Do we need an Electoral College?

Great Debates
41

With no lack of trepidation I am willing to give social choice theory a try. So, yes please. It would be great if you could suggest at least three so I have a better chance of getting one dirt cheap. In the meantime I appreciate helping me muddle along as far as I can.

This paragraph is very disheartening. Not only was the reason not self evident in the first place but I still don’t understand it now. We were making a comparison between 2 systems of voting, neither of which included preference voting. So I fail to see why you felt that subject is relevant.

OK, so when you say that “The beauty of the electoral college is that it scrubs the undesirable properties of plurality rule while at the same time preserving its desirable properties, that is, a guaranteed outcome even when the set of outcomes grows larger” what you mean is that you like the process of rendering individual votes into electoral votes because there will always be a plurality winner in each state and yet the undesirable effects of plurality voting ( which I don’t have a handle on ) are eliminated because the vote of electors is a simple majority vote.

Is that somewhat accurate? Because if so I gotta tell ya, it’s hardly persuasive. In fact, it reminds me of how my older sister used to share a cola ( a rare treat in our home ) with me when we were kids. She would pour equal portions in 2 glasses and then drink what was left in the bottle “to make things even”. In our situation the benefits are created by throwing away the choices of millions of voters. Hell, sometimes a majority of the choices within a state are discarded when there is no majority and all of the state’s electoral votes go to the plurality winner.

Now I am lost again. First off, if there is a winner in the general ( larger ) election then no runoff ( smaller ) election takes place so your 2nd sentence makes no sense. It takes a simple majority to win, remember? If you mean that the most popular candidate in the first election can lose a runoff, that’s just plain sense. Otherwise wouldn’t be any point in holding the runoff.

Also, while this is interesting you still have failed to connect simple majority with runoff elections to the discussion at hand by comparing them to the current electoral system.

Politics are often counterintuitive. You can get Patterson’s book here for under ten bucks even with shipping. The 2000 study found that, “Residents of the most heavily contested states were 13 percent more likely to have particular knowledge of the candidates’ issue positions.” This is not a new finding because the book quotes Ken Goldstein saying, “We decry the ads, we whine about the attack advertising but study after study shows that people exposed to it hold more knowledgeable opinions.”

Timothy McVeigh was not offered as a case in point but merely to include the Oklahoma City bombing as an example of undesirable alternative political activity. I’m guessing you misunderstood and that is the reason for your vehement rejection for I find nothing unusual in the idea that participating in government, even in some small way, binds you together ( again in some small way ) or in the idea that built up tensions can lead to major problems.

Voting and engaging in undesirable political activity are both observable phenomenon so you are incorrect here. But I haven’t done any observing nor do I have a cite from anyone who did so you are free to disagree just as I am free to wonder wherever you got the wild notion that we have a powerful social norm to pointlessly vote.

But it wouldn’t be a “result” if voting weren’t presumed to have meaning. The presumption being: “A lot of Iraqis voted so a lot of Iraqis support the government or at least respect it enough to consider it worthy of their time and effort.”

Here you have convinced me I was wrong. And again I’ll take the suggestions.

This social pressure came in the form of nagging comments to the tune of “Don’t throw away your vote. It will only weaken the chances of your preference among the 2 guys who might win.”

True. Since your vote doesn’t matter anyway you might as well vote your heart. This is hardly a reason to prefer the Electoral College. But in another way the EC does promote third parties over a plurality vote because it is a districted election and regional third party candidates can win electoral votes. The “Dixiecrats” being the last example. Of course, the same can’t be said about simple majority with runoff elections.

I most certainly did not. Do you require an explanation of the common phrase “have run into”?

I don’t find either of your conditions compelling. In the 2nd, if black Americans were each allowed an extra vote you would consider that close enough to equal. Hell, if Jessie Jackson got to cast a 50 million votes you would still consider that close enough to equal.

As for the first, the Electoral College fails that test. The winning coalition is created by those who helped elect electors who in turn helped elect the winner. If you didn’t vote for the plurality winner in your state you can’t be a member of a winning coalition even if, by coincidence, you cast your ballot for the guy who won.

Just my 2sense

42

We are making some progress.

Absolutely. A good place to start is Analyzing Politics by Shepsle and Bonchek. An extreme oldie but still goodie is The Theory of Committees and Elections by Duncan Black. Wonderful but massively difficult are Positive Political Theory I: Collective Preference and Positive Political Theory II: Structure and Strategy by Austen-Smith and Banks. Unless you become a theory junkie, this one works better as a reference. Arrow’s earthshaking Social Choice and Individual Values is still worth reading. You can also even try Abrams, Foundations of Political Analysis: An Introduction to the Theory of Collective Choice. It is 25 years old, but still is pretty good. There is a massive bilbiography and several peer-reviewed journals devoted to this discipline. Believe me, we are only scratching the surface.

