512 Paths to the White House • Hacker News Board

Re: 512 Paths to the White House

#91

Post by henrikschroder » Sat, Nov 03, 2012, 12:49 PM UTC

downandout wrote: post #64

cletus wrote: post #60

Well I guess it's that time in the cycle again: for people to complain about the electoral college (disclaimer: I'm not American). Over the years in different elections in different countries I've heard this complaint [1] > The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view. Translation: > It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority. Also, thi…

"> The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view. Translation: > It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority." You appear to be writing this off as a minor issue. It is not. If Mitt Romney wins 49.999% of the vote in any state, and Obama wins the rest, Obama is awarded ALL of that state's electoral votes. That hardly reflects the will of…

The point OP made was that it's First Past The Post that's the problem, not the electoral college itself. And you arrived at the same conclusion, just using different words.

Another bonus of getting rid of FPTP is that there would be no "swing states" that get 90% of the campaign activity, all states would suddenly be roughly equally important.

Re: 512 Paths to the White House

#92

Post by felanthropop » Sat, Nov 03, 2012, 1:03 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #60

Well I guess it's that time in the cycle again: for people to complain about the electoral college (disclaimer: I'm not American). Over the years in different elections in different countries I've heard this complaint [1] > The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view. Translation: > It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority. Also, thi…

Everything sounded great up to this point: "There are however two glaring problems (IMHO): 1. Voting is optional;"

When people have to vote, they will vote for things they are undecided on and it is likely that stupid things will play into the decision, like what the name looks like and whether it seems familiar. It doesn't make them any more likely to be informed about the candidates.

And if they have been "informed" about the candidates, the most likely corruptive force is our news media, which is biased (on both sides). Each radio and television station provides a "range of views" that on average lean toward their candidate or are carefully edited. If you can't trust the media to be unbiased (not that they ever were), who can you trust to give you the "real" scoop on the candidates? No one that I know of.

If people don't care enough to vote, they don't have a strong enough opinion on how things are going, then leave them alone. I don't want them choosing pretty names, and it is already bad enough that our views are so manipulated.

At least those that choose to vote are probably somewhat swayed by how well the government is doing, and how it is treating them and those they care about. Those that would be forced to vote aren't, or it is an even draw.

All of that said, I admit that I am an "undecided voter". I lean conservative, but I don't know who to vote for because I disagree strongly to some of the views of the conservatives. So, I might not vote this election, and I still care about the outcome.

Re: 512 Paths to the White House

#93

Post by mikeash » Sat, Nov 03, 2012, 1:19 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #60

Well I guess it's that time in the cycle again: for people to complain about the electoral college (disclaimer: I'm not American). Over the years in different elections in different countries I've heard this complaint [1] > The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view. Translation: > It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority. Also, thi…

How can you say that the EC avoids deadlock, and then immediately start talking about Florida? The popular vote in that case was not a deadlock, and would have made for a clear winner with no disputes. The EC is the only reason that Florida's mess even mattered. How many times has the popular vote been close enough to cause such a mess? Zero. How many times has the EC caused such a mess when none needed to exist? More than zero.

Plenty of other countries use a straight popular vote and they somehow manage to avoid all of the problems that EC proponents say the popular vote would cause. It seems obvious that if we were building the country from scratch today, the EC would never even be considered, let alone enacted.

Re: 512 Paths to the White House

#94

Post by gjm11 » Sat, Nov 03, 2012, 1:26 PM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #91

downandout wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"> The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view. Translation: > It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority." You appear to be writing this off as a minor issue. It is not. If Mitt Romney wins 49.999% of the vote in any state, and Obama wins the rest, Obama is awarded ALL of that state's electoral votes. That hardly reflects the will of…

The point OP made was that it's First Past The Post that's the problem, not the electoral college itself. And you arrived at the same conclusion, just using different words. Another bonus of getting rid of FPTP is that there would be no "swing states" that get 90% of the campaign activity, all states would suddenly be roughly equally important.

cletus is proposing that individual states' elections switch from FPTP to AV or a similar system. This would make it possible to vote for "minor" candidates while still having an impact of which of the "major" candidates gets in, but it would not, even a little tiny bit, stop the election being decided by the results in a small number of swing states. It would certainly not mean that "all states would suddenly be roughly equally important".

The solution downandout is proposing is not at all like the solution cletus is proposing; the two did not arrive at "the same conclusion" and the difference between them is not only one of words.

