On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 23:13:55 -0400, JDG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 11:55 AM 10/11/2004 -0400 Bryon Daly wrote: > >I agree that there's a lot of good though behind it, but I think that > >times have changed and the system doesn't serve us that well any > >longer, as it stands. But really my main argument was the need to fix > >the "winner takes the state" system rather than to toss the EC out > >altogether. > > The "winner takes the State" system, however, accomplishes two things: > > 1) Limits the influence of third parties. For example, if Ralph Nader or > Michael Badnarik were to garner a couple electoral votes, either could > hold the "balance of power" for the Presidency. Under the current system, > the "balance of power" is more likely to lie in the middle than the extremes.
An interesting point in a way, but as I understand it, that was a huge point of the electoral system: when multiple parties were in the running, the electors for the last-place parties could shift their votes to the "lesser evil" party of their choice to try to best represent the wishes of the voters they represent. But in any case, you're assuming that the Democrats and Republicans represent the "middle", and 3rd parties must represent the extremes. For Nader and Badnarik that might be the case, but could you say that for Perot in 92 or maybe John Anderson in 1980? Anyway, I think it's possible for a third party to better represent the middle (or at least be no further from it) than the Dems & Reps. are. > 2) It forces attention on small States. For example, a lot of attention > is being given to Iowa and New Mexico in this election cycle. Under a > proportional system, it would take a shift of 10-20% to shift even one EV > in those States. On the other hand, it would only take a small shift of > 1-5% to swing EVs in large States. But we're talking percentages of greatly differing size populations: that 1-5% in a large state can actually work out to needing to swing a lot more people than the 10-20% in a small state I think we already discussed this, though. I understand your point that it's easier to reach more people via the biggest mass markets, but it's also costlier, and your alternative is that these larger groups of people are able to be mostly ignored while smaller groups elsewhere get overimportant value (based on their relative population). My core feeling is that states don't vote, people do, and everyone should have a (near) equal say. > 3) It forces attention on "swing States". If the US were to move to a > pure popular vote system, States like NM, IA, and WI would get token > attention at best. In addition, we would probably see a lot of attention > given by President Bush to states like TX, UT, AL, and MS in order to try > and turn out ever-more of his base, and likewise Kerry would spend much > more time in NY, CA, and MA trying to turn out his base. The Electoral Well, while I mostly like the idea of a pure popular vote system, my main suggestion was to go to a vote-proportional type electoral system. And under a proportional system, there wouldn't be that sort of incentive due to diminishing returns. > College, however, encourages candidates to make their cases to pretty much > the same geographical group of voters... and again forces attention on the > center, rather than the extremes. Well, I'd say it encourages candidates to focus their attention on a small number of states while leaving them both free to largely ignore the majority of the rest. Aside - I just took a good look at the actual state voting results and had some interesting/surprising (to me) findings. I plugged all the numbers from http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/2000presgeresults.htm into a spreadsheet and calculated the proportional EV results. Most of the states were split far more evenly than I had thought they were. There were only 10 states where one side got 60% or more of the vote. By my calculations, with proportional EV assignment by state pop vote, Bush would have gotten 267 EV, Gore 266 EV, and Nader 5 EV. (BTW, if you ignore all the 3rd parties and just use the Dem/Rep pop vote percentages to assign the EV, it is a dead heat at 269-269.) This is all pretty surprising to me - I had thought it would be much more lopsided result one way or the other. It seems the winner/loser vote ratios for each state balanced each other out, but since the victory margins per state are generally so small, I guess it's not really that surprising. Spreadsheet here: http://users.rcn.com/daly5/EVprop.xls So it seems I've shown (to myself at least) that the current winner-takes-state system doesn't have as much impact as I thought it would, at least for the 2000 vote. But that seems more because the state races were pretty evenly divided and cancel each other out than because the system is inherently fair. It'd be interesting to check this with the 2004 results (and/or past elections as well) to see if it generally works out fairly closely whether it's winner-takes-state, or proportional EV assignment. -Bryon _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