I do not think “preference voting” means what you think it means, hence you are getting hung up. I was not referring to preference voting as one particular voting or aggregation rule. The term usually refers to several. I hope this clears it up.

With all due respect, it seems to me that you are not persuaded precisely because you do not have a handle on the negative properties of plurality or even simple majority voting. Your position is akin to claiming that the argument that 2 + 2 = 4 is not persuasive. It is not a matter of being persuasive, it is true because it can be proven. If you are interested in diving into the proof, I would be happy to provide the references. It would take all night for me to type it on the SDMB, which does not exactly support mathematics very well.

My position is by no means immune to contention. It is very possible to make an argument that other voting systems, despite their negative properties, possess positive properties that are more normatively valuable. People have made outstanding cases for the Borda Rule or Approval Voting. I am very partial to the AV case, myself, as I find its properties appealing. I would replace all of our plurality/majority nonsense with AV. But not with your proposed voting system, since it possesses properties that I find extremely unfavorable.

Now you’re getting it. :slight_smile: No voting rule can meet all of the normative conditions that we would like to put on it. None. Nada. Zip. Some of the coke is always going to be treated unfairly. Life is hard. Political science is a pretty depressing field.

In this context, what does a “winner” mean? A simple majority? This is still undesirable.

If so, and the candidate pool is larger than 2, you have a cycle on your social preference. This degree of collective irrationality is typically considered unacceptable in the free world. The lack of resoluteness is extremely undesirable.

The reason why we are going around in circles is because you do not seem to be making an effort to grasp that by changing the rules in this way, we are just trading off undesirable properties. You lose contradiction consistency and rationality in favor of an extremely unrigorous idea of “fairness”, yet you claim that I fail to persuade.

This is nonsensical. Do I have to be any clearer about the undesirable properties of a simple majority election, regardless of whether or not there is a runoff afterwards?

Does the fact that that a person who wins a plurality in the first election will lose the runoff not bother you? Can you stomach this kind of irrationality and insincere voting? The idea that people’s votes change when unwanted candidates are removed from the set of outcomes is incredible and very undesirable.

This is why the tools of game theory, social choice theory, statistics, and mathematics are so valuable. As far as I am concerned, the rest is nonrigorous and pretty uninteresting. Voting rules lend themselves especially to formal study and science.

This is an uninteresting result. Candidates face the “credible commitment problem”: there is a conflict of interest between what they promise to deliver and their reasons for seeking office in the first place. I don’t care how much people in battleground states claim to know about the positions of candidates. The quantity of interest is how much they know about the state of the world. If you believe the PIPA report, the answer is “not much”.

I vehemently reject it because it is nebulous, untestable, unsubstantiated, and is essentially a red herring. McVeigh has nothing to do with it.

No, I am not. You cannot observe all of the people who voted and, as a consequence, did not blow up office buildings or vent their political ire in some other socially unproductive way. I do not think I could be more clear.

You’re kidding, right? The “wild notion” that we have a powerful social norm to vote? Would you like cites or required reading?

The social pressure exists because it is true.

Why? It is an excellent reason to prefer the electoral college. Sincere voting gives your vote meaning, and might get your candidate $$$.

No.

In order for plurality rule to satisfy the conditions that acyclicity requires, it has to be “anonymous”. Anonymity means, formally speaking, that any permutation of individual and preference profile must yield the same electoral result. If everyone tossed their preferences in a bag, pulled out someone else’s and voted, the election outcome must be the same as it would be if everyone voted according to his own preferences. The identity of the individual must be irrelevant for the rule to have its desirable properties. Formally speaking, this is orthogonal to the idea of “equality”. But, just to make you feel better, this condition is an absolute necessity.

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Well I certainly know how that is. I have witnessed (on another board, my home base if you will) a few posters have their sloppy arguments torn to shreds, and received a whipping or two of my own. But don’t worry, I assure that it will be rather painless, as I am an open minded person, and my only concern is with facts, and logical conclusions regarding those facts.

As far as my writing style, I tend to be a bit lax with things on the 'net. As long as my message gets across clearly, I don’t care to impress people.

I might join, I might not. The debates here seem like they an get pretty intense—which I like, but I am often constrained by time—which you can tell by how long it took me to response. Depending on the general “speed” of these boards, I might not be able to dedicate time to getting into the deep conversations. We shall see when my guest membership expires.

I am actually interested, but rather than you wasting what I am sure is your valuable time explaining the details to me, you could perhaps show me a link with some info or suggest a book on the subject. I will look into it, if not even for it’s validity in this discussion, for my own knowledge.

In my defense, the only history I ever learned in school (which has been ‘confirmed’ by other sources after school) was the myth you have described. Maybe not that the dire crisis of the situation, but more the idea that the Articles of Confederation were not working, and were less like a governmental document and more of a treaty between separate sovereign entities. Apparently this was leaving us unable to trade adequately, generally bankrupt, and defenseless. What I then learned of the Convention was that they originally met to reform the government, but then decided behind closed doors to change it entirely, favoring a federal government that still respected states rights.

