Some more about D.C. While the rule is they otherwise get as many electors as they would if they were a state, the can have no more electors than the least populous state. Right now, that restriction doesn't matter. Wyoming is currently the least populous state, with 3 electoral votes (a voter in Wyoming has the most weight on average), but D.C comes out to 3 by the regular calculation anyway.

But, if D.C.'s population were to increase enough to raise the total to four, the rule would kick in and hold it at three.

-Richard

If Colbert becomes president, will bears be outlawed?

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Everywhere except parts of Canada and other foreign lands.

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It's always funny when the Electoral College apologists trot out their excuses. The task of assessing such a quagmire of historical ennui I would tend to leave to Alexander Hamilton and his elitist, empiricist, anti-democratic compatriots. They always seem ready to perform waste management.

Meanwhile, the Electoral College makes sense. Of course it does. It's a tradition! Let's take that sense and apply it to other venues.

By Electoral College logic, US Senators and Representatives should be elected only if they win the majority of the counties in their respective states. If they happen to get the majority of votes, that doesn't count.

And state governors should only win their seats if they win the majority of the towns in the state they wish to govern. If they happen to get the majority of votes, that doesn't count.

Heck, on the state level we even have elections for sheriffs and judges that are won based on majority vote. That's obviously wrong using Electoral College logic. Guess we need to break those results into majorities per wards, etc., and who won the most. Boss Tweed would be proud! Democracy at its finest!

Yeah, right.

Funny how the United States presidential election is the only election where the winner is not who gets the most votes. The ghost of Hamilton still haunts us...

The Electoral College (and all state votes go to the local victor) are perversions of democratic processes. Rationalize away all you want, it doesn't make sense.

(thud, thud, thud)

As with all other elections, the person who gets the majority of the vote should be the winner!

As with all other elections, the person who gets the majority of the vote should be the winner!

As with all other elections, the person who gets the majority of the vote should be the winner!

Is there something here you don't understand, bro?

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Its a rule governing representation in the EC, its therefore an EC problem.

Uh, I'm afraid there is something there you don't understand, actually. Very few elections require a majority. A plurality is all that is generally required, and that goes for the allocation of electoral votes in the state presidential contests. Due to third parties, the winners of presidential elections rarely get a majority of the popular vote. Just look at the stats through history.

So in a three candidate race, if the vote splits 40 - 30 - 30%, the one with 40% wins, and the winner is one that 60%, a large majority *rejected*.

A few general elections do require an absolute majority, the Louisana governor's race being one. And many primary elections (which are a party function, technically) require an absolute majority. That requires runoffs. (You could have system where you rank choices, allowing a runoff to be done from a single ballot).

Oh, and the presidential election does require an absolute majority. Of Electoral votes. If the EC fails to achieve a majority, it is thrown to the House.

And, for those who get their underoos in a bunch about "democratic processes" and "fairness" and all that stuff, take a look at Arrow's Theorem and the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem.

These theorems prove that no election system can be "completely fair". You pick a series of fairly straightfoward criteria that sound fair which just about everyone would agree on, and find that they are inconsistent. No election system can meet them because it is a logical impossibility.

I love those because it's a stark example of warm and fuzzy emotion being shown to be logically invalid.

-Richard

I dunno, Mak. You hit a home run then forget to touch second base. Tsk.

I had never heard of Arrow's Theorem, but had empirically derived the Pizza-Topping Theorem many years ago, where I proved that with available toppings 'n' and pizza consumers 'm', the odds of satisfying everybody are [1/(m^n)]. Maybe [1/(n^m)]; I need to order more pizza to be certain. This doesn't even take into account the Chuck Corrollary, where Chuck wanders in after things are settled and demands anchovies.

