Mathematicians: Elections Flawed

Nader-licious writes "Science News Online reports: 'With recent reports of malfunctioning voter machines and uncounted votes during primaries in Florida, Maryland, and elsewhere, reformers are once again clamoring for extensive changes. But while attention is focused on these familiar irregularities, a much more serious problem is being neglected: the fundamental flaws of the voting procedure itself. Mathematics are shedding light on questions about how well different voting procedures capture the will of the voters.' The verdict: the U.S. system might be the worst of the lot."

Comments

Also a good source

[Anonymous Coward]

A proof, I believe, is located here. Interesting reading, considering that it says that a fair election is mathematically impossible.

biggest problem

[SquierStrat]

In my not humble at all opinion, the biggest problem is that our elections are from 7amto 7pm on TUESDAYS! They need to move the elections to Sundays and open the polls for 24 hours. As it is, alot of people are simply unable to vote because of work and commutes.

Re:biggest problem

[call -151]

Absentee voting, for all the publicity it generated in certain recent elections, is appropriate for a wide range of situations. Every state I've voted in (seven, not all in the same year!) has had absentee provisions that would apply to awful commutes, for example. I do believe that there are some regions where in order to qualify for absentee status, you need to swear that you will be out of the district for the entire day, but I believe those are rare. Furthermore, in many districts, you can get "permanent absentee voter" status and just always vote conveniently by mail. It may have been meant for 80-year-olds, but that's no reason why everyone else can't have the convenience of voting easily and at a leisurely pace.

Re:Absolutely wrong.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

If what you're saying was right, we'd see the President selected the same way. No, the Electoral College exists because of a concern they had in those long-ago days, a concern which is still very valid today: a concern that with pure direct election of the President, metropolitan areas would overwhelm rural interests and we'd wind up with a government "by the cities, of the cities" instead of one which represented the whole nation. If we had direct popular election of the Presidency, do you think the President would ever care about what concerns citizens in Montana had?

You hear this argument a lot from people arguing in favor of the Electoral College system. I don't think it accurately reflects the Founders' intentions -- they weren't so much worried about urban vs. rural (remember that the population of the US was overwhelmingly rural then) as about large states vs. small states, which isn't exactly the same thing. But it doesn't matter in any case, because the truth of the matter is, it doesn't work. Presidential campaigns overwhelmingly focus on "swing states" that are not only close in electoral terms, but also have large populations. In the current system, Republican Montana matters not a whit; neither does Democratic Delaware or evenly split New Mexico (which you may remember had just as close a vote recount as Florida in 2000.) Florida was where the action was in 2000 for a reason: there are a lot of people there. Big coastal states like Florida, New York, Texas, and California will always get more attention for this reason; if those states aren't seriously in play (e.g., as Texas an NY weren't in 2000) then attention shifts to big Midwestern states like Ohio, Illinois, and to some degree Missouri. Everyone else might as well not exist as far as national political strategists are concerned.

Re:Absolutely wrong.

[Waffle Iron]

High priority voting weight?

Count the electoral college votes in Montana compared with Florida, NY, Texas, California... places with much higher populations.

Then tell me how Montana gets a bigger share, somehow.

Montana population: 904,000; electors: 3; Voters per elector: 300,000

California population: 34,000,000; electors: 54; Voters per elector: 629000

Montana: one man, two votes. And Montana is not the only state with excessive representation per voter. It adds up.

Re:The system won't change

[the bluebrain]

• Point of education for you: Nazis were not right-wing... the name of the party (translated from German obviously), which was originally NDSAP, is "National Socialist Democratic Worker's Party". That word "socialist" and the phrase "worker's party" are big clues - the Nazis were hard-core leftists; they took over many companies and tightly regulated everything. That is not the right-wing philosophy of laissez-faire and caveat emptor.
  This is a very commonly made error, possibly because the leftist media would prefer to put known bad guys in the other column.

I assume that your "NDSAP" is a typo - it was actually "NSDAP", standing for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which translates to National Socialist German Workers Party (the word "democratic" does not appear).
They were a totalitarian regime, i.e. a dictatorship / oligarchy, in which many free-wheeling capitalists got very rich, and in which the workers were as fucked as in any other system other than perhaps China (where they are fucked for other reasons).

I am aware that the word "socialist" is part of the acronym "NSDAP" - put please don't be bamboozled into believing that that is what they actually were. As you might have gathered from my post, I was expressedly writing about the one-dimensional political spectrum on which, alas, nazis figure on the right-handed edge. If you want to talk / learn about multi-dimensional models (e.g. socal-economic split), please log in and we can continue from there.

I shall now stop feeding the troll (after having invoked Godwin. Sigh).

Re:The Us Presidency is a two-turn election

[HiThere]

Sorry. On re-reading, you were considering the primaries to be the original round. But:
1) those aren't legally a part of the election
2) who can vote in them is restricted in most (if not all) states.
3) who can participate as a candidate is pre-selected by the party apparatus.

So they don't qualify either.

Re:Absolutely wrong.

[call -151]

To illustrate the difference between the proportional weight of rural voters and urban voters, it may help to look at this map showing net return on the Federal dollar per state. (similar data in tabular form is here. A state that gets as much Federal spending as it sends to the Federal government has a ratio of 1.0; the states that get more than they contribute include New Mexico ($2.07 in Federal spending for every Federal tax dollar) and Montana (1.62 ratio) and states that get less than they spend include California and New York ($.87 spending per dollar) and Connecticut has the lowest ratio at .63

There is similar textual data at this link, which compares the 1990 data to the 2000 data.