I do, however, think that this is still relevant to the eventual compromise on the electoral college. I was basing my statements less on the historical story of “Nation in Crisis,” and more on how the current government seems to work, that is, a compromise between the powers of state and federal government.

Again, I would be happy to read any information you point me to regarding the preconstitutional America.

I agree, the terminology is a bit “fuzzied” by history. To clarify my own ideas, I think a sliding scale would be best. Starting at “Confederation,” which is little more that a loosely bound group of autonomous states, then progressing through weak federalism and then strong federalism. And I would agree that we live in an age of weak federalism. (However, I fear that this is changing for the worse.) Again, I think this strengthens the case for an EC.

I agree that both of these posters missed the mark here. I think the larger questions here are simple: why should the minority submit to the will of the majority? That is, why should the minority voters be ‘usurped’ by the majority? The other, even larger question is this: are states, in fact, sovereign entities in their own right, with their own powers over different aspects of politics? Or, in our age of increasing powers of the federal government, have they been reduced to little more than beaurocratic districts, divisions of convenience?

Before I answer these questions I would like to point out that unless I am completely mistaken, States can choose the manner of the Electors. Maine and Nebraska are exceptions to the “all or nothing” concept of the EC, according to this. [PDF] I can’t find adequate info at this late hour, but it seems that individual states can choose how electors are chosen by their state (meaning, between an all or nothing approach or one that represents percentages of the states votes).

Now, I will not try to answer the first question on my own, because that would essentially be theft. I am going to assume here, given your displayed knowledge of politics in general, that you are familiar with Rousseau’s theories on the validity of majority rule. This has implications on several levels. One in that, if the states are separate, sovereign entities, then the current EC system is, in fact, valid. The minority submits to the will of the majority. The other is that, if the states can vote to change the way their electors are chosen—which I absolutely believe they should have the right to do, if they don’t then I will concede to the invalidity of the EC—then the minority also submits in the sense that they submit to the will of the people to have their electors chosen in that manner. Again, this rests on both the supremacy of states rights and the ability of the citizens of the state to choose the manner of EC representation.

But I must, for the sake of fairness, observe the alternate possibility. What if majority voting is in fact invalid? To me that would render a nation, direct election invalid, because it of course depends on having a majority vote. By the simple fact that you espouse the concept of majority voting on a national level, you have concede to it’s validity on a state level. So we are faced with the second question, the more difficult one. Do the states have the right to act as a unit? I posit that, given the amount of individual powers that states have (driving laws; drinking laws; drug laws; car, health, dental, life, housing, etc. insurance laws; marriage laws; death penalty laws; and at one time, abortion laws, this list goes on and on and on) states are, in fact semi-autonomous entities. This being the case the EC stands valid for the reasons I described above.

Now, you may wish that states were nothing more than districts of convenience, (a notion I disagree with; again, assuming you are familiar with Rousseau) and if this were in fact the case then the EC would be completely outdated, and direct election would not only be logical, but correct in essence.

Thank you. And again, likewise.

Forgive the (likely numerous) spelling and grammar errors. Note the 5am timestamp. Also, forgive me if I am rehashing old arguments, as time restricts me from doing more than skimming the other lengthy discussions in this thread.

One more thing, I should point out as a semi-disclaimer that I am pointing out the idealistic reasoning behind the EC as it stands today. In any sense, as much as I believe in the supremacy of states rights, I honestly don’t see how the elimination of the EC would infringe on those rights in any way. The voices of the citizens of each state would still be recognized, and majority would still rule. I think it’s possible that one of the reasons we have the EC (besides the reasons I gave above) is because direct election was not even considered an option at the time of the constitution.

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It’s not a lack of time that is the problem but a lack of opportunity. I haven’t been online for a couple days because my system is infected with viruses to the point where it has slowed to a crawl. I’m trying to get it fixed and until then things are as bad as they were back when the SDMB was on the old server and I had a dial up connection. Which is to say, nearly intollerable. So there might be a delay again before I will be able to respond again or get to Maeglin’s latest.

I haven’t found any good historical sites on the web so all I can offer you are books suggestions. Which I will as I go along.

No need to defend yourself for not knowing something that is so well hidden. The crisis tradition is actually older than the Constitution itself. It was hyped in the newpapers of the day ( which were overwhelmingly biased in favor of the federal convention ). See John Alexander’s The Selling of the Constitutional Convention.

Your 2nd sentence is the perfect doorway to an understanding of the problems with saying that the Articles of Confederation were not working. They are indeed more properly viewed as a treaty between sovereign states rather than a constitution. And, as such, the Articles worked just fine. But as a constitution they weren’t working at all. So it is a matter of perception. Looking back from our time it seems obvious that the decentralized Articles weren’t working because we can see that by keeping them entirely or mostly intact it would have been extremely difficult if not impossible to get from there to here.

