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How Close Were US Presidential Elections?
Mike Sheppard writes "I'm a graduate student in Statistics at Michigan State University and spent some time analyzing past US presidential elections to determine how close they truly were. The mathematical procedures of Linear Programming and 0-1 Integer Programming were used to find the optimal solution to the question: 'What is the smallest number of total votes that need to be switched from one candidate to another, and from which states, to affect the outcome of the election?' Because of the way the popular and electoral votes interact, the outcome of the analysis had some surprising and intriguing results. For example, in 2004, 57,787 votes would have given us President Kerry; and in 2000, 269 votes would have given us President Gore. In all there have been 12 US Presidential elections that were decided by less than a 1% margin; meaning if less than 1% of the voters in certain states had changed their mind to the other candidate the outcome of the election would have been different."
"269 votes would have given us President Gore"
And eight years of being reminded of that sad fact can take a toll on a man's soul that can't be quantified.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If 269 votes had been counted that weren't, and they were for Gore, it all would have been different. This is a good reason to not stop recounts from going forward...
actually vote for a non-Republican, Diebold will give is the president that it thinks is best for us anyway.
Monstar L
I'm 22, and this is the first presidential election I've ever actually even listened to. Can somebody who is 26 or older tell me, is there anything different about this election than the last one, or does it pretty much run this same route every time? i.e. is media focus the same, before and after the primaries, and so on?
This shows how easy it would be to swing the election should one hack the voting in a few districts. The analysis can be used to show the regions to focus on.
This shows the importance of maintaining an open and audit able process if the system is to be protected from manipulation.
It also shows the importance of every vote and in protecting the rights of all to be able to cast their vote.
Some would contend (and I have difficulty disagreeing) that, in 2000, 269 votes still wouldn't have given us President Gore - it would have just given us 269 more rejected ballots...
So, Bush 41 beat someone named "Dukasis"?
The maps are the best part, as you can see which parts of the country provided the closest margins. It's also interesting that, in 1976, Hawaii had a smaller number of votes needed to flip it than Delaware (Hawaii is generally considered safely Democratic).
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
How many votes of this 1% were miscounted by voting machines?
McAfee anti-virus software decided our president...
Assuming the stats are true, it means Slashdot can determine the outcome of the election. Scary! :)
It also means that you should all make the effort to vote and be happy with the outcome or know that you have the right to bitch about the outcome because you voted for the other guy.
Efforts like "Rock the Vote" to raise awareness really are worthwhile. If you haven't voted lately, please do.
So, not trying to win, but make your opponent lose, and force the tie-breaker where the rules are in your favor. Very interesting strategy, I don't know if it was good or bad that it failed. I don't remember the Whig platform.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
Somewhat old but still relevant article on some of the mathematics behind voting, circa 2000 :
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_11_21/ai_66456956/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1#
It's time for electoral reform. As a precursor to that, I think reform of the media will be necessary.
I have a friend who's in political PR, and he tells me that my dream of "corrections in the media should be given equal billing to the original misinformation" (i.e. if you splash falsehoods onto the front page in big letters, you can't post your apology on page 79 column 5) will never happen: "never argue with someone who buys their ink in barrels". I think the very fact this truism is grounded in ink belies a 20th century mentality, but I don't know enough about the media to be able to judge whether he's right or not. Do any slashdot readers think a grassroots campaign to stop the media shooting first and asking questions later has legs?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
read up
Al Gore actually won the 2000 popular election. Jeb Bush helped his brother cheat.
"Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters."
They're using their grammar skills there.
there were only 9 votes that counted, and switching 1 would have done it.
The fact that so many elections are so close seems to indicate that 'the people' don't have a strong preference for one candidate over another. Why? Because their policies are often nearly indistinguishable.
Look at this election for instance. Even on the issue of withdrawing from Iraq, both candidates plan to withdraw troops from Iraq based on conditions on the ground, and send them into Iraq. Neither of these candidates are going to stand up against this upcoming bank welfare bill. Even the candidate for "change" has voted with the Bush administration to protect telecoms from consequences for their illegal spying on Americans. And yet, people seem to think that this is "the most important election of our time". Bullshit.
So yeah 1% might swing the outcome of an election, but it's going to take more than 1% to cause any sort of real change. You might as well flip a coin, you'll get a 50/50 split that way too.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You didn't realise it was a landslide ? 98% for the incumbent...
