512 Paths to the White House

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/02/us/politics/paths-to-the-white-house.html

by jashkenas • 14 years ago

365 170 14 years ago

Thanks Jeremy, Shan and Mike. I'm continually blown away by the data journalism you're doing over at nytimes on the election. It's truly an inspiration.

patio11• 14 years ago

Ditto. I'm no fan of the paper, but they're doing things practically every week which are ahead of everyone else in the industry.

001sky2• 14 years ago

Agree. Idea of having "reactive" documents came up in another HN thread recently, and this seems to be an implementation of such. Very cool.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715978

jashkenas• 14 years ago

I've got nothing whatsoever to do with this one -- it's a Shan + Mike joint.

But thanks for the kudos. We should have some fun stuff for y'all on Tuesday night...

waterlesscloud5• 14 years ago

It's a really nice project. There are some routes that are surprising and yet seem possible in reality. Those explain some of the choices the candidates have been making, particularly with "safe" states they can't really afford to ignore completely.

riordan• 14 years ago

We're really looking forward to seeing what you've got in store on Tuesday.

It's been a while since the Interactive News Team profile a few years back; I think we'd all like to know how a major night goes down in the newsroom for your team.

tomasien2• 14 years ago

I think this is a great way to explain to someone who's not intimately familiar with electoral politics why people think Obama is going to win despite razor thing polls. Predictions mean nothing of course but:

If Obama wins Florida, Romney has exactly 1 path to victory: winning every other swing state. If Obama wins Ohio, Romney has only 11 ways to win. If Obama loses Florida, Virginia, NC, and Ohio he could still potentially win if he wins the rest of the swing states, all of which he's slightly ahead in in recent polling.

Election day will be interesting, but that's what makes it hard to pundits to predict a Romney victory.

leif3• 14 years ago

Obama's going to win. The only reason you hear pundits talking about it is because they get paid to talk about it. The media controls the messaging these days, not the candidates or the people, and it's in the media's interest to maintain as close a race as possible until the bitter end.

That's why even the most partisan pundits, even when everything's in their candidate's favor, keep claiming that "this is such a close race".

TBH the only way Romney is going to be contentious is through voter suppression, and that's been so heavily exposed in critical areas that it's not going to have any effect as long as the justice system holds its ground.

removes tinfoil hat

(BUT EVERYONE PLEASE VOTE IF YOU ARE ABLE, IT'S CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE)

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

NO BUT [insert crude reduction of Nate's science down to the level of tv pundits]. I'd love to know more about Nate's model, but I trust it a hell of a lot more than the raw data of Gallup (seeing as Gallup's nearly the only one left giving him a chance. Dick back-peddaled today, Rasmussen did more or less too.)

Nate actually has a book about why this occurs and what it does to the conversation of politics in elections in the US.

arrrg2• 14 years ago

Well, I don’t know. Calling it a tossup is very wrong, but Romney’s odds don’t seem that bad to me.

Nate Silver, for example, gives Romney a twenty percent chance. That’s not bad. I would gladly pay $1,000 for a twenty percent chance to win a million.

tomasien2• 14 years ago

I prefer Barack Obama as President of the United States, primarily because I believe things like healthcare reform make job churn and entrepreneurship more feasible - however, there are SOME indications that maybe Obama's lead isn't what it looks like.

Polls are conducted on landlines, which nobody uses anymore. What does that mean? We don't know. Obama has only a slight early voting lead after leading in it 2-1 in 2008? What does that mean? Probably that both campaigns made a push for it this time around and it's reflecting the populous at large, BUT some polling data suggests maybe this isn't the case?

afterburner3• 14 years ago

The only thing interesting about election day will be what happens to the House.

ck22• 14 years ago

The five ways to tie are the most freaky and stressful.

The only problem with this nifty tree is that it must be followed in order to determine the outcome.

Oh wait, I didn't realize the boxes at the top were selectable. I guess that allows out-of-order traversal.

Only thing I'd like to see added to this is using url hash to bookmark the result set so I can share it.

RyJones• 14 years ago

If you use the buttons at the top, you can in effect zoom the chart to see how it plays out.

ninetax• 14 years ago

This is amazing! It's everything a visualization should be: simple, to the point, interactive.

lbarrow3• 14 years ago

It's also pretty deceptive, as it gives each path equal visual weight when they aren't all equally likely

amalag• 14 years ago

Seriously this is an amazing infographic/visualization.

Intrade http://electoralmap.net was pretty accurate in 2008. Also predicting an obama victory.

pjscott• 14 years ago

It should also be weighted by probability, so it's not quite ideal.

nextstep• 14 years ago

Damn, I wish I lived in one of the states that gets to choose our president.

ck22• 14 years ago

Trust me you do not want. Watching TV or the radio is impossible without being inundated.

It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.

gwright3• 14 years ago

A purely popular vote system has its own flaws. In particular, national elections would be reduced to politicians catering to voters in a few high-density regions rather than attempting to appeal to a geographically dispersed electorate.

nostromo• 14 years ago

It may actually happen in our lifetime.

The small states would never allow such a change to the constitution. (A presidential voter in Wyoming has almost 4 times the vote of a Californian.) But the big states may have found a work around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstat...

In short, the states that agree to the compact agree to proportion all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. (For example, if Romney wins the national popular vote, CA would give Romney all of CA's electoral votes.) The compact will only kick in once the states that have ratified it have 270 electoral votes (enough to win). It's already about halfway there at 132.

How crazy would it be to see campaigning in California and New York?

waterlesscloud5• 14 years ago

So instead of your vote being lost in the mass of California or New York votes, it would just be lost in the much larger mass of national votes.

You'd still be in a winner-take-all situation with your vote, but on a national level rather than a state level.

