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Re: Math and the electoral college's virtue
Posted:
Nov 10, 2000 2:04 PM
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It's an interesting article, although I have a few criticisms of Natapoff's
analysis. Firstly, the notion of voter power, is it meaningful? It doesn't
seem to be to me. Secondly, assuming that it is meaningful, it seems
(although it's not entirely clear from the article) that he is comparing the
expected voting power of a randomly chosen individual in the two systems
under consideration, and it isn't clear that this is the best comparison
(how about comparing the minimum voting powers as would be suggested by a
minimax idea?).
I came up with an interesting idea which I haven't really had much time to
play with yet, the idea of "random democracy". Rather than choosing the
president (or whatever) based on who has the most votes (be they electoral
college or individual votes), you get everyone to vote, and then you
randomly (uniformly) select an individual vote from all the votes cast and
make the decision based solely on that. Statistically speaking it's superior
to the "maximum number of votes" principle, because everyone's vote is
(statistically) of exactly equal value, whereas this isn't true in a
traditional system (for example, voting for Nader effectively nullifies your
vote as far as choosing the president is concerned, although it does serve
another purpose). Of course, there are problems with this system, but I
think it's an interesting idea nonetheless.
Dan Goodman
Chip Eastham <chip_eastham@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news://8uhak9$8vu$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
>
>
> Check out this nontechnical discussion of a mathematical analysis of
> the democratic virtue of the Electoral College in choosing the U.S.
> Presidents:
>
> http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm
>
> Regards,
> Chip
>
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
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