Deleted
I have said in the past (since before 2000) that the very strong trend toward fifty-fifty splits between rivals only proves that Marketing is now an Engineering Problem.
To explain: all endeavors start as artforms, like "the tuning of these newfangled carburetors is a bit of a black art." Then you understand the general system well enough to call it a science, "we have found that if we measure the fuel mixture, we maximize combustion." Once the system is known very well, it is an engineering problem: "an electronic system monitors the mixture and adjusts for different conditions on the fly."
Just as the cola wars are in a well-settled detente, the business of national politics is a marketing endeavor. Whether you're Demopublican or Replicratic, whether you're a Preservative or a Libertine, your party system will simply apply the art, nee, the science, nee, the engineering methodology to ensure the candidates do the best they can. Of course, both sides have effectively infinite resources so the marketing comes out equal, and the course of history witnesses Gore/Bush 2000, too many 5-4 decisions to count, a roughly 50-51 Senate, and a dynamic but well-balanced electoral college.
We seem to be deadlocked into a 50%/50% world, regardless of the actual merits. Marketing is simply engineering the "choices" we have, and equally effectively on "both" sides of just about every political issue.
[
This thread is bound to get political so here goes, as long as you can say you're anti-abortion and anti-gay you pretty much have most of the southern states wrapped up thanks to the Evangelical Christians.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Gore is an 8 poped collar douchebag
Added Pressly: "Oh, and by the way, milk is nothing but liquid meat."
Not quite, MANY recounts were performed. One by USA Today, one by Washington Post, another by Wall street Journal, and so on.
They all agreed that Gore simply did not have enough ballots according to Florida legal standards (where hanging chads are called null votes). They all agreed that Bush won Florida State.
As I understand the US system, it only matters to win the state, not the mayority of the votes in total over the whole country. Would be interesting to know, how close it gets there...
Don't you mean - "these were the districts where the voting machines were hacked by a few hundred votes to give the required outcome"?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The recounts did indicate that if overvotes were counted (where the voter filled out a bubble for Al Gore, then wrote in 'Al Gore' again at the bottom, or had crossed out GWB's name), then Gore would have won. But, regardless of Florida law, Bush still would have won the election by 1 vote anyway.
This might be a farce but how close to reality is it? http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks
My understanding is:
1. The people vote for their candidate. The results are counted.
2. The Electoral College, whoever they are, decide the result.
Not trolling, I really don't understand it.
I don't really understand this about US (or possibly any other) election system. In science, the margin of error for measurements being taken, or due to inherent flaws in a mechanism used gets quoted and becomes part of the results. If the margin of error is too large, results are inconclusive. Can we really vouch for any president elected by votes well within the margin of error for the combined effect of disparate tallying systems, vendors, and human fallibility? Has any system in the country ever been more accurate than 1% margin of error—or some ridiculous amount like 269 votes?
Seems unlikely.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
A "feature" (probably unintended) of the design of the Electoral College system is that most elections look like more of a blowout than they were. In theory, if someone manages to consistently get 50.5% in every state, they could win every state and the public will be told the next morning about the victor's huge landslide victory.
That's why after the 2000 election the Reps floated around those red state/blue state US maps with such glee. It made a squeaker look like a huge victory. (For a better picture, see the University of Michagan , which use some cartiographical tricks to adjust for population).
A better illustration are Regan's victories. Everyone knows Regan clobbered Carter and Mondale, right? Well, the true answer is not really, and sorta respectively. The electoral college turned his %50.7 victory in 1980 into a %86 state victory, and his %58.8 victory in 1984 into a %94 state victory.
It has been argued that this effect is actually good for the country, as it gives presidents more legitimacy from their elections.
I think the summary is misleading. It's not just a random 269 votes from all around the country that would have changed the outcome in 2000. 269 more votes for all gore in Pennsylvania wouldn't have done anything for Gore. I'm going to assume that the optimal 269 votes the story is referring to come from Florida, probably Miami-Dade. It's adding undue drama to the situation to say that 269 votes could have changed things. It's a very specific 269 votes from a very specific, and relatively small percentage of the population, that could have changed the outcome of the election.