But that is imposing a deterministic view on the past. What we are saying, in effect, is that the Articles weren’t working because they would never fulfill America’s “Manifest Destiny” to spread across the continent within a century and become the world’s sole superpower after another. If a person thought instead, as so many did in 1787, that the purpose of government was not to bolster the nation’s glory and power but simply to preserve freedom, then the Articles were working. Indeed, one “Antifederalist” complaint was that their opponents were motivated by a desire for empire.

These are part and parcel of the myth we are discussing. The United States was hardly defenseless. We had just fought of one the major European powers, and the world’s greatest sea power, in winning the Revolutionary War. Nor was trade a major concern. The myth states that Great Britain closed the Carribean to us by declaring us banned from her ports there and removed the protection of the Royal Navy, leaving us at the mercy of the North African pirates which kept us out of the Mediterranian as well.

Those charges are false. American seamen were great smugglers. Britain had been trying to limit our trade with the British suger islands for decades but had been unable to do so because of the skill of our ship captains and crews, the long coastline of America to bring goods ashore, and the simple fact that the suger islands didn’t grow enough food for themselves and couldn’t get it anywhere else as cheap. The people of the suger islands, including colonial officials, defied London because they profited from the smuggling.

As far as the Mediterranian goes, what is the difference between a British ship and a formerly British American ship? To a North African, they seem much the same so often times it is a simple matter of forging some documents in a language the pirates don’t speak, let alone read. Not only that but the commercial relationships between New England and Old remained and new partnerships sprung up after the fighting ended. A ship with one owner in London and another in Boston could produce a legitimate registry from whichever country conferred preferable trading possibilities in port.

OTOH, it is not inaccurate to say that the United States was bankrupt. The central government was unable to meet even the interest on its massive debt. The problem was that it could only request that the states provide funds and once some ceased to do so the others balked at having to pay even more as a consequence. The Congress still had assets to cover the debt, in the form of requisitions on the states, but it had no ability to force the states to pay.

Still, this situation was not insoluable under the current system. The Confederation Congress could have let things work themselves out by combining its debts and its assets. That is, it could have called the debt in and issued new bonds drawn on the state governments in proportion to the amounts each owed. By dividing the debt into parts states could raise money to pay the bonds with the knowledge that they would have to pay only their share and no more. Also by, as much as possible, assigning bonds to creditors drawn on their own state governments the Congress could have made it more likely that state officials would pay up because otherwise they would have to face the political consequences of defrauding their own citizens.

Ideas such as that were not unheard of but were opposed by the nationalists. Glory seekers such as Alexander Hamilton had no interest in paying off the debt. They wanted to use it as an excuse to build a strong central government. The book that best covers this material is Merrill Jensen’s The New Nation which is oft cited and just as often has its conclusions ignored.

With the constitutional convention nothing is ever simple. There was a significant difference between the formulation for the original call for a convention made at the Annapolis Convention and the later call sent out by Congress after it appeared likely a federal convention would get off the ground. The Report of the Annapolis Convention called for a meeting to examine the situation and report on what was necessary “to render the constitution of the federal government adequate to the exigencies of the Union” whereas the later call from Congress specifically limited the goal of the meeting as “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation” and reporting their findings to the Congress and the states.

This difference is significant because it indicates that there was some notion that an entirely new government might be created by the constitutional convention, as turned out to be the case. We also know from letters that some delegates, Madison being the most prominent ( and young Charles Pinkney the most cheated from his due prominence ) went into the meeting planning to discard the Articles.

Well, certainly the form our government takes has bearing on the debate over the Electoral College. But given that the debate tends to be between keeping the current system or moving to a direct popular vote I would say that it is the powers of the states and the powers of the people as a whole that are the important considerations.

The best book I have found covering the entire revolutionary period ( circa 1755-1805 ) is John Ferling’s A Leap in the Dark. He is a fearless author who has produced the only work I have read that properly puts the Newburgh Conspiracy into context. That is, instead of deserving credit for halting an attempted coup Washington deserves criticism for allowing discontent among the officer corp of the Continental Army to come to a head to exploit it for political purposes.

For a political history of the period from a different point of view try E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic, 1776-1790. Forrest McDonald is devoutly conservative but his devotion is apparently so strong and sincere that he doesn’t feel the need to pretend nothing a modern reader wouldn’t approve of never happened. Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic remains the best study of the ideas that drove the American Revolution. If you are only going to buy one book on the constitutional convention, Decision in Philadelphia by the Collier’s is the one to go with.

Remember we are only comparing voting systems here not debating the foundations of democratic theory. If you don’t believe every citizen deserves an equal say in who will represent them then there isn’t any absolute reason why the minority should give way. If they are strong enough to do so they can decide amongst themselves who should lead and then enforce their will at the point of the gun. But now we are talking about oligarchy rather than democracy.

