Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

Gbaji is the cancer killing the OoT Asylum

From WaPo:

It does look as though he's setting up excuses to get rid of some departments. "Oh, look, I put someone in charge who's against everything this department does, and now it's useless! Welp, may as well cut it."

Great! Now we're getting somewhere.



Technically, you listed the changes you'd make (eliminate the EC, move to popular vote, maybe weight by population, maybe have some proxy thing that I'm not sure exactly what it is). But that's a start, I guess.



Would the change(s) you're proposing improve enfranchisement? Heck. How do you measure enfranchisement? And is that the only factor, or should it be balanced with other factors?



Great. What's the system, and how does it accomplish that? And again, how do we measure "what voters want"? Remember, we're basically looking at changing how results are generated from votes cast. Is a straight national popular vote actually a better measurement of "what voters want" than the EC system?



I'm not sure what alternative you're proposing here, or how it accomplishes this. It's like you steadfastly insist on only doing half the work of a real argument.



Do you think national popular voting would result in better governance then? Seems like you're pushing something totally unrelated to how we count people's votes here. If anything I would think that a system of direct popular vote would be more subject to whims and "win the vote first then govern later" methodologies than the EC system.



And again. How would any alternative you're proposing be better in this regard? I would think that direct popular voting would result in more rapid shifts as opinion shifts on various issues (or as various issues wax and wane in importance to the public), not fewer.



Which of your proposed alternatives generate more political options though. I guess we could assume that a popular vote methodology would no longer require a majority of votes (just a plurality), and I suppose that could produce more options/parties. But again, that actually makes for more shifting than I was even thinking of above, since instead of having to shift opinion for/against one party versus another, you'd have a number of them, in which small shifts could have a dramatic effect.

Imagine that instead of just 2 major parties, we've got 10 smaller parties, each averaging somewhere around 10% of the vote. What this means right off the bat is that no "winner" is going to represent the choice of more than a small percentage of the voters (so potentially even greater divisiveness than we have now). No candidate needs to appeal to more than a small number of people to win either (I assume you think that's a bad thing, right?). Also, small shifts in popularity will make it almost certain that the party who wins will be different every election cycle, more or less eliminating a couple of your claimed goals.

I suppose if we did a number of run-offs, slowly narrowing the field, it might work. But you'd need to produce a methodology and actually analyze the effect. That could at least preserve the concept of "majority winner", but it would be the result of essentially a multi-party primary process of elimination, which itself would seem to be even more likely to result in 2 or 3 final round candidates that really only represent the interests of a small number of voters, but get there because the rest have no choice but to vote for one of them (or not at all).

If you think the choice of shit sandwtch on rye and shit sandwich on wheat we got this time around was bad, you'd be introducing that in pretty much every election cycle.

Or are you proposing something else? Be specific with the proposal. And explain what effects it would have and why those effects would be "better" (and even maybe, how you're defining "better" in the first place). You're going in the right direction here, but are far away from anything resembling a well thought out alternative.

Edited, Dec 9th 2016 5:52pm by gbaji

As I'm sure that the Enquirer is your publication of choice to get your information from

Right. Which is what gave rise to two prominent major parties over time that any candidate serious about winning at the federal level had to align with. But the flip side works as well. It means that the platforms of those two parties have to be broad enough, and with enough planks in them to appeal to a large enough voting population to be able to win those elections. Which has a feature of moderating the major party's platforms somewhat.

As opposed to a system with nothing but very narrowly focused smaller parties (yeah, I know that's not going to be all there is, just pointing out the range here). Which means that any candidate will mostly be about his party's specific agenda and everything else will be secondary. The EC forces the parties to be broad, and encourages victory for the party that best grabs the voters in the middle of any political ranges. Systems with more parties tend to have a mix of large and small parties, and the winner is the one who can grab those last few votes (whether popular or parliamentary) to win a majority. Which may be a block in the "middle", but could just as easily be a block on the edges.

It's one of the reasons I kinda laugh about the still repeated assertion that Trump won by getting the white racist vote. Um... Assuming that Trump is viewed by white racists as the better candidate for them, he's going to win them anyway. And frankly, if we accept the stock liberal claim that the GOP in general always appeals more to white racists than the Democrats do, then that's not really a change right? He'd get them. Romney would get them. Rubio would get them. Heck. Anyone running against Obama should certainly have gotten them, so those numbers are already baked into the election cake.