I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar
OK, we have some instances of small fluctuations causing major effects. Rather than just sitting back and says "wow, that was close", the next stage is to calculate the possibility of these events being statistically random.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If the results of the vote are within statistical error (which is a LOT bigger than 269 votes), the election should be thrown out and run again. Plain science; the kind that politicians will never allow. They'll claim that would be too confusing for most voters. That is, thay'll say we are in the aggregate too stupid. SOME people may be, but most of us aren't. We are, however, too apathetic. The election in 2000 was blatantly rigged, yet the populace just grumbled. I guess I'll move to canada. The US government has been hijacked.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
"It doesn't matter if you win by an inch or a mile, winning is winning." - Vin Diesel "The Fast & the Furious"
I live in a state that went Republican in 2000, and I realized afterward that if a thousand or so additional people voted for Gore, then the whole Florida recount issue would have been moot.
That is the example that I give to people nowadays that say, "I don't bother to vote. I mean, there are millions of people. My vote doesn't count."
If you don't vote, then you shouldn't complain when the you don't like the results of the election.
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
I could not be happier with the outcome of the elections since 2000. We have invaded Iraq and killed Saddam. Our economy is in an epic fail mode and its actually making me a lot of money. Go republicans!
Voters are allowed assistance if they need it. They can even have an absentee ballot filled out for them.
Where they more than 1 percent different in their positions ?
well, if what the McCain campaign is telling us is true, then Obama should have no problem winning the "popular" vote
Even closer: if less than 0.5% of voters in certain states...
The government should reward people if they vote, say a voter stimulus package of $100 sent to you in the mail after confirming that you showed up at the polls and voted.
This might be the only way to increase voter turnout, therefore creating a stronger 'Democracy' or whatever it actually is these days.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Sorry pal, but that is what they teach in high school Algebra I/II classes as a stand-in for analytically solving equations.
Inquiring minds want to know: where the fuck do they teach this in Algebra I/II?
P.S. If you've got some way to analytically solve any constrained optimization problem with 50+ variables, there's probably a long line of people with medals and/or piles of cash to give you.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
mmm...Potatoe...
This seems to be in the nature of the political system of the USA, if you think about it.
Both large parties are diverse conglomerates, containing people who often disagree significantly on important issues. The big question for the party is where to draw the border of the part affiliation. Who is in, and who is out?
The answer to that is that the optimal popular appeal for a party is 50% plus one vote. Less, and you lose the election. More, and you have increased the internal stress in the party and reduced the size everybody's slice of power, for no real purpose. The art of winning elections is to convince the median voter without alienating the rabid zealots at the other end of the party too much.
So the two parties will always align themselves around the median voter. Close elections are in the nature of the system.
Diebold will give is the president that it thinks is best for us anyway.
Diebold, now known as Premier Election Solutions, and the others like them have run out of time.
For many places, this will be the last election such sorry machines will see use. The only reason they're still enjoying such widespread use is that *the budgeted money had already been spent* and/or there was not enough time to switch them out for better alternatives. If you followed the news, there was much gnashing of teeth over the last two years because of those two problems.
For 2010, I expect one of two things:
1. the voting landscape will be significantly less electronic
2. Diebold, aka Premier Election Solutions, et al will have given up their source code for independant review
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Will you people get that through your head? We are a representative REPUBLIC!!
"For example, in 2004, 57,787 votes would have given us President Kerry; and in 2000, 269 votes would have given us President Gore."
But aren't you ignoring the white elephant here? In both cases an unnamed third-party candidate attracted enough votes to spoil the Democratic win.
With the winner take all electoral college, any votes that are more than 50% of the majority don't count.
If California had 80 Million Votes for A, and 20 Million votes for B, then the extra 30 million votes for A count the same as if there were only an extra 10 votes for A over B.
If a smaller state votes an A over B by 10,000 votes, those extra 30 million votes from California don't matter.
So the only states that a relevant are the ones where the campaigners estimate the voters are somewhere close to that halfway mark and they can tip the balance in their favor.
Personally I think in cases where there is a vote count difference smaller than the statistical risk of error of popular vote should be substituted.
As grandparent said, if such a differentially small amount of voters can have such a drastic change in how a country is governed, something is wrong. You say 50% is happy with the result, but you might as well say that 50% is unhappy with the result. If a political system results in such an outcome, then perhaps it needs to be changed in such a way as to make compromise outcomes more likely. You'll have to agree with me that if say 80% were sort of happy with the result, that would have been a much better outcome than what we actually got.