I don’t think this is the right question. What is important here is not a question of what we have but rather of what we ought to have. That is, we have the Electoral College. The question is: is that what we should have. And, as I alluded to before I don’t think the current discussion of abandoning the EC has much to do with state’s rights vs federal rights but rather states rights vs popular rights.

Yes, this is correct. Though Maine and Nebraska do not assign their electoral votes proportionally. Instead they assign 2 votes to the statewide plurality winner and 1 vote each to the plurality winner in each congressional district. To me that seems pretty much the same thing as “all or nothing” except that it is partly on a smaller scale.

I haven’t read Rousseau. I do have his On the Social Contract on my bookshelf though if you want to make a citation. I expect I will eventually get around to reading it.

I was unaware that anyone was arguing that the EC is invalid. I am arguing that there seems no reason to prefer it and plenty to dump it.

I have not questioned the right of states to act as a unit. They certainly do have that right. It says so in the Constitution. Of course, that is not the same thing as saying that they should have that right.

My position is not based strictly on personal preference but on utility.

Just my 2sense

45

You have my sympathy. My computer was in a similar state months ago. I will never get the time back that I spent to fix it.

I am looking forward to your reply.

46

I wish I shared your confidence.

Believe me, I have no desire to delve any further than necessary. That being to acquire a vocabulary to enable me to understand your preference for the EC. Would you mind stating your reason concisely here so my goal is clear?

None of the ranked ballot systems were under discussion so I presume you were referring to the fourth Wiki definition. That is, in the sense of, “All voting is preferential voting.”

Of course I don’t have a handle on the negative properties. I said so, didn’t I? The pertinent question is whether or not I have a handle on the positive properties of plurality voting. That is, I think you are saying that it is that it always produces a winner. My observation that your argument wasn’t persuasive was not based on any mistaken assumption of understanding on my part but rather on what I took to be the pathway to eliminating the negative properties.

You have missed the point. My anecdote was not intended to highlight the unfairness of the result but the crassness of the process. That’s how it relates to what you were saying. I am saying that whatever inequities must necessarily result they should not be “fixed” by eliminating a portion no matter how inconvenient. All the Coke should be considered just as all the votes should be considered. Your pathway to eliminating the negative properties seems crass to me because in order to gain the benefits of simple majority rule ( of electors ) you eliminate from consideration all the preferences of people in every state who didn’t vote for those particular electors.

Excuse me? I am proposing the very same voting system for president that is used in all other US elections. That is, a direct popular vote. ( Well, I’m sure there are some minor exceptions but none I can think off offhand. )

Yes, it takes a simple majority to win a simple majority election.

This doesn’t help me because I don’t know what a “cycle” is in this context. Nor do I see how it is possible for the result of a simple majority election to necessarily be “considered unacceptable in the free world” since simple majority elections are hardly unheard of.

Your impression about the effort I am making is mistaken. I am trying hard to understand but I don’t feel that effort is being recipricated. If you really wanted to be understood you wouldn’t speak in jargon that I have already told you I don’t understand. Of course, there is nothing forcing you to make an effort to speak comprehensibly. You are free to do whatever you want.

It would only be possible to be clearer if you had been somewhat clear to begin with so no, you cannot be clearer. :stuck_out_tongue: But yes, an explanation of what you mean here would be nice. For instance, how can you not have a runoff of some kind in a simple majority election? We, or I at least, are discussing the real world not pure math. In the real world someone must be elected, after all.

I don’t see why it should bother me. Of course people base their preferences on their choices. That’s life. And again we are talking about real life. A runoff election is a seperate election. It won’t have exactly the same set of voters and the those that are the same might have changed their minds. Humans are sometimes irrational. I accept that.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to bore you. I just wanted to show you that in some ways campaigning was socially beneficial.

I disagree but I see I am not going to convince you.

You aren’t unclear. You are just wrong. You can observe the behavior of a representative sample of the population. You can also observe overall turnout and socially undesirable behavior from different periods and compare the results.

I would accept cites with quotations. And don’t forget that the points of contention are that the norm is strong and exists independently of any expectation of influencing the outcome of an election.

It is true only if you consider the outcome of the current election the only thing that matters. I reject that consideration as irrational. In any case, hopefully you understand now why I stated that my personal experience precluded any necessity to explain how plurality voting drives out third parties.

Um, because the benefit comes at the cost of effectively throwing away votes? See my remarks on crassness of the process, above.

Not “no”. Yes. As in, “Yes those examples would satisfy the criteria you laid out.” You said nothing about acyclicity before. Certainly you can change the conditions just as I can change the examples to be anonymous. The result remains the same. The examples show that your conception of what deviations from equality should be considered acceptable is generally unconvincing. If you can’t convince people that the outcome is fair then you can’t have a fully successful election.