Trump won in the middle. More correctly Clinton lost in the middle. And honestly, I think that's a better way of determining a winner, even at the cost of not having a perfectly proportional "one person one vote" system. We want presidents to be elected by the middle, not the edges. Don't we? One of the effects of the EC is to force a two party system. A two party system will, over time, polarize those on the sides to one party or the other, effectively cancelling the edges out against each other. The result more or less requires campaigning and winning in the middle. Assuming there's even somewhat of a geographical (or state aligned) association with hard held positions of one party or the other, then what a direct popular vote does is make it more worthwhile to double down on the people on the edges, right? Is that really a good trade off though?


Again, I'm assuming some sort of alternative where either we no longer require a majority to win the election *or* some sort of run off system to allow for more parties to participate. Since I wasn't provided much in the way of details about the proposed alternatives, I'm somewhat left guessing and looking at a handful of different possible ways of doing the things that are being proposed. Now, if someone wants to, and this is just crazy talk here, actually write down a more detailed alternative methodology, then we could have a more productive discussion about it.

Not Timelordwho obviously but:

1) Yes, in nearly all cases.

2) I'm going to regret doing this because you'll immediately find some way in your mind to discount it, and to give you an accurate answer requires a lot or work on my part, but hopefully others reading will appreciate it.

You do so by the number of votes that mattered as a percentage of the votes cast. Votes that don't matter are those cast in excess of the number needed to win for the winning candidate and those cast for any losing candidate.

a) For the 2016 presidential election if you go by a 1 round plurality winner, then 46% of the votes cast mattered. There were a total of 136,737,898 votes cast with Trump as the second highest popular vote having 62,896,407, therefore Clinton needed only 62,896,408 to win and only these votes mattered. A runoff majority election requires some minor speculation on how voters who no longer have a horse in the race would have voted, but it would not be significantly different.

b) Assuming electors aren't faithless and are bound to cast their vote as pledged (which they aren't and cannot be repeated enough as a huge fudging problem) then 270 are needed to win a majority (note I am choosing to follow existing rules regarding the majority win for EC instead of a simple plurality which would be 233 votes, this makes the percentage of votes that mattered lower for the popular vote and higher for the electoral vote, I'm being incredibly generous doing this). I am using the following data from Wikipedia, note I have removed all third party candidates because none of them got even second place to affect the result.

