XKCD: It's more than a comic

Now to be fair, other states can and have gone red or blue contrary to what party they normally vote for, and it isn't unreasonable to think that they could do so and thus those three states aren't the states that choose the president.

Any person with a sufficient understanding of sociology can tell you why that isn't the case, but fundamentally there's no reason to necessarily think that.

Furthermore the logic behind Electoral College was to give states power, not to give the people power. Logically speaking the people should be electing in officials that share the populace's view and desires for how the state is run, and then those officials are what elect the presidency. Thus, the populace of congress, based on the officials elected, are representing the people.

If people were well-informed that is. But because people are sheep they follow whatever party they're told to follow, for the most part, and stick with that for their entire lives because people are stubborn fools.

So we have situations like so where the president is won based off of ill-informed masses, hence the importance of campaigning in swing states.

oh wait this isn't OTC

I don't have a great understanding of sociology; do you wanna share that reason with the class?

I've said this before, but as someone looking from the outside, and from a multi-party representative system, it's bizarre that most Americans, seemingly, are happy in a system where millions of Republicans in California and Democrats in Texas are effectively disenfranchised by a system that seems designed to avoid changes in the balance of power.

As a Finn, and someone relatively happy with our system, I'd recommend that the country be divided into districts and seats given to each district according to population, but with some tweaks to favour smaller places. The seats from each district would be allocated based on the results of elections according to something like our D'Hondt method, which makes it easy for a party to get one representative, and each successive representative from a district after the first becomes progressively harder to get (so you get a mixture of proportional representation and some smaller parties that do well).

I was pretty disgusted at the results of a UK election about 8 years ago, where two parties got about the same percentage of the national vote, but because of the FPTP system, one got 0 representatives and the other got 2. (Of course, the major parties were also within maybe 5% of each other, and one got a much higher percentage of seats in Parliament because they just about edged out so many constituencies.

The Electoral College seems fundamentally anti-democratic to me, as someone looking at this from a Western democracy with a more direct system of representation; but the FPTP system seems far worse, still. If your elected representatives in the House of Representatives really were willing to meet and discuss issues with their constituents regardless of party affiliation and connections to lobbyists and interest groups, it would at least support the argument for every district having its own, single, named representative. When representatives don't actively seek the input of their constituents - not just from a given party, but all constituents - the system has obviously failed to produce representation.

Advance voting in out Presidential election starts next week. For Presidential and European elections, Finland is one district. In the Presidential elections, if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, a second round is held between the two candidates who got the most votes, and the winner of that gets the Presidency. That seems like a reasonable arrangement for Presidential elections, where it makes sense that the winner should have a majority to claim from the elections. For Parliamentary elections, no representative comes in with a mandate from a majority; everyone's mandate comes from a sufficient plurality, guaranteeing that a party that gets 20% or 30% in a district will not go unrepresented.

(In the D'Hondt system, votes to a list - which is effectively the same as a party - get allocated so that the winner within each list gets all of the list's votes, the runner-up gets 50%, third gets 25%, and so on. When the votes within a list are calculated, the seats get allocated when the results for each candidate between lists are compared, so that the winner of each list is very likely to go through, but the runner-up of smaller lists might not, assuming that the more successful lists get lots of votes distributed between all of their candidates.)

I wonder how different - and how much more democratic - the politics of the US and UK would be if they switched to a more representative system. Due to inertia, we are unlikely to ever find out.

I don't understand why at least electors aren't awarded proportionally to the votes within each states, instead of all-or-nothing.

Excellent question. And I've yet to find an answer to it. My theory is that it was meant to reduce the need to count absentee or ambiguous ballots. Today, unless the election is really close, they don't bother, but in a proportional system, it becomes more important whether a candidate secured 60% or 75% of the vote. And as we saw in the infamous Florida recounts, it can really drag things out when they have to get down to the level of checking the paper.

There's a bit of variance here between states - they get to decide how their electoral college votes are allocated. Some states are divided into disctricts even in the Presidential elections, so it's possible for the state's votes to be split. Some states with 3 electoral college votes are split in half, with each half allocating its electoralcollege vote according to the election in that district; and the remaining electoral college vote is given to the candidate who got the majority in the state, so it's possible to get a 2-1 split for the electoral college votes.

Most states give 100% of their electoral college votes to the candidate who got the most votes. That's meant to increase that state's importance in the Presidential election, forcing all candidates to devote time and effort to winning that state. The idea is that a state with 3 electoral college votes that can get you 1 or 2 votes (and the remaining vote(s) to your opponent, if it's close enough) will be a lesser priority for a candidate than a state where 51% of the vote gets you 3 electoral college votes.

I can actually understand why a state with a small number of electoral college votes would do that. I have much less sympathy for states with 10+ electoral college votes that don't split, because the number of people they end up disenfranchising, compared to the total national population, is really significant. Can you imagine being one of California's million of Republicans who know, going into each Presidential election, that the most they can do is try to use the Presidential campaign as a device for promoting local candidates?

@Frosty: I'm going to severely simplify it because I'm short on time- basically due to the nature of how people congregate and share opinions, certain areas of the population will internally only share and accept views similar to theirs. So you have a mass of the same opinion per area with little deviancy, hence why some states are always red or always blue.