Just my 2sense

47

Maeglin: I’m having trouble following your argument. Suppose we put aside thoughts of a runoff. Why is a series of 56 plurality elections (counting DC and the ME and NE districts) better than one nationwide plurality election?

Suppose we had a group of 1,000 people voting on a leader. We’d probably argue the merits of pluarlity versus majority rule and runoffs versus preference voting. As you say, no system is perfect. But surely no one would propose dividing up into groups of 50, conducting a plurality election among the 50, and then adding up the group votes? Can you give a layman’s explanation as to why this is better?

One other question: the EC imposes a requirement of a majority of electoral votes to win. The procedure if no one wins a majority is to conduct a runoff among the top three candidates in the House of Representatives. This bizarre provision has been in abeyance for almost 200 years, but it’s part of the system and could some day come into play again. (It might have in 1992 if Ross Perot had been a little less psychotic.) Does this affect your assessment of the overall desirability of the EC under the social choice measures that you’ve described?

48

After reading your latest reply, I am starting to agree with you.

That’s too bad. For someone who is interested in politics and rules, this stuff is incredibly useful.

Plurality rule has problems. Majority rule has problems. Put them together and you still have problems, but these problems are smaller than each of the rules imply individually.

This objection seems absurd on its face. I am inferring that you would prefer a suboptimal outcome if somehow the process is less crass. Why? How could a “crass” process yield a better outcome in this context? This leads me to believe that your idea of crassness is somewhat less than rigorous.

This is not the case. The preferences of those who didn’t back the winner weren’t “eliminated” from consideration. Their preferences informed the social preference as much as everyone else’s. It just came to pass that their preferences were not selected. Only one person wins a presidential election. I think it is utterly “crass” and socially irresponsible to trade off positive properties of a voting rule for the touchy-feely benefit of not spilling any Coke. I prefer to live in a society that better optimizes social welfare possibly at the expense of my individual vote not mattering because I understand that it has to be that way.

Please, please try to read this brief article on the Condorcet Paradox that I suggested before. This illustrates a “cycle.” Cycles are very bad, as I am sure you will see.

Simple majority rule is acyclic if and only if the number of candidates is fewer than three. If you don’t want to take my word for it, I will point you in the direction of the proof.

This is very restrictive. It eliminates the viability of third parties. Perhaps we can both agree that this is bad.

I suppose this is what it comes down to, then. I do not accept this degree of collective irrationality. People are welcome to behave however they want, but I expect our voting system not to aggravate this fact. It is also kind of weak to appeal to the random behavior of individuals to justify irrational voting rules.

I can also observe voter turnout and clothing color choices from different periods and compare the results. Perhaps I will find some interesting correlations. Perhaps people who wear green tend to back winning candidates. I can draw all sorts of interesting conclusions about this finding.

Oh, wait, I can’t.

The fact that these results can be compared in no way even suggests that color choice drives electoral choice. Likewise with the act of voting and undesirable behavior, whatever that means. Good luck controlling for the myriad of other variables that drive the decision to commit “undesirable behavior.”

I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that you do not actually believe this. Either I am misunderstanding you or that you misspoke.

Sure. Two seconds on Google found a recent book devoted to the subject.

A relevant passage:

I discussed it in my very first post to this thread. If you need to revisit it, scroll up and read the article on Condorcet Paradox.

You haven’t even gone so far as to define which properties characterize a “fair” election! This is why this discussion is turning into a parody of itself. You keep are telling me that you are “unconvinced” yet cannot even articulate what “fair” means in this context. Pick a set of desirable properties and we will see if your proposed rule, or any rule, fits the bill.

49

Let me try to start generally and then hone in more specifically if you aren’t satisfied. I am failing to communicate the kind of reasoning I am doing to reach my conclusion. I don’t mean to be overly nitpicky, but “better” is not precisely the word I would use here.

A voting rule is like a mathematical function. You toss in inputs and it transforms these inputs into some result. Like mathematical functions, voting rules have certain properties. Take y=x^2. Consider a basic property: it always maps some number x to some positive number y. Ordinarily we don’t really care in a normative sense whether the output is positive or negative, since it makes no difference to our lives.

No so with voting rules. Some properties are extremely desirable and are consistent with our basic ideas of fairness. For example, there is a property called “weak Pareto.” In words, if every single voter in the entire United States votes for Jello Biafra for president, then the voting rule has to select Jello Biafra for president. Obviously, plurality rule is weakly Paretian. Unanimous individual choices yield a unanimous social preference. We can say that by this standard, plurality rule is “fair.”

Imagine if this were the rule that governed social choices. Every person’s vote is given “equal weight,” and every person has a veto. Sounds great. Sort of.