Besides, Mak, the Erectoral College isn't just a tradition

it's a way to make the actual, difficult choice of Tawp Dawg so convoluted that any outcome can be justified post hoick by appealing to the thoughts in the two hundred year old dust under those perukes. The same ones invoked when deciding whether multiple carriers may use the same fiber-optic cable (Hamilton, for one, was quite firm in this belief, noting that even with spread-spectrum multiplexing the available electromagnetic bandwidth was simply insufficient).

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

OK, got me on a technicality. I was thinking of "majority" in terms of "who got the most votes", not as "who got over 50%".

Therefore

(thud, thud, thud)

As with all other elections, the person who gets the plurality of the vote should be the winner!

As with all other elections, the person who gets the plurality of the vote should be the winner!

As with all other elections, the person who gets the plurality of the vote should be the winner!

Is there something here you don't understand, bro?

BTW, in our little village of Anatevka, we do things according to tradition.

Why?

Because it's a tradition!

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It's OK. The rules in this league allow for the following:Funny, I was already doing my Zero impression prior to reading your post.

You're right, convolutions are excellent ways to cover the convoluted methods used to convolute the convulsed methods of choosing the next hoicken burning bush, if he is a rich man, with a proper double chin, he should be so lucky.

As they say on the Moon, Earthrise, Earthset.

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Except that the Earth neither rises nor sets relative to any geographical point on the Moon...




Don't shoot! PLEASE!!

It's a TRADITIONAL saying.

And wouldn't it be a selenographical point?

I won't shoot if you won't...

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Don't worry, not too many people have heard of it. But Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel in Economics in part for it. It is sort of like Godel's Theorem -- it takes the wind out of your sails. It is a big part of "Voting Theory", the study of voting and electoral systems. Most students of voting theory are quite surpised and even disillusioned by the results of it. Which may explain why not too many people are aware of it.

No voting system can be completely fair, and no voting system can be completely "rational" (how you define that gets involved). It stems from the fact that when you have a vote, you are trying to define some entity called the "group", the "public", the "majority", and trying to determine what this entity wants or prefers. That is easy with an individual. But put a bunch of them together and try to determine some consensus, and it gets problematic. The notion of "consensus" just can't be defined in a logically consistent way.

Now, Arrow shows us that no system can be 100% fair and rational. However, some systems are certainly less fair and less rational than others.

And, it turns out the plurality system is just about the worst one of the most common methods. As one mathematician who is a big name in voting theory laments, is the one system that can pick a winner despised by a 2/3 majority of voters.

You can see that very easily. We have a three man race, A, B and C, and we have 100 voters (to make percentages = number). We have a vote and the tally is

A 35
B 33
C 32

A wins! However, B and C voters absolutely despise A. If B were eliminated, his voters would have chosen C, and vice versa for C's voters. So, we have chosen a winner despised by 65% of the voters, and rejected candidates that, in head to head match ups with A would win in landslides.

I was reading some commentary by the voting theorists who say this is one thing that really gets to their students right off the bat. We've been raised on a plurality wins system, that the guy with the greatest number of votes wins and that's wonderful, but then with some very simple analysis find it is one of the worst systems there is. It can be very disconcerting.

A (much) better way is a majority system. By some method, you eliminate candidates/choices until you get a majority. But, you'll find that can pull some crazy stunts as well depending on just how you do the counting and the elimination.

-Richard

Mike,

You mentioned the Pizza Topping Theorem, which is a slight variation on a common example used in voting theory. I would use it, but since I'd get my toppings mixed up, I'll stick with the traditional form, which a bunch of party goers deciding on what beverage to serve.

We have 15 people, and three choices of beverage, tea, wine, and beer. For purposes of analysis, we imagine all voters have a ranking of preference of all choices. In the real world, we wouldn't know that of course, but it lets us see how various voting methods choose amongst the rankings.

Let's say that six people, group A, rank it tea, wine, beer. And we'll let this ranking be "love", "okay with", "hate". So group A loves tea, would be fine with wine, but hates beer.

Five people, group B rank it beer, wine, tea.

The last four, group C, rank it wine, beer, tea.