What people think happen is that they're well-informed and that they developed their views on their own merits, but that's hardly the case since our entire world view is shaped by our environment.

The system in use presumes the former, when in reality it's the latter that happens.

Another thing we all need to keep in mind- the USA is a Democratic Republic, not just a Democracy. We elect officials to represent us, we don't vote as the masses.

edited 9th Jan '18 9:52:18 AM by EpicBleye

I ask this in all seriousness: what's mystical about acreage of land that means we should give people more vote per-capita when they live on a lot of it?

Who are you asking? If it's me, then I don't. It's a stupid system and needs to be changed. But it has it's merits that have been largely lost as the political landscape and population density per state changed to what it is today. They just don't work as they did even just a century ago, much less over 200 years ago.

edited 9th Jan '18 10:12:30 AM by EpicBleye

Well, it took us many more centuries to get it right, so perhaps it will improve with time.

There isn't something sacred to land involved. There is an aspect of the importance of the state, though. The Senate representation, and two electoral votes, are equal among all states for that reason. As to what's sacred about the state... well, that's a lot of history and the fact that the states of the United States operate almost more like countries in the EU than they do a single country. They have their own laws, their own taxation, but share a currency and share some common law.

"I ask this in all seriousness: what's mystical about acreage of land that means we should give people more vote per-capita when they live on a lot of it?"

Regional divisions worsen economic disparity, undermine commerce, increase risk of violent protest, seccession and civil war, something the US has experience with.

NOT saying the electoral collage is the best or even an effective solution to this, but is basically what it was designed to do.

IMHO, jerrymandering and election funding are the critical problems right now, not the EC or FPTP.

Gerrymandering is very bad, indeed. I've been listening to the Fivethirtyeight podcast about it and the various attempts that have been made to solve it.

The one that seemed the most reasonable is the one in California, where the process was outsourced to a non-partican committee that would draw the districts based, in part, on the category of "communities of interest".

That meant that on top of the consideration of having a given suburb or town inside one firstrict instead of splitting it, people could come to the committee to present a case for the consideration of a given group as a community that would lose its political influence if it was split.

Typically those would be city districts where a large percentage of people were of a given ethnic background, but sometimes it could be something like horse owners who felt that they needed to be clumped together so that their representative would take their issues into consideration, and those who lived near a particular airport because they were in a long campaign to secure protection against the noise the airport produced and felt that if they were split to multiple districts, their representative would not feel compelled to fight about this with the airport.

Those are kind of weird examples, but I get the thinking behind it. More importantly, though, in measures of voter power, where the influence of one voter on the outcome of an election is compared across all districts in a state, and among multiple states, the California model produced the best results, with the fewest voters who fail to make a difference.

In Arizona, this same target was pursued with a nonpartisan committee, but there the state legislators and courts decided that the districts had to yield competitive elections; so the party registrations of voters in each region were taken into consideration and the map was drawn so that whoever got a majority, they wouldn't lead by more than a few representatives. That, of course, is just plain undemocratic because the state leans very firmly towards one party and the opposition got a major advantage form this, compared to the previous situation.

This is another reason, by the way, why this year's election, and the one in 2020, will be very important. Districts are to be drawn again after the census is completed, and the balance of power in each state, as well as nationally, will leave its mark on the outcome. Democrats generally want to pursue models where the drawing of districts is left to committees that have no party affiliation and base their decisions mostly on demographics, whereas Republicans generally want to consider the voters' party affiliations and have the committees composed of politicians.

edited 9th Jan '18 12:19:19 PM by BestOf

Here is a site with more info on the math of voting and gerrymandering.

Yeah, in a way, the 2020 census is a prize that both parties want to be taking.

The idea of political parties drawing electoral district boundaries is one of the things I find weirdest about the US political system. Having that in the hands of a nonpartisan organization (here, it's Elections Canada at a national level, and Elections [insert province] at a provincial level) seems like a no-brainer, and pretty fundamental to being a functioning democracy.

edited 11th Jan '18 10:53:08 AM by Galadriel

The problem is, once the process gets captured by one or both parties, convincing them to give up their control. Since only the party that won the last elections can make that decision...

The Food Size Cycle
The alt-text is the best part, actually.

Dying Gift
That one looks like Black Hat's final days.

That might be an American thing.

Food size? Yeah, I was thinking it probably doesn't happen outside the US.

The first thing I thought about the food size thing is that it applies to cars. Like, if you compare an early Toyota Corolla to the latest model.

Cars have gotten beefier outside because they need room for crumple zones and style. They've gotten bigger on the inside because Americans have gotten bigger and less patient with cramming into small spaces (except on airplanes, because the only alternative is paying a thousand dollars more for a first class seat).

Hmm... as someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I'd actually argue that cars have gotten smaller, more efficient (ah, the days when people were shocked that gas went over a dollar per gallon, and said it would never hit two dollars per gallon because all of the signs would have to change...). Most people don't drive huge steel-framed boat cars. SUVs are on the rise in some markets, but most people are driving smaller car because the mileage is so much better.

Cars in general have gotten smaller, but if you watch individual models, they've bulked up since the 80s.

Its kinda cute that people honestly believed gas companies would rather keep gas prices artificially low than replace their signage.