I don't think this change would have the effect people imagine. At all.

wisty3• 14 years ago

I'm surprised that most of the states supporting this are democrat or swing states.

I guess more red states will get behind this if Obama wins the election, but loses the popular vote.

afterburner3• 14 years ago

Don't forget you choose your House and Senate reps. Those are vital for actually passing laws.

icelancer2• 14 years ago

Why? So you could be bombarded by ads and annoying campaign propaganda while you cast a still-statistically insignificant vote?

ianstormtaylor2• 14 years ago

Does anyone know if I should be as scared as I am that there are 5 paths to tie? Is that the norm in a presidential election? because it sounds crazy.

knowtheory• 14 years ago

They're pretty low likelihood events. Wikipedia appears to have a pretty solid writeup of the electoral college system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_State... ) which includes the various mechanisms states use to select their electors.

The vast majority of the states are winner-take-all, which presumably reduces but doesn't eliminate the possible ways to split 538 down the middle, but some states either only have a single electoral vote or use mechanisms which can divide their electoral votes between the candidates.

So, yeah, every election has this chance. Probably isn't going to happen though. This is conjecture, but I'd hazard a guess that a Bush v. Gore style dispute over a single large state which holds the balance of the election is way more likely than an actual numerical tie where the House would choose the president and the Senate the VP.

mlinsey• 14 years ago

Dunno why that would be scary. Ties (or really, any allocation of electoral votes where no candidate gets to 270) are resolved in the House of Representatives, and this was common practice in the early 19th century. If it were to happen now, there would be a lot of complaining, but overall it would be less of a constitutional crisis than the 2000 election. If anything, it might be a spark for true electoral reform.

ianstormtaylor2• 14 years ago

Ah yeah, I stupidly misinterpreted the bottom row of the graph and thought there were 5 ties out of the 20 or so possibilities (forgetting the branches that didn't need to be resolved by New Hampshire), but now I realize that was only for decisions ultimately decided by New Hampshire.

That Wikipedia article talking about the 1800 tie is pretty awesome.

jlgreco• 14 years ago

> House of Representatives

Considering every time you hear a story about politicians trying something insane, it seems to be about the House of Representatives, I think that is exactly why a tie sounds scary.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

This is a good indicator of Obama's chances: http://election.princeton.edu/history-of-electoral-votes-for....

Barring external events, you can probably put a fork in it.

mbostock• 14 years ago

A couple hidden features: 1. You can option-click on any of the buttons to see the transition in super slo-mo. (This was mainly for debugging, but it's fun to see how the transitions work in more detail.) 2. You can double-click on any part of the tree, and it will zoom in by one level.

Also, we did a variation that used state-level probabilities to weight the tree. This gave a sense not just of the logical possibilities, but of the likelihood of each, which I liked. However, the FiveThirtyEight state-level probabilities are not fully independent, so you can't multiply them together to compute conditional probabilities. Perhaps next election!

raganesh• 14 years ago

That is cool. And thanks Mike, for your incredible d3.js library.

001sky2• 14 years ago

However, the FiveThirtyEight state-level probabilities are not fully independent

This is interesting, are they linked in some manner to national polls, or is their something more nuanced?

usaar3333• 14 years ago

538 derives their probabilities by running simulated elections. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/

Somewhat intuitively, the simulations themselves have concepts of "national movements", where a candidate can (with some probability) gain 1%, 2%, etc. across all states.

The state probabilities are then derived from how many simulations/total candidate A won. However, partly because these simulations actually had national movement effects, you'll find that odds of winning both Florida and Ohio (as in # simulations/total candidate A wins both states) are not the state odds multiplied (they odds actually should be higher).

That said, with the raw simulation data, the graphic could show probabilities for every combination.

gus_massa• 14 years ago

I like the graph, but it's a pity that the weighted version is not available :(. It was the first thing I looked for. It's more difficult to explain, but it much more useful that only counting the number of branches.

(I don't mind if it would use only the naive approach and just multiply the probabilities. But it could be a problem if the final probabilities are very different when they are estimated with the correct method and the naive method.)

Evbn9• 14 years ago

You should weight the branch-level possibilities.

trueluk• 14 years ago

I'm not sure why Nebraska's second congressional district isn't included. According to FiveThirtyEight, Obama's chance (14%) of winning one vote from Nebraska is higher than Romney's chance (11%) of winning Nevada. As a matter of fact, the last FiveThirtyEight visualization I saw linked here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657826) didn't include the one electoral vote Obama won in 2008 from Nebraska either.

agildehaus• 14 years ago

Maybe they're not counting that electoral vote here. Can anyone tell? This diagram needs an electoral vote count.

ecmendenhall• 14 years ago

If you're sufficiently convinced by this, the 538 model, or your favorite electoral vote map, and you are willing to bet your beliefs (and you are in a jurisdiction that has not regulated prediction markets out of existence), Intrade contracts on an Obama victory were trading around $6.70 today.

usaar3333• 14 years ago

This should be legal for any American: http://tippie.uiowa.edu/iem/

Sadly, if you don't already have money there, your transfer is unlikely to go through until after the election.

icelancer2• 14 years ago

It will be impossible to get money on Intrade before the election.

robomartin4• 14 years ago

The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view.

I fully understand that the popular vote option has its issues (focusing on large population areas, etc.). However, a lot of this can be mitigated through legislation and regulation of the process.

Here's a random set of ideas:

- Candidates are only allowed to visit each state capital once. That's it.

- Candidates are not allowed to trash the other candidates. They are only allowed to discuss their views.

- Candidates are awarded an amount of money to run their campaigns. No external contributions from any source whatsoever. None.

- Candidates must participate in detailed interviews for a period of several weeks. Some of these interviews are aired in national networks and the rest made available online.

