11–20 of 175 posts
Damn, I wish I lived in one of the states that gets to choose our president.
It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
Does anyone know if I should be as scared as I am that there are 5 paths to tie? Is that the norm in a presidential election? because it sounds crazy.
The vast majority of the states are winner-take-all, which presumably reduces but doesn't eliminate the possible ways to split 538 down the middle, but some states either only have a single electoral vote or use mechanisms which can divide their electoral votes between the candidates.
So, yeah, every election has this chance. Probably isn't going to happen though. This is conjecture, but I'd hazard a guess that a Bush v. Gore style dispute over a single large state which holds the balance of the election is way more likely than an actual numerical tie where the House would choose the president and the Senate the VP.
Damn, I wish I lived in one of the states that gets to choose our president.
The small states would never allow such a change to the constitution. (A presidential voter in Wyoming has almost 4 times the vote of a Californian.) But the big states may have found a work around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstat...
In short, the states that agree to the compact agree to proportion all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. (For example, if Romney wins the national popular vote, CA would give Romney all of CA's electoral votes.) The compact will only kick in once the states that have ratified it have 270 electoral votes (enough to win). It's already about halfway there at 132.
How crazy would it be to see campaigning in California and New York?
Damn, I wish I lived in one of the states that gets to choose our president.
Trust me you do not want. Watching TV or the radio is impossible without being inundated. It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
I think this is a great way to explain to someone who's not intimately familiar with electoral politics why people think Obama is going to win despite razor thing polls. Predictions mean nothing of course but: If Obama wins Florida, Romney has exactly 1 path to victory: winning every other swing state. If Obama wins Ohio, Romney has only 11 ways to win. If Obama loses Florida, Virginia, NC, and Ohio he could still po…
That's why even the most partisan pundits, even when everything's in their candidate's favor, keep claiming that "this is such a close race".
TBH the only way Romney is going to be contentious is through voter suppression, and that's been so heavily exposed in critical areas that it's not going to have any effect as long as the justice system holds its ground.
removes tinfoil hat
(BUT EVERYONE PLEASE VOTE IF YOU ARE ABLE, IT'S CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trust me you do not want. Watching TV or the radio is impossible without being inundated. It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.
Also, we did a variation that used state-level probabilities to weight the tree. This gave a sense not just of the logical possibilities, but of the likelihood of each, which I liked. However, the FiveThirtyEight state-level probabilities are not fully independent, so you can't multiply them together to compute conditional probabilities. Perhaps next election!
Does anyone know if I should be as scared as I am that there are 5 paths to tie? Is that the norm in a presidential election? because it sounds crazy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trust me you do not want. Watching TV or the radio is impossible without being inundated. It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.
Does anyone know if I should be as scared as I am that there are 5 paths to tie? Is that the norm in a presidential election? because it sounds crazy.
Dunno why that would be scary. Ties (or really, any allocation of electoral votes where no candidate gets to 270) are resolved in the House of Representatives, and this was common practice in the early 19th century. If it were to happen now, there would be a lot of complaining, but overall it would be less of a constitutional crisis than the 2000 election. If anything, it might be a spark for true electoral reform.
That Wikipedia article talking about the 1800 tie is pretty awesome.