Weak Pareto happens to be spectacularly irresolute and undecisive. “Resolute” and “decisive” have formal definitions, but it suffices to recognize intuitively that this rule has some serious problems delivering positive preferences over any outcome. The Polish aristocratic council whose name I forget followed this rule. Each member had the liberum veto. This council was incredibly fair and incredibly useless. Poland was swiftly partitioned and eaten by its neighbors because its ruling body was ineffectual.

Plurality rule has some great qualities. Under certain conditions it is “acyclic”, that is, produces outcomes without unwanted cycles. It has other great qualities, not really worth discussing in detail. I stipulate that plurality rule is a very good thing.

However, preserving some of the good qualities require some pretty restrictive conditions. Like I told 2sense, you have to have fewer than three candidates to ensure an acyclic outcome. This is a nail in the coffin of third parties. This condition does not apply to simple majority rule. The relationship between acyclicity and the number of outcomes is different. It is possible to have more candidates in a simple majority election and still produce an acyclic result.

Great, so simple majority gives us a desirable property, acyclicity. But in order to gain that, we have to trade off other desirable properties. It is very easy to imagine that in a presidential election, any single candidate fails to achieve a simple majority. In that case, even though the rule may be acyclic, it does not deliver any resolution. No president is elected.

I think that a plurality general election and then a simple majority electoral college election preserves the good properties of both rules and mitigates the bad ones. The viability of third parties is preserved under plurality rule, but the majority rule ensures an acyclic outcome. It also ensures a rigorous minimum for victory. It is not difficult to imagine that in a plurality general election with three or more viable candidates, the winner can win with an unimpressive 30% of the vote share.

This possibility frightens me. In order to retain his office, the president only needs the support of a relatively small fraction of the electorate, already but a fraction of the entire population. It is very easy to reward these people, and thus it becomes very hard for him to be removed from office. There are thus fewer people who can check his policies.

I am very comfortable with the idea that to win, a candidate absolutely must achieve a minimum, predetermined electoral standard by which the electorate’s votes are aggregated. I believe that plurality > electoral college keeps some good properties, mitigates some bad ones, and provides a minimal if arbitrary standard that ensures to some degree that any president needs to reward a lot of people in order to stay in office. This is a good thing.

See above. :slight_smile: Keep in mind that you are already deciding how large each of the plurality units is. This is not the case in the United States.

If, in your group of 1000, you had a few substantial blocs who could reasonably expect to shut the minority out of decision making, this might be an avenue worth investigating.

This is a good question. Yes, the provision seems bizarre. I think that the probability of it occurring is vanishingly small. However, on a certain level, it is pretty reasonable. If the American people cannot reach an outcome using our current aggregation rules, it makes sense that representatives of the American people, who hold their jobs based on local aggregations, would be empowered to make this choice. This does not really affect my assessment all that much.

I really do hope both you and 2sense find this helpful.

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Hmm, well I can’t sress the value of a good virus and spyware scanner (or several of each) enough. Obviously, Norton anti-virus is a good way to go, but I would also check out Trend Micro - Online Virus Scanner, it’s free and effective. Also, Lavasoft - Ad Aware helps me with spyware.

On that note, thanks for providing all of the historical info. I will have to check out some of the books you references when I get a bit more time (I am currently studying Marcus Aurelius, so no new books for me right now). On that note, there were a couple things I wanted to address:

That makes perfect sense to me. The stronger central government that the Constitution perscribed, and the increasingly strong government of today seem—for lack of a word without negative connotation—more imperial. A loosly binded conglomerate of States would probably not have been able to become the power we are today.

This I know about. I was referring to the difficulty of trade within states, because they each had their own printed money, and some were not accepting the money of others and what not. Also, I was under the impression that the different monitary systems were a nouscance in the realm of foreign trade.
As for the electoral college:

I am addressing this last, simple sentence first because it pretty much clears everything up for me. When you , in a previous post, said, “No, you aren’t off at all. You have formulated a working overview of the Electoral College. Now it is time to ask the right question. The question, of course, is ‘Why?’” I was assuming that you were questioning the validity of the EC as a whole. This was my mistake, but its pretty much the question I was trying to answer.

If you are only arguing that, at this juncture in our history, we have no reason to keep the EC, then I would agree. I do believe that it is a valid system (meaning non-tyrannical), but it is also a complicated and archaic system. As I said before, I don’t see how it’s elimination would stamp on sovereignty of states at all.
And since I am here, a few more questions regarding specific points:

I am a little confused as to what you are saying here. I believe that every citizen deserves equal say; I don’t see how supporting the EC would negate that. You refer to the concept of a voting system being “all or nothing” in a negative manner, but isn’t any system based on majority voting an all or nothing system? And I am really missing what you are tryign to say about the minirity enforcing their will aty the end of a gun, I don’t see how that applies here.

Well, my question would be, shouldn’t popular rights be the ultimate goal either way? The whole purpose of government is (ideally) to protect popular rights. It’s just a matter of which system will do that best.