- Candidates are obligated to participate in detailed debates

- Television networks are prohibited from endorsing or communicating bias

- The publication of poll data is illegal

- A candidate must post a huge bond. If he or she is found telling lies they end-up in prison and have huge financial consequences.

- Campaign promises are recorded and signed in a document that is publicly available. A politician that does not deliver on promises made is exposed to financial and criminal liability. Don't make promises you can't keep.

- Public endorsement of any candidate is illegal. They have to float and survive on their platform and track record.

- The incumbent is not allowed to campaign in any way at all. His or her opponents cannot trash him/her. The incumbent can only rely on having done a good job and kept promises. People will vote and want to keep someone who is doing a good job. The only thing they are allowed to do is announce their running for office and participate in scheduled debates or interviews.

- Politicians are limited to serving in public office for a certain period of time, perhaps ten years. After that they must return to private life --no connection whatsoever to government and politics-- for five years before they can run for office again. This is to infuse balance and perspective and not have a race of politicians, by politicians and for politicians.

There are probably a number of other interesting ideas out there. What we have it horribly broken in many ways. It'd be nice to see real dialog and actions to change it.

anigbrowl3• 14 years ago

This would be great if voting were restricted to smart people with halos.

ewillbefull3• 14 years ago

First you want to place a legislature in charge of how they are elected? We have enough problems with gerrymandering as it is.

Most of the rest of your points are arbitrary things that nobody could be in a position to judge, like "trashing" the other candidates. Publishing poll data being illegal? A politician is a criminal if they don't align with promises? What about compromises or emergencies?

What happened to free speech? Who would be in a position to judge any of these restrictions and how would they not eventually result in tyranny?

I feel like you're trolling... this doesn't sound democratic at all.

khawkins• 14 years ago

Is this a joke? What you're proposing is almost fundamentally contradictory to the principles the nation was founded upon. Banning bias? No "trashing" other candidates? No polling? No public endorsements? Incumbent can't run? You propose some of the most egregious restrictions on freedom of speech I've ever heard of.

Only can use government money to campaign (and not their own)? Can only visit state capitals once? Candidates obligated to participate in debates? Are you suggesting candidates have to become slaves to the process in order run for office?

On top of that, you expect government officials, the same ones put into office by this process to be the ones deciding whether someone is "biased" or not and who "didn't deliver" a campaign promise. Your proposals, if enacted, would probably generate a horribly corrupt government, where every politically motivated person would take every chance to destroy opponents through legal processes until an establishment party has so permeated the government they're basically a dictatorship.

As much as I'd like to believe this post was made in jest, I feel like you're taking cues from Hugo Chavez.

Volpe• 14 years ago

While I agree with your points, I also think there are problems that should be resolved.

- Historically, the majority of presidents have been rich and white. How do you fix that?

- Candidates make heavy use of propaganda, there is no accountability to what is said. Is censoring information (i.e What China's PRC does) any different from glutting all forms of media with YOUR information so other information is harder to find? This (among other things) was how Berlusconi came to power, and stayed there in Italy.

- Industry getting involved in matters of state... is this any different from Church and state? Should the same 'fix' be applied?

MichaelApproved3• 14 years ago

As a citizen, you're allowed full freedoms but if you're running for office, it's reasonable to ask you to adhere to certain restrictions so the process doesn't get corrupted. We ask people who hold certain positions in government and the public sector to give up some freedoms while holding their job (CIA, military and Pentagon personnel, certain contractors, etc.), I think it's fair to ask people to give up some restrictions while trying to run for public office. A job that has a lot of power that can easily be exploded.

What those restrictions are, I don't know, but I do know that we should be able to brainstorm without being accused of taking cues from Hugo Chavez.

robomartin4• 14 years ago

No, it wasn't made in jest. Obviously arriving at a systems that could work well would require intelligent discussion of all kinds of proposals point by point. I am more than prepared to accept that some aspects of what I rattled-off in five minutes of typing could be bad ideas. It's not like I spend every waking hour of my life thinking about this. It's almost exactly the opposite.

My point is that what we see today is an abomination. Perhaps the system put into place when this country was founded made sense at that time and for a number of years after that. I really think it makes no sense at all today.

The Obama and Romney spent TWO BILLION DOLLARS in their campaigns and who knows how much PAC's spent. This is obscene. Particularly at a time when so many people in our country are suffering.

Today you can't run for office unless you can raise a billion dollars. Period. That's what it takes. That means that there are a lot of truly intelligent people with great ideas that are financially banned from the process. Want to talk about the 1%. About wealth inequality? Let's talk about the 0.01%, the handful of people that can raise a billion dollars and, effectively, try to buy the presidency.

Sick.

Candidates ought to be restricted to presenting their platform and ideas. They should not be allowed to trash the other candidates with impunity and, yes, lie right and left. What we end-up with today is something I see in my house every day with my little ones: "Daddy, he broke the flower!"; "No, I didn't, she pushed me"; "Nooooo, he said a bad word". Oh, please, stop it!

I'll self-appoint as an intelligent voter. I think you might be one too. The problem is that not everyone is. And the system we have in place allows candidates with money to use drive-by media techniques to cause outrage and indignation on the average voter with the aim being to gain a vote and take it away from the competition. This is criminal.

There are other issues here. If you are not "cool", speak well and present well you have zero chances of getting elected. Before someone goes off thinking that I am attacking Obama, stop it! This is a general statement that is party and candidate agnostic. Steven Hawking --or someone like him-- could never become president. Never. That is wrong. Is being president about looking good and speaking well? Not at all. It shouldn't be, anyway. It should be, among other things, about their ideas, track record, experience and ability to make tough decisions.

I want to get down to an election system that removes all the five-year-old crap from the process and focuses on ideas and accountability. If you can't guarantee that you will come through with a promise, then don't promise it. State it as you idea and explain the challenges you might face making it happen.