Re: 512 Paths to the White House

#95

Post by InclinedPlane » Sat, Nov 03, 2012, 1:26 PM UTC

tisme wrote: post #90

This is all window dressing. Elections do not decide who wins. Funding does. And as long as corporations can outspend private citizens companies decide elections. If you wanted to reform elections in the USA then you would have to start to curb the direct influence of corporations on the elections, compared to that the electoral college is a minor detail.

You're just translating the problem one level, you're not actually addressing the root problem. The problem isn't that money is allowed to be spent in elections, or even that corporations can outspend individuals or truly grass roots organizations (unions are a big part of the top political donors, for example). Ultimately, buying a TV spot or radio advertisement does not constitute "buying" a vote.

The problem is that the whole system is too shallow. And that starts at the electorate and extends to political pundits and the media. If you magically sucked money out of the system tomorrow then we'd be absolutely no better off. Neither individuals nor the media would suddenly decide that it's important to discuss the real issues and be open and honest. No, it would still be the same old popularity/celebrity contest and the same old "gotcha" game.

Re: 512 Paths to the White House

#96

Post by gus_massa » Sat, Nov 03, 2012, 1:28 PM UTC

mbostock wrote: post #17

A couple hidden features: 1. You can option-click on any of the buttons to see the transition in super slo-mo. (This was mainly for debugging, but it's fun to see how the transitions work in more detail.) 2. You can double-click on any part of the tree, and it will zoom in by one level. Also, we did a variation that used state-level probabilities to weight the tree. This gave a sense not just of the logical possibili…

I like the graph, but it's a pity that the weighted version is not available :(. It was the first thing I looked for. It's more difficult to explain, but it much more useful that only counting the number of branches.

(I don't mind if it would use only the naive approach and just multiply the probabilities. But it could be a problem if the final probabilities are very different when they are estimated with the correct method and the naive method.)

Re: 512 Paths to the White House

#97

Post by kmfrk » Sat, Nov 03, 2012, 1:32 PM UTC

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #10

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.

This is a good indicator of Obama's chances: http://election.princeton.edu/history-of-electoral-votes-for....

Barring external events, you can probably put a fork in it.

Re: 512 Paths to the White House

#98

Post by leif » Sat, Nov 03, 2012, 1:44 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #45

leif wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about what kinds of questions get discussed and addressed during campaigns. The point of the campaigning process is chiefly to elect new representation, but secondarily (and closely so) to debate and test competing theories on the primary problems of the time. In the electoral college model, the concerns of the swing states get the most attention, for reasons which are far too numerous and obvious to go in t…

You make a huge and incorrect assumption that both parties care based on raw population. In fact the more urban someone is, the more likely they are to vote Democrat. The more rural, the more likely they are to vote Republican. If you're targeting swing votes, you're interested primarily in suburbs and smaller cities.

That correlation does exist, but surely it's influenced by the voting model.

Re: 512 Paths to the White House

#99

Post by cincinnatus12 » Sat, Nov 03, 2012, 2:24 PM UTC

The argument that the EC is there to the avoid a deadlock situation is quite inaccurate. In fact, given there are only 538 EC votes to distribute, the likelihood of a tie (269-269) is much, much higher than the likelihood of a tie in the popular vote (where in 2008 both candidates received > 50 million votes). Nate Silver's 538 blog estimates the current chances of a EC "deadlock" at 0.2% -- small, yes, but not so small as to ignore the possibility entirely.

The "solution" under this scenario? If the election doesn't produce a candidate with 270 or more electoral college votes, the race gets decided by the House of Representatives. Can you imagine the reaction if Obama won the popular vote, but only received 269 EC votes and then the (Republican) House awarded the election to Romney?

There is precedent for this, of course. The 1824 election saw Andrew Jackson getting a plurality in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, but not a majority in either. Ultimately, a Congress hostile to Jackson would award to the Presidency to his arch-rival, John Quincy Adams. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...

In terms of worrying about deadlock, a simple popular vote total is far superior than any permutation of the Electoral College.

Re: 512 Paths to the White House

#100

Post by nhebb » Sat, Nov 03, 2012, 2:32 PM UTC

This is interesting, but it leaves out Pennsylvania. Penn is a long shot for Romney, but the Romney campaign's internal polling must indicate that it's in play, otherwise they wouldn't be spending time in the final weekend campaigning there.