State Method H-#  H-% H-Electoral T-#  T-% T-Electoral T-#
AL WTA 729,547 34.36% – 1,318,255 62.08% 9 2,123,372
AK WTA 116,454 36.55% – 163,387 51.28% 3 318,608
AZ WTA 1,161,167 45.13% – 1,252,401 48.67% 11 2,573,165
AR WTA 380,494 33.65% – 684,872 60.57% 6 1,130,635
CA WTA 8,696,374 62.28% 55 4,452,094 31.88% – 13,964,413
CO WTA 1,338,870 48.16% 9 1,202,484 43.25% – 2,780,220
CT WTA 897,572 54.57% 7 673,215 40.93% – 1,644,920
DE WTA 235,603 53.35% 3 185,127 41.92% – 441,590
DC WTA 282,830 90.48% 3 12,723 4.07% – 312,575
FL WTA 4,504,975 47.82% – 4,617,886 49.02% 29 9,420,039
GA WTA 1,877,963 45.89% – 2,089,104 51.05% 16 4,092,373
HI WTA 266,891 60.98% 4 128,847 29.44% – 437,664
ID WTA 189,765 27.49% – 409,055 59.26% 4 690,255
IL WTA 3,090,729 55.83% 20 2,146,015 38.76% – 5,536,424
IN WTA 1,039,126 37.91% – 1,557,286 56.82% 11 2,740,958
IA WTA 653,669 41.74% – 800,983 51.15% 6 1,566,031
KS WTA 427,005 36.05% – 671,018 56.65% 6 1,184,402
KY WTA 628,854 32.68% – 1,202,971 62.52% 8 1,924,149
LA WTA 780,154 38.45% – 1,178,638 58.09% 8 2,029,032
ME–a/l CD[b] 352,156 47.84% 2 332,418 45.16% –
ME-1 CD[b] 210,921 53.95% 1 154,173 39.43% –
ME-2 CD[b] 143,952 41.06% – 180,665 51.53% 1
MD WTA 1,677,928 60.33% 10 943,169 33.91% – 2,781,446
MA WTA 1,995,196 60.01% 11 1,090,893 32.81% – 3,325,046
MI WTA 2,268,839 47.27% – 2,279,543 47.50% 16 4,799,284
MN WTA 1,367,716 46.44% 10 1,322,951 44.92% – 2,944,813
MS WTA 462,127 39.74% – 678,284 58.32% 6
MO WTA 1,054,889 37.84% – 1,585,753 56.88% 10
MT WTA 177,709 35.75% – 279,240 56.17% 3 497,147
NE–a/l CD 284,494 33.70% – 495,961 58.75% 2 844,227
NE-1 CD 100,126 35.46% – 158,626 56.18% 1 282,338
NE-2 CD 131,030 44.92% – 137,564 47.16% 1 291,680
NE-3 CD 53,290 19.73% – 199,657 73.92% 1 270,109
NV WTA 539,260 47.92% 6 512,058 45.50% – 1,125,385
NH WTA 348,526 46.98% 4 345,790 46.61% – 741,885
NJ WTA 2,148,278 54.99% 14 1,601,933 41.00% – 3,906,709
NM WTA 385,234 48.26% 5 319,666 40.04% – 798,318
NY WTA 4,441,437 59.06% 29 2,738,645 36.41% –
NC WTA 2,189,350 46.17% – 2,362,697 49.83% 15 4,741,665
ND WTA 93,758 27.23% – 216,794 62.96% 3 344,360
OH WTA 2,394,164 43.56% – 2,841,005 51.69% 18 5,496,487
OK WTA 420,375 28.93% – 949,136 65.32% 7 1,452,992
OR WTA 1,002,106 50.07% 7 782,403 39.09% – 2,001,336
PA WTA 2,926,457 48.02% – 2,970,764 48.75% 20
RI WTA 227,062 53.83% 4 166,454 39.46% –
SC WTA 855,373 40.67% – 1,155,389 54.94% 9 2,103,027
SD WTA 117,442 31.74% – 227,701 61.53% 3
TN WTA 868,853 34.90% – 1,519,926 61.06% 11
TX WTA 3,877,868 43.24% – 4,685,047 52.23% 38 8,969,226
UT WTA 310,674 27.46% – 515,211 45.54% 6
VT WTA 178,573 55.72% 3 95,369 29.76% – 320,467
VA WTA 1,981,473 49.75% 13 1,769,443 44.43% – 3,982,752
WA WTA 1,742,718 54.30% 12 1,221,747 38.07% –
WV WTA 188,794 26.48% – 489,371 68.63% 5 713,051
WI WTA 1,381,823 46.44% – 1,404,000 47.19% 10 2,975,313
WY WTA 55,973 21.63% – 174,419 67.40% 3 255,849
US – 65,737,041 232 62,896,704 306 136,737,898

First we remove all the EC the Hillary won, because they were cast for a loser. Next we find the minimum number of votes required by Trump to win each individual state, this is the number of votes Hillary won +1. We then remove EVs for states unneeded to win (excess of 270), this is Florida, ME-2 and Iowa based on highest EV per person. Here is the resulting table.

