Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Electoral College Decision Tree

observablehq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 373 posts

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#321

Post by salawat »

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…

So you don't essentially get heard get heard until n election cycles after coming of voting viability age?

You've just taken all the complexity of counting people every 10 years and rejiggering the numbers, and now made it nightmarishly more complex given that you're transitioning into that system in the first place.

Furthermore, you're over emphasizing the structural elements (net representatives votes) instead of the important bit, that everyone has an ear to tug to get something listened to up high. You're entitled to an input. Not to skewing the structuring function to optimize for voter population density, neither directly via tinkering with the effective representation calculation, or indirectly via the change you suggested.

It's not a terrible idea to be honest, but there is a degree of simplicity to the way we do it now, and I have the feeling yours would be a hard sell to the average American, or even the above average ones without substantially more in detail analysis.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#322

Post by salawat »

patentatt wrote: post #244
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.

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…

I've long been in favor of the vote of no-confidence. I'm not sure what the system should do with it, (I'd like it to have some teeth) but alas, I'm uncertain as to it's efficacy.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#323

Post by UncleMeat »

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…

States aren't historical actors. People are.

I'm not trying to say that "the EC was about slavery" is a correct narrative or even more valid than "it was about states". The point I'm trying to make is unrelated to the specific question about the EC and slavery. The point I'm trying to make is that there are hundreds of narratives for almost every historical event. Motivations that range from the smallest microhistory to the largest historical narratives. And that "APUS said it was about X" is going to miss a whole lot of interesting scholarship.

Again, I'm not trying to make any statement about the EC. I'm trying to make a broader suggestion about the limitations of high school history classes.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#324

Post by [deleted] »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #293
roywiggins wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 direct…

[deleted]

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#325

Post by newacct583 »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #319
newacct583 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People have done this analysis repeatedly, you just aren't reading it. And polling in 2018 was generally quite good. But again, there's nothing wrong with their "methodologies". Polling errors in 2016 were in fact not far from historical norms. Numerate consensus (c.f. 538) picked a likely but not certain Clinton victory and the result was an extremely narrow loss instead. That stuff happens.

Unfortunately a bunch of people whose political desires hinge on this kind of error being present in all elections and always to the advantage of "the other side" never want to hear this analysis and so repeat the nonsense that "polls are always wrong".

But they're not. They're just not as precise as we want. If the polls are exactly as wrong this year, and in the same direction, as they were in 2016 then Biden wins a solid victory. If they're as wrong as they were in 2012 then he wins a landslide with Texas and Georgia going blue.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#326

Post by beerandt »

dane-pgp wrote: post #303
beerandt wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It is the sovereign State (1 entity) casting its electoral vote, so splitting the vote makes less sense than a single winner. We're not a parliamentary style government.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#329

Post by standardUser »

sova wrote: post #249
standardUser wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why don't you skip the theatrics and state your point, if you have one.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#330

Post by lmilcin »

205guy wrote: post #176
lmilcin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, if you take a look at the graph, you will notice that paths that direct to red leaves are almost all almost entirely red whereas there is a lot of paths to blue leaves that are mostly or even almost entirely red. Or think another way. The largest number of states that can be blue and red still wins is 4. There isn't any combination of any combinations where 5 of selected states are blue and red can still wi…

I believe that the "direct" path of one color and "alternating" path are just a choice of the graphing and not dictated by the data. If you make different node selections, you could make the reverse. Same for the layout of the nicely ordered trees and those that seem more chaotic--it's just a matter of adjusting the layout of the nodes to determine the angles of the edges.

I don't mean the order, but the number of paths with given number of nodes of given color. This is independent on the chosen order or layout of the graph.
Post reply on HN