The funny thing is, whilst you are wondering whether to 'follow' Europe, Europe has been trying to decide how to structure itself whilst looking west to see how the US is structured...

This site is awesome. I've been looking for something like this for a while now.

Hey, that's Bitt's job!

I have secret deputies.

I really, really, considered correcting those yesterday, since there were two egregious ones in a row, but my new job keeps me busy.

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new job...

Congrats! Whatcha doin'?

-jk

More Unix admin for a biotech company. I'd like to be able to say I'm contributing to the downfall of humanity, but it turns out that they're not doing anything really invasive or insidious here.

Cool. (My brother worked for Monsanto for a while, so I've heard all about that invasive and insidious stuff. He's at Pfizer, now.)

I don't recall in which point of the triangle you live; do you have to fight I-40 now?

-jk

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More Unix admin for a biotech company.

Oh, very cool. That didn't take long (Whew!) Congratulations.

Yeah. First and only job I applied for. I was only out of work for two or three weeks. Much better than my year-long unemployment two to three tears ago.

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two to three tears ago.

Nice typo...

Heh.

I figured I would bump this back up instead of glueing it on to one of the other threads.

Looking into the amendment more, it was started by a democrat from California. His goal with it was to get a state typicially on the edge, but still mostly republican to pass it. Thus, the republican candidate would lose votes, while the democrats gained votes. He didn't start this in California, since that is 55 solid votes that typicially go to the democrats.

Looking at the votes, we had 1,058,040 for Bush and 944,052 for Kerry. On this issue, 1,255,302 were against, and 661,305 for it. So it was more then just a party division on it, with 175,000 extra votes above the Bush supporters.

Even knowing the above and having some dislike for an outsider trying to affect our state, I did vote yes, as I still feel it would have been the start to much needed reform. Two states can divide their votes, but they never have. This amendment would have made us the first state to force proper allocation. At least this time around Bush did manage to get the electoral vote and popular vote.

2008 I am betting we will swing to a blue state. We put a democrat in the senate, and we now have a majority of democrats in the state government. Guess it all depends on who runs.

I've spoken to some political scientists about the Electoral College and other places where you might want to reform the electoral system. Suffice to say that it's a Pandora's Box. Once you open the discussion to reforming one part of the system, everything is suddenly on the table. If you feel, for example, that the Electoral College gives disproportionate weight to some states, then you're effectively saying the same thing about the Senate. Any argument you make against one applies to the other. In effect, you're tugging at the glue that (barely) holds things together in Washington. For example, if you want to go after the morass of redistricting, then you're going after the heart of what a Congressional district is, in the first place. Why stop at, say, "compact districts" when you could go after some sort of K of N scheme where you have larger districts, allowing minorities to focus their votes behind their favorite niche candidates yet preserving a majority's control over the government? You're really dancing around the fundamental question of what "representation" is all about. Is it about having a rep whose small district includes you, even if you disagree with your rep, or is it about having much larger and more vacuous districts, where you might have somebody with whom you more closely agree? One of the big arguments in favor of this sort of reform is that it makes third-party candidates viable. It's largely unclear how that would all pan out. Would we have coalition governments as occurs in many countries with a Parliamentary system? Do we want minority, single-issue parties, to serve the purpose of king-makers? "We'll join you to form a government under the condition that you support our abhorent position."

Much as I'd love to see these kinds of questions being seriously discussed in Washington, I doubt they'll go anywhere. And, if they do, they might not go somewhere that we like, because the people in power (notably Tom DeLay), have already demonstrated their willingness to push major changes for a strictly partisan benefit. If we'd had a scenario where Bush won the popular vote but Kerry won the Electoral College, then you'd have pissed off activists in both parties willing to discuss major reform. Given that the Republicans won in every way (modulo allegations of fraudulent activity), they're quite likely to be happy with things as they are.

Earlier in this thread, somebody was saying that, if the President were elected strictly based on popular vote, that the campaigning would turn to population centers away from rural areas. This is only partly true. In Florida, Kerry won most of the population centers, but Bush won the state based on his rural and suburban appeal. I don't know nationwide statistics, but there are enough suburban and rural people that a candidate would ignore them at his or her peril.