P.S. I'm saying this as a fairly conservative person, so don't go all 'you're just sour you lost' on me. Also, ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
That would acheive two things:
-Waste taxpayer dollars
-Encourage people to vote who shouldn't.
If you don't care enough to vote, you shouldn't vote. You forfeit your right to complain about the results by doing so, but you shouldn't vote.
It ticks me off all the movements of 'just vote, whatever it takes'. People who are responsible enough to vote will vote. The last thing an election needs are throngs of people who didn't spend an ounce of effort researching the platforms and tendencies of the candidates. Everyone *should* make an *EDUCATED* vote. If they want to forgo the EDUCATED part as its too much work to lookup, they should feel free to skip the election and not complain if they think the wrong person won.
this DVD is being sent out to voters in swing states. A few thousand votes here and there...
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The winner-take-all selection of state electoral votes isn't something described or even mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.... and it is a mistake to think that it has to be the only system for selecting candidates for the U.S. Presidency either.
I think California would benefit from having a proportional selection of electors, where even a 4%-5% shift in votes would still be gaining a few extra electoral votes for each candidate. It would also give a chance for 3rd party candidates to actually get some legitimate electoral votes... which is perhaps why it won't ever be done.
"(...) meaning if less than 1% of the voters in certain states had changed their mind to the other candidate the outcome of the election would have been different."
(...) meaning if less than 1% of the voters in certain states had their ballots changed to the other candidate the outcome of the election would have been different.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
Highly intelligent and well-informed people disagree on every political issue. Therefore, intelligence and knowledge are useless for making decisions, because if any of that stuff helped, then all the smart people would have the same opinions. So use your "gut instinct" to make voting choices. That is exactly like being clueless, but with the added advantage that you'll feel as if your random vote preserved democracy.
Try reading the links on the bottom, like the ones that show how Kerry lost on all districts in New Mexico that had touch screens. How the Ohio machines were networked, and prone to remote manipulation.
I disagree. I posted elsewhere but I think less than margin of error should be popular vote. Think about it if things are that close, why let a small number of votes count for the millions of votes in that state?
If it's too small to be sure, then call it a draw and let the popular vote from the rest of the country decide.
``Because of the way the popular and electoral votes interact, the outcome of the analysis had some surprising and intriguing results. For example, in 2004, 57,787 votes would have given us President Kerry; and in 2000, 269 votes would have given us President Gore. In all there have been 12 US Presidential elections that were decided by less than a 1% margin; meaning if less than 1% of the voters in certain states had changed their mind to the other candidate the outcome of the election would have been different."''
That is, assuming the vote counts they used in their research were correct. Which they likely weren't.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Those voting for the third party candidates (at least the ones I know), are quite vehement that none of the frontrunners are good candidates.
Case in point, one person I know who typically votes for third party candidates has stated he can't get behind any of the candidates, and that they are all wrong. He has stated his intent to go to vote just to turn in a completely unmarked ballot.
They don't believe in the 'least of evils', they tend to want all or nothing. I don't think it a particularly realistic view, but they are quite obstinate in insisting on the perfect candidate or else refusing to vote, regardless of the competition.
One of the things that surprised me the most in the analysis here is that Hawaii shows up so often in the recent elections as a swing state that could have made a huge difference.
Generally speaking, Hawaii is written off in national elections and only gets marginal attention in Presidential elections. It certainly isn't mentioned as a traditional swing state like Ohio, Michigan, or Florida... perhaps because of the small number of electoral votes. In a close election, however, even a few electoral votes can make a difference.
Other states that perhaps shouldn't have surprised me so much were New Mexico and Iowa... both relatively smaller states but have had close presidential election vote totals as well in several of the past elections. They do show up quite a bit.
For somebody planning a campaigning strategy approach for one of the major candidates, this is some incredibly interesting analysis and could suggest some approaches that haven't been looked at due to "conventional wisdom" thinking some states were more important when some of these smaller states could make a big difference.
BTW, that was a deliberate campaign strategy for the George W. Bush re-election team in 2004.
In a Galaxy Far Far Away.......swooosh
"Yes and simply because I am a Slashtard and have linked "the truth" below proves that indeed both elections were stolen despite investigatiosn by major (and leftist biased) newspapers in the aftermath which determined they were not."
"But no, because I, the Slashtard can link "the truth" on "the internet" it must be that the elections were stolen."
