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Re: Math and the electoral college's virtue
Posted:
Nov 13, 2000 1:00 PM
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In article <8uhgqv$b80$1@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>,
Dan Goodman <dog@fcbobDOTdemon.co.uk> wrote:
>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.
One major problem is that gives the American Death To Black Folks party
a non-zero chance of getting their pet fascist elected President. Personally
I don't think that is a good thing.
Election fraud would be focused on tweaking the random number generator.
I don't know if that would make it harder or easier to detect.
I think the important thing to remember is that every voting system has flaws.
The question we have to ask ourselves is are we willing to live with the flaws
of the existing system and does it serve our needs about as well as any other
system.
Alan
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