Hugo Chavez? Please, stop it. We should be able to discuss an issue like the failings of the electoral college system without resorting to insults, right?

wisty3• 14 years ago

> - Candidates are only allowed to visit each state capital once. That's it. > > - Public endorsement of any candidate is illegal. They have to float and survive on their platform and track record. > > - Candidates are not allowed to trash the other candidates. They are only allowed to discuss their views. > >- Candidates are awarded an amount of money to run their campaigns. No external contributions from any source whatsoever. None. > >- Television networks are prohibited from endorsing or communicating bias

So, you want to ban free speech in an election?

Let's say Bill Clinton wants to appear at a pro-choice rally in Ohio, in the run-up to an election. Can he do so? Can he talk about "extremists" who are trying to ban abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, and for medical reasons? He won't mention Obama or Romney, and might not even refer to their exact positions (attacking a straw man is more fun anyway), he's just a guy exercising his right to speak about political issues.

Can Republican supporters fund an ad about the dangers of socialised healthcare?

What is "communicating bias"?

>- The publication of poll data is illegal

I'm not even sure what problem you are trying to solve. Can parties conduct opinion polls for internal use? Can they talk to people in the mall about what issues they care about?

>- A candidate must post a huge bond. If he or she is found telling lies they end-up in prison and have huge financial consequences. > >- Campaign promises are recorded and signed in a document that is publicly available. A politician that does not deliver on promises made is exposed to financial and criminal liability. Don't make promises you can't keep.

So, you want candidates to deliberately be even more vague than they already are?

dwiel• 14 years ago

We need to address the problem at its heart which is the separation of wealth. If there weren't huge players with lots of money to throw at the election (people and corporations), or if at least everyone had the same opportunity to do so, then a lot of those problems would be somewhat relieved.

unequal distribution of wealth == unequal distribution of money == unequal distribution of power != democracy

outside1234• 14 years ago

I know you mean well, but all of these laws would end up getting used to suppress other political parties.

Take for instance, this one:

- A candidate must post a huge bond. If he or she is found telling lies they end-up in prison and have huge financial consequences.

Laws like this, for instance, are used to great effect in Singapore to suppress alternative parties. The party in control uses the threat of bankrupting the other candidate to make it impossible for them to basically run a campaign. And god forbid they talk about the Yew family!

seldo• 14 years ago

A really great way to show why Ohio is so important:

1. Give the democrats Wisconsin (I don't know why people are treating it as a swing state)

2. Give the democrats Ohio

3. Give the democrats any other state (except New Hampshire)

Basically, as long as Obama takes Ohio, Obama wins.

james-skemp• 14 years ago

Re Wisconsin, as someone who has lived in the state all his life, and been confident that we'd elect a Democrat as president since the mid-90s (and definitely in the last 12+ years I've been voting), I believe the state is swinging.

Walker's recall showed how red the state is, once the people outside Madison and Milwaukee actually vote. (Disclaimer: I live in Madison, and commented to others that I didn't realize Wisconsin had turned red.)

Obama is back in Madison shortly, but he really needs to head up to the north of the state. Unless he thinks he can carry it by getting the vote out in obviously blue areas.

On the other hand, I don't think he can sway people in two days, so getting people excited where he knows a vote will be a vote for him might be the best bet.

marcamillion• 14 years ago

I LOVE this. I have always wondered what such a visualization might look like. Now, when the results come in, I can be my very own 'electoral college pundit' and be right :)

cletus• 14 years ago

Well I guess it's that time in the cycle again: for people to complain about the electoral college (disclaimer: I'm not American).

Over the years in different elections in different countries I've heard this complaint [1]

> The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view.

Translation:

> It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority.

Also, this isn't just an election for president. There are Senate (in 2 out of 3 elections) and Congressional races, probably local races too.

But let me address the common "solution" for this "problem": the popular volte (for president). That is a terrible idea.

The electoral college doesn't only exist for the reasons of state rights (although that's a pretty big part of it). It exists to avoid a deadlock. The delegate almost without exception vote as their state did. The possibility of no decision coming out of the electoral college is practically zero.

For those of you who were paying attention in 2000, just look at what a mess Florida became. Now watch me get downvoted into oblivion (but that doesn't make me any less right) but the optional nature of the US voting system has resulted in:

- the left buying votes (cigarettes to homeless people, that sort of thing); and

- the right trying to disenfranchise groups that tend to vote left with such measures as removing the right of felons to vote (and even people who aren't felons).

HOWEVER, by the rules that were in place at the time of the election Florida was always a Bush win (seriously, please don't downvote siimply because you disagree). Even extensive analysis (by the likes of the New York Times, etc) after the fact supports this.

My point was that Florida turned into a circus of trying to change the rules after the fact (eg what constitutes a vote, the whole dimpled and pregnant chad business). You just can't do that.

Imagine that circus on a national level with an incredibly close popular vote.

On a personal note, as someone who resides in New York, one of the most expensive media markets in a state that is safely blue, I appreciate the minimal amount of election ads.

Anyway, the electoral college is not the problem here. There are however two glaring problems (IMHO):

1. Voting is optional;

2. Elections are first-past-the-post ("FPTP").

The argument for (1) is that mandatory voting leads to uninformed people voting. I assure you that uninformed people are already voting.

Voter turnout nationally is something like 50% (IIRC). Of those 40% always vote Democrat, 40% always vote Republican and the 20% in the middle decide the election. So 10% of the population is deciding the election even key states.

The problem with optional voting is it creates the wrong incentives. Measures like voter ID, removing felons right to votes are a consequence of this. If voting were mandatory (as it is in Australia) then a lot of these problems go away. Also, in many parts of the US it is hard to vote with long lines. It should be moved to a Saturday but this difficulty is, in many places, a natural consequence of voting being optional. Election officials are partisans too so you shouldn't be surprised if a right-leaning official under-resources an area with a lot of poor people.