I can think of one good reason to keep the Electoral College around. It gives you someplace to focus your attention if things go wrong. Imagine, in a nationwide popular vote without the Electoral College, Candidate A beat Candidate B by a mere 500 votes. Suddenly, every damn precinct in the country would start doing recounts to see if they could bolster their candidate. It would be chaos. A similar effect could happen if, in every state, the electoral votes were split as they are in Nebraska, Maine, or in the falled Colorado initiative.

It's the devil you know verus the devil you don't.

The catch with any "modern" preference voting systems is that none of them are "strategyproof", meaning two things. (1) There will always be cases where a voter has an incentive to state something other than their true preferences. (2) There will always be obscure corner cases where everybody can look at the numbers and say that, obviously, Candidate A beat B and C, but in fact, C won. This is the crux of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, for which he got a Nobel prize in economics.

electionmethods.org is a reasonable site, although it's clearly biased in favor of Condorcet elections. The wikipedia has a pretty good page on Condorcet election methods and voting systems in general. I actually have a soft spot for approval voting. Voters give up the precision of being able to rank candidates, but they get something much easier to understand. You can cast one or zero votes for each candidate. All of those votes are added up, and whoever gets the most, wins. One of the interesting side benefits of approval voting is that it works right away with traditional voting technologies. You just redefine overvotes as legal and now your old punchcards or optical scan system works just fine.

One of the most intriguing possibilities that I heard of recently is called "open primaries", as in California's Proposition 62, which apparently failed in the California election. The general idea is that the two candidates for November 2 will be decided in one, wild swinging open primary election with multiple candidates. In effect, the primary becomes an open election and Election Day becomes a runoff election. The only way you could make it work is with some kind of preference system (as above), which wasn't part of California's prop 62, as far as I know. Still, the idea of a multiround preference voting system might be a way to work around some of the undesirable features of single-round preference voting, but still end up with something that voters can wrap their brains around without causing too much pain.

No idea where to post this, but Here is a cool results picture.

Dan --

I'm not replying to any specific thing in your post, but have been looking for a place to pose this question to you, as there is nobody I know whose answer would be as credible to me as yours.

Can you comment on the stories I have heard (I have no way of evaluating their truthfulness) that the discrepancies between the actual vote counts and the exit polls were extraordinarily high (in the area of 5--7%) when not once since the practice of exit polling began decades ago had the difference ever run more than 1--2%? That these alleged discrepancies occurred almost exclusively in precincts using electronic voting machines with no verifying paper trails is particularly disturbing.

tanstaafl.

I've read many of those same stories. Probably the best analysis I've read so far is on Sam Wang's site at Princeton. He doesn't dismiss the possibility of fraud, but he does feel it's unlikely that there was enough fraud to throw the election. Also, for what it's worth, I think the best summary of where we need to go from here was in an editorial in yesterday's NYT. So many different things went wrong in this election. It's not just about voting technology. It's about the entire process, top to bottom.

Ann Coulter has an explanation: that was a transparent Democrat ploy to trick the voters into voting for that phony Vietnam hero Kerry by showing him as leading... But it not work, despite incompetent Rove almost ruining the landslide victory for Bush. What, you are not convinced?

BTW, the woman is news for me (I heard of her before, and some of her wisdom, but did not connect them, until a popup ad for her new book sent me Googling). A collection of her earlier gems is here. I always have trouble telling whether people like her are pulling our leg; I mean, nobody can actually think this, right?

Reforms that NYT suggest, reasonable as they might be, are a no go, I am affraid. Under the current interpretation of the Consitution (from Bush vs. Gore), "[T]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote. [...] The State legislature's power to select the manner of appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself." If that is indeed so (and the Supreme Court is who says whether it is or not), for the changes to be enacted amending the Consitution is necessary (with all those state ratification procedures etc). So, don't hold your breath, I would say.

BTW, what is your take on what was intention of the Constitution (of 'Founding Fathers', as I am often amused to hear) in this respect: do states elect the President, or citizens?

If we can discuss constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage, then we can certainly discuss amendments to tidy up issues with voting. Also, depending on how you do it, you can certainly have Federal voting laws that don't interfere with the Constitution, including the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 or even the more recent Help America Vote Act.

If you wanted to abolish the Electoral College and adopt a nationwide preference voting system, then you'd clearly require a constitutional amendment. If you want to mandate that all state election officials be non-partisan, that all voting equipment, training, and procedures are well-specified and rigorous, that would be well within the scope of an act of Congress. The only question is how you could actually define "non-partisan".