Now we have a vote. The participants, raised up in the plurality wins system declare tea to be the winner, since it won the greatest number of votes, 6.

But 9 people, a 60% majority, B + C *hate* tea, and raise a ruckus. They're not going to tolerate tea being served, and they're gonna go home.

So, they decide to adopt a majority method, and have a runoff between the top two choices, tea and beer. Group C's choice, wine, was eliminated, so they vote for their second choice, beer.

Beer wins the runoff by 9 to 6. Beer has 60% majority. It won in a landslide. Beer must be the consensus.

But look at the ranking. A 60% majority prefers or is okay with beer, but 40% despise beer. Look at wine. 100% of the people would prefer or be okay with wine. No one despises wine. Our majority method failed to find the beverage that is clearly the "consensus" of the group in the sense that no one would complain about it.

And that choice, the true consensus choice, was the one that got the *least* number of votes in the initial ballot!

-Richard

As we saw above, the plurality and even the majority. There are various methods here, the one above would be the exhaustive ballot method, low man out each round until a majority winner is found. Well actually, with just three choices, it could be one of several possible ways.

Another is, roughly, pick a run-off set with the fewest members having the greatest majority. Suppose we had a four man race, A, B, C, and D. First round went A:30, B:25, C: 24, D: 21. The low man out method would elimate D, then hold a three man run off between A, B and C. The greatest majority would see the set (A, B) had a 55% majority, and eliminate C and D and hold a two man run off between A and B. (You can see that a numerical tie would throw a monkey wrench in this, giving us more than one greatest majority, least number set, such as if C got 25 and D 20).

And then there is simply the "top two" method, which picks the top two, regardless of whether they sum to a majority or not. That can do as bad as a straight plurality.

With just three, the distinction between these various run-off methods is not apparent. But at any rate, none of them would've correctly picked wine in the beverage race.

Is there a method that would've correctly found wine? The Condorcet method would in this case. Condorcet's method is to construct all possible two-way ballots and declare the winner to be the one who wins all such two way ballots he/she/it participates in.

So in our tea, wine, beer contest, we would hold tea vs wine, wine vs. beer, and beer vs tea. Look at the rankings.

In the tea vs wine matchup, wine wins 9 to 6.

In the wine vs beer contest, wine wins 10 - 6

In the final beer vs tea contest, beer wins 9 - 6

Wine is thus the Condorcet winner, winning both of its two-way matches clearly. Beer one won, but lost the other. And tea lost both of its contests.

So you can see the Condercet balloting did just the opposite of the plurarity. The plurality ranked wine the lowest, even though wine was clearly the consensus, and it ranked tea the highest, which was despised by the largest majority.

The Condorcet method correctly found the "true consensus", that wine was the least despised, indeed no one despised it, while tea was the most despised 9 out of 15 despising it.

But before you get your hopes up about Condorcet, it runs into problems as well. You can't get around Arrow. It's Theorem, Principia Mathematica derived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system

That will get you started if you're interested in voting theory.

-Richard

The system is not letting me edit, so I'll have to make a second post to correct an errata.

The wine vs beer contest would be wine 10 - 5

-Richard

And it is so with the presidential election, too. The problem is that people think they're voting for the president when they're actually voting for presidential electors. The electoral candidates who get the most votes become electors, and then the presidential candidate who gets the most electoral votes becomes president (with, of course, all of Publius' caveats about majorities vs. pluralities).

The fact of the matter is, everything that affects the people of South Carolina (for example) is either

a) voted on solely by the people of South Carolina; or
b) voted on by a representative group of people who themselves are elected by residents of the various states.

So it seems to me that the presidential election is not different from every other election - but it would be if it were decided by nationwide popular vote.

(Oh, by the way - the USA is not a democracy, it's a republic. And while the EC may not be purely democratic, it is pretty darn republican).

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

It's a Remocracy.


...Depublic?

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort