Electoral College Decision Tree • Hacker News Board

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#311

Post by bradleyjg » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 1:20 PM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #265

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…

Eh, we had a bifurcation of slave states and free states, and a legacy of that in the segregated south. Do you know what would have happened if the majority of the population lived in those states? You’d have a racist executive branch for decades. Popular vote working exactly as you want, but you wouldn’t be singing the popular vote tune when what’s popular is not stuff you believe in. Just some quick googling, not a…

> Popular vote working exactly as you want, but you wouldn’t be singing the popular vote tune when what’s popular is not stuff you believe in.

I’m reminded of Churchill’s famous aphorism that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others which have been tried. Yes, it can go badly but it’s still the least bad choice.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#312

Post by bradleyjg » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 1:22 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #111

bryanlarsen wrote: post #89

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…

This among other reasons is why we a lot more states.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#313

Post by extra88 » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #280

ianai wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem with the polls are their error bars. 538 hopes they’re eliminating those error bars through a number of different tactics - like averaging the polls. That should do something like increasing the N and decreasing the error. But that’s assuming the methods used to generate the surveys are themselves fully unbiased and representative of the underlying population. On the other hand, seasoned pros are…

> 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.

Frank Luntz said it on Fox News on Friday.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#314

Post by 67868018 » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #208

67868018 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> after someone cosplays as the voter to ensure the voter can't cast two ballots. I'm sorry, what? This needs more explanation.

They don't just stuff it through the machine, you get in line as is you were the voter, verify you're on the rolls for your polling place, check you off in the book, etc. No steps are skipped to ensure the voter can't show up and request another ballot and vote again.

This is as described by a friend who had worked elections for years, this year will be my first. Should be interesting to see it in person.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#315

Post by rayiner » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

WaltPurvis wrote: post #182

nick_gur wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Have you seen the early voting? Rs are LEADING in Miami-Dade, a Clinton county. Define "LEADING" please, because the actual numbers for voting in Miami-Dade county [1] as of today are: Mail Voting Rep 83,605 Dem 158,788 NPA 82,533 (NPA = No Party Affiliation) In-Person Early Voting Rep 61,273 Dem 61,548 NPA 35,296 Totals Rep 144,878 Dem 220,336 In what way does that constitute Republicans "LEADING"? [1] https://cou…

That’s a 20 point lead for Biden, and the data above shows that Republicans are more likely to vote in person than Democrats. (1:2 margin among mail ins, and 1:1 among early in person voting).

Clinton won Miami Dade by 30 points (65-35) and still lost Florida by 1.2%.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#316

Post by newacct583 » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

extra88 wrote: post #313

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.

Frank Luntz said it on Fox News on Friday.

To be clear: that's a republican pollster giving a message to republican-dominated media which was quite clearly intended to be encouraging to the overwhelmingly republican audience.

Luntz is a data guy. He believes polls, they're what he does. If he didn't believe the polls he would have said so. Instead he said that if they were wrong then polling must not work, which is what his audience wants to hear.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#317

Post by rayiner » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

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.

“Finished forever” isn’t really a thing. The parties realign. Texas was a Democratic stronghold until the 1990s. Beto ran close in a 2018 election against a Republican candidate supporting a historically unpopular Republican President, during the blue wave. But Greg Abbott won his election for Texas Governor that same year by a bigger margin than George W. Bush did in 1994. He won 42% of the Hispanic vote (Texas became majority-minority in 2011).

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#318

Post by WaltPurvis » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #284

newacct583 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh... whose modelling? We've never had a pandemic election, I think it's fair to say no one has any idea which demographics are more/less affected by an early voting drive. All we can say is that a whole lot of people are voting early.

Most people believe more Democrats are voting via mail (Trump had been criticizing mail voting). We do know how many registered voters from each party are voting in some circumstances. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/early-voting-number... is a decent overview

>Most people believe more Democrats are voting via mail

It's not necessary to "believe" anything when it comes to Florida. We have the actual hard number of ballots requested and returned, broken down by party registration. More Democrats are voting via mail. They're also voting in-person in equal numbers to Republicans, at least so far.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#319

Post by lern_too_spel » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

newacct583 wrote: post #309

nl wrote: post #306

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. 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…

If that's the case, the pollsters have an easy way to regain trust in their methodologies. They can simply reweight their 2016 data to ensure education sampling matches the population and show that they now predict 2016 correctly. Have any of them done so?

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#320

Post by salawat » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #85

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.

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.

Try again. Read Federalist Paper 68.

https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-61-70

As well as the anti-Federalist Paper 72.

Also keep in mind the Framer's never intended or expected the formation of organized national conventions.

The Electoral College had zilch to do with slavery besides momentarily (in that time frame) possibly benefiting from how Southern States populations were calculated, but look how that turned out.

Also, if you specifically look at what was outlined in the Federalist Papers, a Faithless Elector was a feature, not a bug. Political parties have completely ruined it by orchestrating to try to legally compel voting via data rather than by conscience and good sense, which fundamentally undermines the proof against a crowd pleaser, but ultimately incompetent actor the Framer's were trying guard against.

I can understand being upset that the Electoral College doesn't seem to be working as promised, but it's the byproduct if taking the screwdriver that is the EC as designed and trying to use it to turn a nut. There is a level of not being applied as designed. You aren't going to fix that without revisiting some structural assumptions. Also, no, I squarely do not buy the Anti-Federalist tune that crowds are somehow free from being shaped and manipulated more than a small number of individuals relatively randomly selected put into a position of deliberation.

People are collectively pulled down in the fidelity of collective reasoning by the damping effects socialization and large numbers, prone to passionate but ineffectual reasoning, and represent a great indicator that something need be done, though amazing at constraining a problem space through Wisdom of the masses, but terrible at managing the gory details for all of the shouting going on.

A person is smart, capable of forethought, reasoned, and generally best equipped when given several options of being able to justify which is better, and developing a workable solution that balances against a wide variety if pre-existing weighting factors.

The entire intent of the structure of our political process was to filter the energy of the whole, into paths of effectively achievable actions to be carried by a few such that the Nation could be driven without an undue on everyone. If you hate Jury duty, imagine how bad life would be if you had to be polled constantly on every decision needing to be made whether you knew anything about it or not.