As for (2) the problem is that this reinforces a two-party system. A vote for a minor party is often a vote for the other side (eg voting for the Greens is a vote that would probably otherwise go to a Democrat so is effectively a vote for the Republicans).

Australia has a preferential voting system. Given a field of 5 candidates you number then 1 to 5. When votes are counted you allocate all the "1"s. The candiate with the least number of "1"s is eliminated and their votes are distributed to the "2"s. This continues until something has more than 50% of the vote.

This means you could vote [1] Green [2] Democrat [3] Republican and protest the Democrat candidate without losing your vote.

One last point, as much as people focus on key states deciding the election, the reality is that the states are on a spectrum based on the popular vote. If a Republican wins the popular vote by 8% or more they'll probably carry California, otherwise they won't. A Democrat will have to win by 5-8% to carry Texas. When the popular vote is close, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin are in play. Were it not close they wouldn't be.

Over time states change their "bias". For example, Florida is becoming more Democratic with retirees from blue states in the Northeast. California used to be a safe red state but is now safely blue. These changes aren't sudden and the variations possible are actually quite small.

Whatever the case, the popular vote at the national level would be a disaster.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736105

downandout2• 14 years ago

"> The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view. Translation: > It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority."

You appear to be writing this off as a minor issue. It is not. If Mitt Romney wins 49.999% of the vote in any state, and Obama wins the rest, Obama is awarded ALL of that state's electoral votes. That hardly reflects the will of the people in the context of a national election.

IMO the solution, assuming there is a reason to keep the electoral college at all, is for each state to award to each candidate a percentage of its electoral votes commensurate with the percentage of votes that each candidate received in that state.

vsync2• 14 years ago

> That hardly reflects the will of the people in the context of a /national/ election.

Federal.

henrikschroder• 14 years ago

The point OP made was that it's First Past The Post that's the problem, not the electoral college itself. And you arrived at the same conclusion, just using different words.

Another bonus of getting rid of FPTP is that there would be no "swing states" that get 90% of the campaign activity, all states would suddenly be roughly equally important.

hristov2• 14 years ago

You are entitled to your dubious opinions but please do not try to change history. All newspapers agreed that Gore won Florida. What they said was that the Gore vs Bush decision would not have made a difference. That is because in his legal case Gore chose the wrong Florida counties where to request a recount. But if all votes were counted, Gore won.

And no the electoral college does not exist to avoid deadlock. Do you know what the chances of deadlock are in a popular vote of about 100 million people?

Oh and can you show me any documented case where someone gives homeless people cigarettes to make them vote for someone? How would that even work? You know you usually have to register before hand.

spindritf• 14 years ago

> please do not try to change history. All newspapers agreed that Gore won Florida.

That's the funniest comment in this thread. I love the idea of history or truth as something established by consensus between newspapers. I don't mean to say that your conclusion is wrong but your method is somewhat lacking.

dctoedt2• 14 years ago

> You are entitled to your dubious opinions but please do not try to change history. All newspapers agreed that Gore won Florida. What they said was that the Gore vs Bush decision would not have made a difference. That is because in his legal case Gore chose the wrong Florida counties where to request a recount. But if all votes were counted, Gore won.

Um, not quite; you've misstated the conclusion of the news organizations' study of the uncounted ballots. In a much-expanded recount, according to the Times wrap-up piece in November 2001 [1], Gore might have won in a few possible scenarios, but only by a teeny, tiny margin at best (smaller than the margin Bush ended up with). Even that possibility depended on the different counties' election officials recounting the disputed ballots in the same way that the news organizations' independent auditors did.

The Times had endorsed Gore --- as it has every other Democratic presidential candidate starting in 1960 [2]. Yet the lead grafs of the Times piece were commendably explicit: "A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward. Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore."

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12VOTE.html

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/28/opinion/presid...

logn• 14 years ago

> And no the electoral college does not exist to avoid deadlock. Do you know what the chances of deadlock are in a popular vote of about 100 million people?

It might not be the intention to avoid deadlock (I have no idea). But it could definitely happen. You don't need an even split for this to occur, just enough to require a recount, which in a popular vote might mean recounting every single vote in the country which would be a nightmare.

eze• 14 years ago

"It exists to avoid a deadlock."

What do you mean? Tight popular votes at most require a runoff between the two most popular candidates. If anything, this [1] 2004 NYT article gives the traditional reason:

"The Electoral College's supporters argue that it plays an important role in balancing relations among the states, and protecting the interests of small states."

But it goes on to convincingly counter:

"A few years ago, this page was moved by these concerns to support the Electoral College. But we were wrong. The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate, which more than looks out for their interests. And there is no interest higher than making every vote count."

For the record, I'm not American either, but if I were I'd feel much better and meaningful during presidential campaigns living in, say, Ohio or Florida, instead of New York or Texas.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/opinion/making-votes-count...

jmaygarden4• 14 years ago

Some would argue that the electoral college was actually designed to create deadlock so that congress would often choose the president [1]. That's in fact how it used to work--especially prior to the 12th amendment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_%28United_Sta...

baddox3• 14 years ago

There are problems with FTPT, but all voting systems are simply compromises between certain mutually exclusive criteria, all of which are generally desirable. You can't have all the desirable characteristics at the same time, as demonstrated by Arrow's impossiblity theorem and the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem. Sure, FTPT has some disadvantages, but trading it for something like instant run-off voting introduces some new disadvantages. It's insufficient to argue that FTPT is strictly inferior. You really just have to argue for which criteria you think are more important. The third link is a great comparison of many different voting systems and criteria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_t...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_runoff_vo...

studentrob• 14 years ago

Most important to me would be a condorcet winner, something we do not have in FPTP (ftfy)

harshreality2• 14 years ago

FPTP and IRV for single-winner elections are completely compromised, due to tactical voting (and lack of fairness to third parties) in common scenarios. I don't think you can support your claim that other systems are just as bad. In every informed discussion of voting systems I've ever encountered, FPTP and IRV are considered inferior to voting systems like Condorcet variants [1] or Range Voting [2] [3].