State Method H-#  H-% H-Electoral T-#  T-% T-Electoral T-# needed to win EVPP
PA WTA 2,926,457 48.02% – 2,970,764 48.75% 20 2,926,458 6.8342E-06
NC WTA 2,189,350 46.17% – 2,362,697 49.83% 15 4,741,665 2,189,351 6.85135E-06
NE–a/l CD 284,494 33.70% – 495,961 58.75% 2 844,227 284,495 7.03E-06
MI WTA 2,268,839 47.27% – 2,279,543 47.50% 16 4,799,284 2,268,840 7.05206E-06
WI WTA 1,381,823 46.44% – 1,404,000 47.19% 10 2,975,313 1,381,824 7.23681E-06
OH WTA 2,394,164 43.56% – 2,841,005 51.69% 18 5,496,487 2,394,165 7.51828E-06
NE-2 CD 131,030 44.92% – 137,564 47.16% 1 291,680 131,031 7.63178E-06
GA WTA 1,877,963 45.89% – 2,089,104 51.05% 16 4,092,373 1,877,964 8.51987E-06
AZ WTA 1,161,167 45.13% – 1,252,401 48.67% 11 2,573,165 1,161,168 9.47322E-06
MO WTA 1,054,889 37.84% – 1,585,753 56.88% 10 1,054,890 9.47966E-06
TX WTA 3,877,868 43.24% – 4,685,047 52.23% 38 8,969,226 3,877,869 9.7992E-06
NE-1 CD 100,126 35.46% – 158,626 56.18% 1 282,338 100,127 9.98732E-06
LA WTA 780,154 38.45% – 1,178,638 58.09% 8 2,029,032 780,155 1.02544E-05
SC WTA 855,373 40.67% – 1,155,389 54.94% 9 2,103,027 855,374 1.05217E-05
IN WTA 1,039,126 37.91% – 1,557,286 56.82% 11 2,740,958 1,039,127 1.05858E-05
AL WTA 729,547 34.36% – 1,318,255 62.08% 9 2,123,372 729,548 1.23364E-05
TN WTA 868,853 34.90% – 1,519,926 61.06% 11 868,854 1.26604E-05
KY WTA 628,854 32.68% – 1,202,971 62.52% 8 1,924,149 628,855 1.27215E-05
MS WTA 462,127 39.74% – 678,284 58.32% 6 462,128 1.29834E-05
KS WTA 427,005 36.05% – 671,018 56.65% 6 1,184,402 427,006 1.40513E-05
AR WTA 380,494 33.65% – 684,872 60.57% 6 1,130,635 380,495 1.57689E-05
OK WTA 420,375 28.93% – 949,136 65.32% 7 1,452,992 420,376 1.66518E-05
MT WTA 177,709 35.75% – 279,240 56.17% 3 497,147 177,710 1.68814E-05
NE-3 CD 53,290 19.73% – 199,657 73.92% 1 270,109 53,291 1.87649E-05
UT WTA 310,674 27.46% – 515,211 45.54% 6 310,675 1.93128E-05
ID WTA 189,765 27.49% – 409,055 59.26% 4 690,255 189,766 2.10786E-05
SD WTA 117,442 31.74% – 227,701 61.53% 3 117,443 2.55443E-05
AK WTA 116,454 36.55% – 163,387 51.28% 3 318,608 116,455 2.5761E-05
WV WTA 188,794 26.48% – 489,371 68.63% 5 713,051 188,795 2.64838E-05
ND WTA 93,758 27.23% – 216,794 62.96% 3 344,360 93,759 3.19969E-05
WY WTA 55,973 21.63% – 174,419 67.40% 3 255,849 55,974 5.35963E-05

So due to the EC, only 27,543,968 votes mattered, for a percentage of 20%.

So more than half the votes that would matter in a popular vote plurality election don't matter in the EV election.

3) It's the absolutely most significant factor if you believe in democracy. Votes That don't matter are the same as votes that are not counted are the same as votes that are prevented from being cast. There is no functional difference between me creating a voting system where your vote doesn't mean anything and me creating a law barring you from voting.

The more layers of voting you add, the less you represent the original intent of the people casting those votes. It's like taking a picture of the picture, where it gets blurrier each time. Gerrymandering is when people intentionally abuse these layers, but even with states where the boundaries aren't actually rearranged you have an unintended gerrymandering.

Edited, Dec 11th 2016 11:25pm by Allegory

Not Timelordwho obviously but:

Is that obvious? I'm not so sure.

We're as alike as two peas in a pod!

It seems like like this majority thing is your new kick.

