----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan Minette" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 7:42 PM Subject: Re: br!n: My big salvo
> > You could also show me why using sums is wrong...but I'm pretty sure that's > what happens in the votes. > > Dan M. I've thought of another way to phrase this. Each state gets one electoral college vote for each senator and member of the house; while DC is treated as though it is a state with one representative. The problem is not that the smallest states are so small that the don't deserve even one representative based on population alone. Counting both the DC population, and attributing one representative to DC, we have 645k population for house member. That means Wyoming, which has the lowest population, deserves .766 representatives in Congress on population alone. This clearly rounds up to 1, instead of down to 0. Using John's stage 3 analysis, we see that Bush has a 9 state advantage, which translates into an 18 electoral vote advantage. If you take this away, Bush would trail by 13 electoral votes, instead of leading by 5. If the electoral votes were appropriated according to population (including fractional values), then Kerry would lead by 14.04. That one vote difference is consistent with rounding error, and is much smaller than the 19 point difference with the present system. So, the easiest way to reform the electoral college system is one electoral vote per congressional district and one for DC. On paper, having each district elect one member of the electoral college would be worthwhile, but I can see two problems with that. 1) It opens the presidential race up to gerrymandering 2) It reflects the Congress too closely. Proportional votes by state would probably be better than this. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