Preference between condorcet and range voting is a lot more murky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_sel...

http://rangevoting.org/rangeVcond.html

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting

[3] http://rangevoting.org

caf• 14 years ago

The two most important electoral reforms that the US could adopt would be to switch voting to Saturday, so that most people don't have to take time off work to vote; and to put the administration of federal elections in the hands of an independent, professional, non-partisan electoral commission.

abraham_s• 14 years ago

>>>and to put the administration of federal elections in the hands of an independent, professional, non-partisan electoral commission.

Even if you have a federal electoral commission, the "foot soldiers" who will be working in the election booths will be the same people who is doing it now. (Based on what I know about the system in India, there it a election commission, who provides the administration and drafts Central/State government employees to carry out the elections). I agree that the net effect of such a measure will be positive, if there is more uniformity in the voting rules.

protomyth3• 14 years ago

Switching to Saturday would get the US in trouble with many religions in the US that would absolutely forbid voting on a Saturday. A weekday is much safer.

Having election day be a federal holiday wouldn't hurt.

rmc2• 14 years ago

put the administration of federal elections in the hands of an independent, professional, non-partisan electoral commission.

Wait this doesn't happen now?!?!! WTF?

nhebb2• 14 years ago

> The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view.

The Constitution doesn't mandate how electoral votes are allocated. Maine and Nebraska, for example, distribute the electoral college votes by congressional district. So the winner take all policy of most states isn't due to the electoral college itself, but how the states choose to implement it.

AlexMennen2• 14 years ago

States have an incentive to use a winner take all policy to maximize their influence in the outcome.

bobwaycott2• 14 years ago

True, and they also add in a couple electors based on the statewide popular vote.

wisty3• 14 years ago

> 1) The argument for (1) is that mandatory voting leads to uninformed people voting. I assure you that uninformed people are already voting.

I'd argue that passionate people are more likely to vote. Arguably, they deserve to be heard, since they care so much about politics. On the other hand, they may be brainwashed idiots.

It also creates a lot more divisive candidates. Obama is a far-left (by US standards, in Australia or Europe he'd be center-right). Bush was far-right. You need to be extreme to win the primaries, and need to stay extreme to get your base excited enough to vote. Polarising candidates encourages debate (which is good), but also encourages group-think.

> As for (2) the problem is that this reinforces a two-party system. A vote for a minor party is often a vote for the other side (eg voting for the Greens is a vote that would probably otherwise go to a Democrat so is effectively a vote for the Republicans).

Once again, this makes it hard for a compromise candidate to win, and makes it hard for extreme groups to win anything more than a small percent. It's the worst of both worlds - less debate, and more extreme Presidents.

bobwaycott2• 14 years ago

You seem to let your bias leak through here. Given the sum total of both his rhetoric and his governance to date, Obama does not stand anywhere near far-left, not even in the US. You may want to recalibrate your scales.

Supporting gay marriage and abortion rights are increasingly moderate positions, held by people who swing further left and right on a host of other issues. For example, Obama has been overwhelmingly willing to compromise with business to move other policy agendas (e.g., health care) forward—the far-left is quite unlikely to do this. There are plenty of other counterexamples to an unfounded claim that he is far-left. Drone strikes come to mind, to name but one other.

If he holds views and suggestions for policies that are actually far-left, please enlighten us.

felanthropop• 14 years ago

Everything sounded great up to this point: "There are however two glaring problems (IMHO): 1. Voting is optional;"

When people have to vote, they will vote for things they are undecided on and it is likely that stupid things will play into the decision, like what the name looks like and whether it seems familiar. It doesn't make them any more likely to be informed about the candidates.

And if they have been "informed" about the candidates, the most likely corruptive force is our news media, which is biased (on both sides). Each radio and television station provides a "range of views" that on average lean toward their candidate or are carefully edited. If you can't trust the media to be unbiased (not that they ever were), who can you trust to give you the "real" scoop on the candidates? No one that I know of.

If people don't care enough to vote, they don't have a strong enough opinion on how things are going, then leave them alone. I don't want them choosing pretty names, and it is already bad enough that our views are so manipulated.

At least those that choose to vote are probably somewhat swayed by how well the government is doing, and how it is treating them and those they care about. Those that would be forced to vote aren't, or it is an even draw.

All of that said, I admit that I am an "undecided voter". I lean conservative, but I don't know who to vote for because I disagree strongly to some of the views of the conservatives. So, I might not vote this election, and I still care about the outcome.

Joeri• 14 years ago

You're finding issues where none need exist. My country has mandatory appearance, but not mandatory voting. If you are undecided you can leave your ballot empty, but you have to come to the voting booth regardless.

But even with mandatory voting you could argue that it is a fairer representation even if it forces people who don't care to choose a side. Democracy is about trying to capture what te people want, and "the people" means everyone, not just those who care. Idiots have equal voice to nobel prize winners, that's the democratic way.

FPTP is the real problem though. You could keep optional voting but just switch to pretty much any other vote tallying system and get better leaders. FPTP is mathematically guaranteed to bring out the worst in politicians.

mikeash• 14 years ago

How can you say that the EC avoids deadlock, and then immediately start talking about Florida? The popular vote in that case was not a deadlock, and would have made for a clear winner with no disputes. The EC is the only reason that Florida's mess even mattered. How many times has the popular vote been close enough to cause such a mess? Zero. How many times has the EC caused such a mess when none needed to exist? More than zero.