You act like the part I bolded is the goal. I'll agree the EC, ignoring the fact that faithless electors can do whatever they want which overrides anything else about the system or that we can say about it and thus this is all ultimately meaningless, will achieve a majority winner more often than a popular vote. It does so artificially. It also does so poorly. A system where every vote is assigned to the first person alphabetically achieves a majority vote more often and with a greater majority than the EC, and is therefore superior to it in that regard.

I see, and I'm open to a better suggestion if you have one, that the purpose of a voting system is to translate the will of the people voting into results. The more accurate that translation, the better the system. In this regard the EC and pretty much any layered voting system does a terrible job and is surpassed by a simple popular vote.

Alternatively I'll offer the purpose of a voting system is to maximize utility, utility being the number of people who want something multiplied by how badly they want it.

It doesn't fix the problem, and it wasn't intended to.

States didn't change to winner take all because it was a good idea, they did so as a power play. If I'm part of the purple party and the purple party is currently in control in my state and therefore makes the rules about how EVs are allocated in the state, why wouldn't I make rules that give my purple party every single EV? There is no incentive for a party to not give themselves every single vote because they can and it is in their best interest to do so.

There wasn't a problem to fix. If 49% of the state wants the orange party to be president, then say "No dice, you're instead voting 100% for purple" achieves a majority at the cost of people getting what they want.

1) A majority isn't a goal. It needn't be achieved. If a plurality is the result then there's nothing inherently wrong with a plurality.

2) You can achieve a majority winner without a negotiated process with a popular vote, and if you bothered paying attention to the people telling you how bad the EC is or genuinely cared about this issue rather than using it as a tool to promote Republican control you'd know about methods such as instant-runoff elections.

You'll take whichever one gives Republicans power.

Edited, Dec 13th 2016 6:04pm by Allegory

Allegory. I appreciate the effort and data. Here's the problem though. You're proposing a rule change yet assuming that everyone will continue to play the same way. The popular vote count is only that high because we don't elect presidents by popular vote count *and* we have an EC system which requires a majority to win *and* we have most of our states awarding EC votes via WTA methodology.

If you go to a direct popular vote and require a majority to win, you introduce either a very high probability of Congress simply picking the president and vice president (it's extremely rare for any candidate to actually win a majority of the popular vote, even in our two party system, and presumably less so if you were to change this). Or, If you use a run off system, you have the problem of having multiple narrow focused parties participating, each appealing perhaps to just a smallish percentage of the population, but (in the simplest version) the top two going into the run off. Meaning that while you can technically say that on paper 50%+1 votes "counted", a potentially large percentage of those vote were cast for someone who's platform doesn't match what the voters actually want, but maybe is just slightly less undesirable than the other person in the run off.

If you just go with plurality for the win, the outcome could be even worse. Again, I think you're failing to take into account that how we campaign and how we vote today is heavily influenced by the rules of the election. Change the rules, and you change the way people run for the office.

I also don't necessarily agree with your math in terms of how many votes "mattered". Yes, we can calculate that after the fact, but the point is that we don't know how many votes are going to be needed, and where, most of the time. Voters still have to go out and vote to make their votes matter. Opposition votes for the loser still matter, in that if they didn't show up at all, the winner would not have needed as many to win, which may affect things like campaign promises, platform, etc. Every election, there are issues candidates in the race (mostly in primaries, but what do you think the third party folks are doing?). Sanders voters, by your math, "didn't matter", yet by voting for him in such numbers, Clinton was forced to make changes to her platform and campaign language.

It's more than just tallying up the result. It's what happens along the way that matters as well. I'd much rather we have a system that forces candidates to construct a platform and a ticket that aligns with the desires of the voter while running, even if the actual number of votes that "matter" is fewer on election day, than one where the highest number of votes on election day "matter", but the candidate that won is less likely to have done so by listening to, much less adjusting to, the voters. You're advocating for a system that works on paper, but doesn't necessarily result in a president who is more likely to reflect the positions of the people as a whole. And IMO, that latter bit is really important.

As an aside, popular vote sorta already does that; not on the individual level on every election, but by various demographic groups (vis a vis voting rate). Mandatory voting lowers this effect, as does EC.

I'm annoyed at you Timelordwho for not mentioning that you already brought up ranked voting in this thread 2 months ago.

Edited, Dec 14th 2016 7:54am by Allegory