Well, my references to the EC and the minority submitting to the majority would be best addressed in The Social Contract - Book One - Chapters 5 and 6. However, I would suggest reading it in its entirety if you get the oppertunity; it’s fascinating. A bit of advice upon reading it: Rousseau tends to confuse people, because he speaks almost simultaniously in practical terms of how things are, ideal terms of how things are, practical temrs of how he thinks things should be, and ideal terms of how things should be. He doesn’t make a distinction, so it’s up to the reader to make them. You are obviously intelligent so you shouldn’t have a problem.

MY question to you in is this: do you think that states voting “as unit” somehow subverts the will of the people?

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It is true that I am more concerned with the process but I am not entirely unconcerned with the result. In some situations I would prefer a process that might yield an inferior result to a crass process that would not. For instance, I would prefer the current system to one where the president was declared by an oracle who examined the entrails of sheep and magically ( and unerringly ) determined who would win a direct popular vote. Voting, even under an inequitable system, allows us to determine the outcome for ourselves and not have it handed down to us from on high.

Similarly I would be willing to trade some negative consequences from a direct popular vote for the benefit of voter equality. But I don’t assume everyone would agree with that preference. Instead I seek to compare the consequences from both systems and allow everyone to decide for themselves which is better.

You can say that individual preferences aren’t eliminated but the fact is that many do not have any impact on the final outcome. Yes, in the end there can be only one winner. But the EC determines winners before the end. Only the most popular preference in each state is allowed to affect the final outcome. It is this unnecessary culling of preferences that I find objectionable.

I don’t understand how you can consider achieving equality, the fundamental principle of democracy, in any way equivalent to a “touchy-feely benefit”. Nor do I understand why you believe retaining the EC optimizes social welfare, if that is what you are getting at.

I’ve already read that page more than once. Reading it again and following the links to a definition of Intransitivity leads me to believe that I did understand what a cycle was. I thought it meant something different in this context because you said that if you had a majority winner of an election with more than 2 candidates there would be a cycle. It seems now more likely that you made a mistatement. It may be possible there would be a cycle even if one candidate achieved a majority but it is also possible that there would not.

In any case, it is absurd to claim that such an election is “typically considered unacceptable in the free world” because here in America the winner of an election is typically the person with the most votes, whether or not they achieved an actual majority and whether or not there is a cycle.

I will settle for a simple explanation of the term “acyclic”. If it means, “can not produce a cycle” then I have no problem. If, however, it means “does not produce a cycle” then I think you are wrong.

You seem to have lost the thread of the conversation. What we are comparing here are plurality elections with simple majority elections. That is, where the person with the most votes wins automatically or where that person only wins when they have an actual majority otherwise they face a runoff. You will note that the latter is more conducive to the viablility of third parties.

I still don’t see why it should bother me. Why do you believe it is irrational for people to collectively prefer one candidate in a large field but another if the choice is limited to 2? It seems perfectly understandable to me. We choose differently because we are given a different choice to make. No muss. No fuss.

Nor do I see how we can do any better than simple majority elections. If we could do away with the necessity for strategic voting or the possibility of cycles then I would be all for it but Arrow’s theorem seems to preclude that. It seems to me that we can’t iron out all the problems so the best we can do is keep things as simple as possible.

Certainly correlation isn’t causation but if study after study did find a strong correlation between voter turnout and clothing color choices then that would suggest that there is a link. And that link could be further investigated by studying a representative sample of voters. You were wrong to claim that my argument was unfalsifiable. If there were no correlation between voting behavior and antisocial behavior then that would disprove my assertion.

I have stipulated that the norm exists and will now agree that it exists without expectation of influencing the outcome of the election. I do not see anything in the quoted paragraphs specifically referring to its strength. Perhaps though that is merely semantics. I assume it is not strong because I know so few people who vote and am aware that most people do not do so. But it is clearly a significant enough phenomenon to be discussed and disputed so I see no further use in disputing it between ourselves. I concede the point.

My words did not refer to your first post but to the post where you explained how much equality you would find necessary. If you are unwilling to scroll up yourself I am willing to quote it again for you. Otherwise I expect you can see for yourself that that post said nothing of acyclicity and thus you were wrong to claim that my examples didn’t fit. I have no problem with you clarifying your thoughts on the matter so long as you recognize that doing so doesn’t mean my examples were inappropriate at the time.

I’ll decline the offer to follow the red herring, thank you very much. What is at issue here is not any voting system that I might prefer but simply that your idea of how much equality is required for the sake of fairness seems generally unconvincing. Not that you have to convince me, mind. You are entitled to your opinion. If you want to be the guy who says “I’m OK with one ( random ) person having 49.999% of the voting power” then that is your business.

Thanks for the explanation you gave to ** Freddy the Pig**. That does seem more comprehensible to me, thanks. If you don’t mind I’ll give my thoughts on it. Perhaps not soon though.

Just my 2sense