Plenty of other countries use a straight popular vote and they somehow manage to avoid all of the problems that EC proponents say the popular vote would cause. It seems obvious that if we were building the country from scratch today, the EC would never even be considered, let alone enacted.

netfire• 14 years ago

The chances are very low that a national popular vote would be so close that counting or not counting dimpled/pregnant chads would make a difference. Lets also not make the assumption that the same people would vote in an electoral election as in a popular one. I think more people would vote, especially in non-swing states, where their vote usually doesn't matter as much in a presidential election

The main problem I see with the electoral college is that it forces the candidates to focus on winning the votes of just a few swing states, instead of the entire country. If the president is supposed to represent the needs/wants of the whole country, shouldn't everyone's vote count equally to decide who takes office?

robomartin4• 14 years ago

> The electoral college is incredibly unfair to voters who live in states that lean opposite their view.

Translation:

> It's unfair that I don't get my way even though I'm in the minority.

Nonsense!

The least you should have done is actually reply to my post rather than do a drive-by with your own imaginary conclusions. Here it is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736105

This --and the statement you refer to and mangle-- has nothing to do with me (or proponents of an alternative approach) getting their way. You almost make it sound like a childish whine to which I take offense.

This is about having fair and intelligent elections. Elections today feel like you are watching five-year-olds blame each other for who broke Mom's flowers. It's idiotic at best.

Candidates should not be allowed to engage in stupidity. Talk about your platform, ideas and approach. Leave the other guys alone. Let me decide based on who you are and what you say you are going to do.

This is also about making it possible for anyone to run for office. I said in another reply that someone like Stephen Hawking has zero chance to run for office today. In this media-driven election system we seem to have looking good, speaking well, being able to crack a joke, sing and dance seems to be a requirement. Do you know how many super-smart people have the personality of a brick? Maybe not that extreme, but I hope you get the point.

And, how about money. If you don't have or can't raise a billion dollars, forget it. Again, tons of incredibly gifted people don't stand a chance. They wouldn't even get off the line. That is wrong.

The electoral college also means that Independent candidates have an almost zero chance of winning the presidential election. Zero. States like California have a significant number of independent voters. I was talking to one the other day and he said something akin to "My vote really doesn't count. In order to feel like it counts I have to choose to vote for either a Republican or Democratic candidate.". How fair is that system.

A popular vote, devoid of state lines and with rules aimed at reducing the bullshit factor would allow the very real possibility of having more than two choices. It should allow almost anyone to run and be heard.

There's no reason why it couldn't start on a website where candidates --hundreds of them, thousands of them-- stated their platform and start being filtered two years in advance of the election. Don't have a computer? Want to participate in the process? Go to a library and use on of the computers there. I find it funny to note that some of these purportedly disenfranchised voters are walking around with iPhones, driving SUV's and watching satellite television on their 50 inch LCD TV's.

I agree with you on the point about mandatory voting. I lived in Argentina for a number of years and watched how mandatory voting is twisted and turned there for candidates' benefits. They'd literally buy votes through all sorts of giveaways. What's worst is that the people being manipulated are the poor and uneducated. The ugly truth is that they just follow the carrot.

The opposite of this is that absolute morons are allowed to vote in either system. Voluntary voting does not guarantee that informed people will vote any more than it guarantees that votes are not being bought. I've had conversations with people who absolutely floored me. One guy was in absolute awe of the government because, as he put it, "they are so smart that they can predict eclipses and shit like that. Anybody that can do that is incredible". Another person, who happens to be the daughter of a friend of mine who has a PhD in Physics didn't understand and couldn't get her head around what the national debt means to her. She obviously didn't follow in her fathers footsteps, at least in the math department.

How do you fix this? I don't know. I know it isn't popular to say that not everyone should vote. If people are required to pass a test to obtain a driver's license, why shouldn't they be required to pass a test every year in order to be able to vote? They can actually kill more people with their vote than by not knowing how to drive a car. Not so? How about the religious morons who vote across hard religious beliefs and against issues of health, science and progress that could save millions of lives? Before anyone goes off for this comment, I am not a Democrat or Republican. I hate aspects of both parties and like aspects of both.

The electoral college is just not good any more. The same is true of the way we allow these campaigns to be run and funded.

jmaygarden4• 14 years ago

> This is also about making it possible for anyone to run for office... Do you know how many super-smart people have the personality of a brick?

I don't understand this line of thinking. Do you believe Steve Wozniak would make a better president than Steve Jobs? Leadership often requires a strong dose of charisma and moxie. Those geniuses without people skills make great advisors.

snowwrestler2• 14 years ago

You cannot mandate voting in the U.S. because the sovereign right to rule originates with the people. The government simply does not have the legal authority to mandate such a thing, any more than it has the legal authority to force people to speak if they don't want to.

khuey• 14 years ago

The government definitely has the legal authority to force people to speak if they don't want to. It's called a subpoena.

AlexMennen2• 14 years ago

> One last point, as much as people focus on key states deciding the election, the reality is that the states are on a spectrum based on the popular vote. If a Republican wins the popular vote by 8% or more they'll probably carry California, otherwise they won't. A Democrat will have to win by 5-8% to carry Texas. When the popular vote is close, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin are in play. Were it not close they wouldn't be.

It is always the states near the middle that matter. This is because if you are going to lose the election anyway, losing by a smaller electoral college margin doesn't help, and conversely, if you are going to win anyway, winning by a larger electoral college margin doesn't help. Candidates campaign to maximize the probability that they reach 270 electoral votes. That is why Obama and Romney are campaigning a more in Ohio than they are in Florida even though the polls are closer in Florida than they are in Ohio. Florida is a toss-up, but if Obama wins Florida, he probably also wins enough slightly bluer states like Ohio to win without Florida.

