to R) that happened not to be tracked well (those voters don't respond as well to polling) nor accounted for (most pollsters didn't weight for education). And it happened to be most concentrated in a few states in the upper midwest that were close to the tipping point. AND it happened to be JUST ENOUGH to have predicted a very narrow (sub 1% in PA/WI/MI) win incorrectly.

To wit: 2016 was a perfect storm. Swap any of those factors above and 538 would have been predicting a 50:50 race (instead of 70:30) at election day and Trump's very narrow victory would have been "correctly predicted".

Assuming that's going to happen again seems a bit like magical thinking to me. Remember that in 2012 the polls were "wrong" in the opposite direction (undercounting Obama votes by a bit) and no one cared.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#310

Post by syshum »

noahtallen wrote: post #250
syshum wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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…

It depends on how you view the nation. I view each state as a sovereign entity that internally pick who (as a state) they desire to lead the federal government. Then as 1 voice they tell the other states who that person is.

At a basic level this would mean each state only got 1 vote no matter how many people where in that state.

As a compromise from that, the system of proportional representation was created. Originally this was designed at a time where the Senate was not elected by popular vote but instead the Senate was appointed by the legislatures of each state not by popular vote. Something I also would support returning to

The House of Representatives was to be the only pure democratic body in the US Government.

The electoral college part of State Sovereignty respecting that we are a Union of states. the 17th amendment reduced State Sovereignty considerably and IMO has lead to some very large negative effects including the politicization of court system but that is a whole other topic

Since at least the 1920's there has been a strong push attempting to reduce the power of the State government and centralize the power of the Federal Government. In short a strong push to transform the United States of America away from a republic of states, to a single universal government. To those wanting to transform the nation the preferred model is Direct Democracy one with no Natural or inherent rights, and no Constitution. To those people if the majority desires it, that should be the law of the land....

That is not a constitutional republic form of government. The attack on the Electoral College is a direct attack on the constitutional republic

As to RCV or other voting methods besides First past the post. That has nothing to Electoral College, you can implement RCV (which I would support as well) with out eliminating the Electoral College

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