Also, California or Texas flipping would require an absolutely massive popular vote landslide. Probably at least a 15% margin.

charlieok• 14 years ago

Please don't talk about how your post will be “downvoted into oblivion”, or plead with readers “don't downvote siimply because you disagree”. Just say what you are going to say, and let the chips fall where they may.

In any case, as I read this, you have the top comment on this thread. It'd look better in that spot without the obsession about how people vote on it.

jandrewrogers• 14 years ago

Most American voters do not understand what the President is which is part of why they find the Electoral College confusing.

The President is not the President of the people. It is the President of the States. Only the States have a vote. In fact, for most of its history, the State governments voted directly and there was no popular vote for President. In modern times, they allowed people to have a say in who their State government votes for but it is still only people controlling the vote of their State. They have no say in how people in other States choose to vote for President.

When people complain about the Electoral College, what they are really saying is that they want to eliminate the concept of States voting for President. For better or worse, the idea of the President being the Executive of the States is so foundational to the US Constitution that you'd basically have to throw out the US Constitution and start over. The only representative in Federal government people were supposed to have is their Representative; in recent decades people vote for other Federal positions as well but it is only to decide how their State will apportion its votes rather than voting for the Federal position directly.

Evbn9• 14 years ago

Overlooked is the fact the Federal government is extremely over involved in citizens lives, when it should be dealing mostly with the States.

If I don't vote for President, why is the President allowed to shoot my dog on suspicious of marijuana possession?

mayneack• 14 years ago

I don't think it's fair to say the president IS the president of the states. The office certainly used to work that way, but because every state elects their electors, it is no longer true.

malandrew• 14 years ago

FWIW Brazil has mandatory voting and many parties. Two of them are dominant, but there is a much greater level of awareness for other parties than here in the US.

If you don't vote in Brazil a lot of the things you normally do involving the government become complicated until your pay a fine and fix your status. Anything involving government issued IDs to social security and unemployment benefits are cut off until you "regularize" your status by paying the fine for not voting.

My biggest complaint is that the system forces even Brazilians living abroad to vote, which is a big pain in the ass when you are abroad since you aren't aware of elections (it's easy to forget) and you need to find the nearest consulate and figure out how to vote. Every time I've returned to Brazil I've had to go and fix my status by paying the fine for not voting in the elections that occurred while I was out of the country.

tisme• 14 years ago

This is all window dressing. Elections do not decide who wins. Funding does. And as long as corporations can outspend private citizens companies decide elections.

If you wanted to reform elections in the USA then you would have to start to curb the direct influence of corporations on the elections, compared to that the electoral college is a minor detail.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

You're just translating the problem one level, you're not actually addressing the root problem. The problem isn't that money is allowed to be spent in elections, or even that corporations can outspend individuals or truly grass roots organizations (unions are a big part of the top political donors, for example). Ultimately, buying a TV spot or radio advertisement does not constitute "buying" a vote.

The problem is that the whole system is too shallow. And that starts at the electorate and extends to political pundits and the media. If you magically sucked money out of the system tomorrow then we'd be absolutely no better off. Neither individuals nor the media would suddenly decide that it's important to discuss the real issues and be open and honest. No, it would still be the same old popularity/celebrity contest and the same old "gotcha" game.

spoiledtechie• 14 years ago

Actually, They are right.

I really think you should take the time to watch this video, understand it, let it sink in and totally mold your brain around it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc

cincinnatus12• 14 years ago

The argument that the EC is there to the avoid a deadlock situation is quite inaccurate. In fact, given there are only 538 EC votes to distribute, the likelihood of a tie (269-269) is much, much higher than the likelihood of a tie in the popular vote (where in 2008 both candidates received > 50 million votes). Nate Silver's 538 blog estimates the current chances of a EC "deadlock" at 0.2% -- small, yes, but not so small as to ignore the possibility entirely.

The "solution" under this scenario? If the election doesn't produce a candidate with 270 or more electoral college votes, the race gets decided by the House of Representatives. Can you imagine the reaction if Obama won the popular vote, but only received 269 EC votes and then the (Republican) House awarded the election to Romney?

There is precedent for this, of course. The 1824 election saw Andrew Jackson getting a plurality in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, but not a majority in either. Ultimately, a Congress hostile to Jackson would award to the Presidency to his arch-rival, John Quincy Adams. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...

In terms of worrying about deadlock, a simple popular vote total is far superior than any permutation of the Electoral College.

nhebb2• 14 years ago

This is interesting, but it leaves out Pennsylvania. Penn is a long shot for Romney, but the Romney campaign's internal polling must indicate that it's in play, otherwise they wouldn't be spending time in the final weekend campaigning there.

theltrj• 14 years ago

is there a library out there that mimics this visualization? very powerful stuff

mistercow• 14 years ago

Fascinatingly, 84% of these scenarios are Obama wins, which is surprisingly closeto fivethirtyeight's current projection of 85%.

protomyth3• 14 years ago

If you want more campaigning in your area, then start a petition and vote for a change to your state's constitution to allocate electoral votes by house district. This is a change that could happen if your state wants it.

I believe on real problem is the state's voice is not heard in DC and a lot of crap is done that is not in the State's best interest. I wish they would repeal the Seventeenth Amendment so people would concentrate a lot more on the State's politics. Or perhaps, replace the senators with the sitting governor. Then the Senate would think about the state's budget and regulation burden before passing things.

Evbn9• 14 years ago

Hmm. I wanted to go reqd that page tonight to see you what is left that matters, but it has been replaced by the link be results map. Lame.

512 Paths to the White House

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