"See look at my rock solid evidence linked below, IT PROVES IT"
"Long Live King Gore"
Sorry to inform, but there is enough evidence to believe that both the last 2 presidential elections in the US were stolen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2004#Election_controversy [wikipedia.org]
Try reading the links on the bottom, like the ones that show how Kerry lost on all districts in New Mexico that had touch screens. How the Ohio machines were networked, and prone to remote manipulation.
Yes, we are. And our republic just happens to also be a democracy.
We're not a *direct* democracy, that's for sure, but democracy as a word is much more general than just that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerry_Military_Service_Controversy#Document_release
On May 20, 2005 John Kerry signed a 'Standard Form 180', releasing pretty much every possible relevant document, including all his military service, reserve and discharge records, as well as his medical records, to the Associated Press, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times.
-Chris
Media reform (ownership regulation, equal time for qualifying candidates)
Electoral reform (physical and fully auditable ballots, banishing the electoral college, plurality voting, etc.)
Reform of banking and finance sectors (start with close reevaluation of the Fed).
But I would place media reform as probably the first or second priority in returning the country to a saner path. These highly-concentrated corporate wealth centers now have major stakes or own the mass media outlets, and those media have so little in common with the average person that they are turning many important issues into incoherent and emotional posturing (when they're not stumping for new wars, that is). The public can't hash out important issues like this.
This might be a good place to start.
Other interesting links:
http://www.stopbigmedia.com/chart.php
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080616/mcchesney
John McCain will get us into a nuclear war with the restrengthening Russia! Vote for Zombie John Adams!
Actually, linear programming IS basic algerbra, but is best solved with geometry skills. Simpler formulas are being used in 6th and 7th grade math. Basic linear programming problems, like calculating the best sale price for profit based on demand, are math standards used in Algebra I, Geometry, and statiscics classes alike. In some states using circular math, like NY and Connecticut (tiered learning instead of seperating Algebra from Geometry, from Trig, which is simply stupid to do since they're all interdependent!) Linear programming and advanced logic are taught in the second year of high school math (9th or 10th grade).
But actually, it starts much earlier than High School. My wife teaches 3rd grade now in SC, but Linear programming is one of the standards of math she taught a couple years ago when teaching 4th grade. It appears again in the 6th and 8th grade curriculum standards on the state's PACT test.
The wiki article is highly technical, and goes pretty deep into equasion design, but honestly, you've been using this stuff for years, it just wasn't called "programming" and you didn't use function notation... (and it has no relation to writing software)
This is exactly the same as kids that use calculus, doing derivitives and more for optics experiments and when dealing with simple velocity equasions, in basic physics classes in 6th, 8th and 9th grade years before actually finding out it's called "calculus" because if they actually told kids that, they'd refuse the work and parents would lobby the schools not teach that stuff to kids who had not already taken calculs... Honestly, short form derivitives using the 4 shortcut rules is easier than algerbra, and many people believe it should actually be taught FIRST, after basic math skills but before geometry and trig.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Those recounts did not involve all counties.
Bush never won in the 3 largest counties in FL.
Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties have always voted Democrat. They did it for Clinton and the did it for Gore.
considering that these three counties have the largest population in the whole southeast United States, Bush never won the popular vote in FL.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Ok, this might be so extreme that you could call me a troll but if all elections are so close why don't you just toss a coin and save a huge amount of money? I understand that's a matter of legitimacy and popular involvement however when the president of 300+ million people is decided by a 269 votes margin tossing a coin models the outcome quite faithfully.
By the way, this happens in many countries. The outcomes of the elections in my country (.it) is usually resolved by small margins and the distribution of voters among electoral colleges. The last ones have been the exception to the rule. As left and right wing coalitions take turns at the government since 1994 tossing a coin could be good for us too :-)
I'm serious now: we have a very complex decision algorithm that yields a result that looks random (ok, I understand that the number of samples is small but forgive me). Does that teach us anything about the way we the people vote? How can half of the people be right and half be wrong? People tends to agree when judging many common practical and ethical problems, at least among members of the same culture. Did we end up with two different cultures inside the same country or the differences between the candidates are so small that votes split evenly because it's difficult to decide who's the best one?
... which doesn't reward voters of (literally) third parties. Other countries have it different - today's Germany, for example has 5 parties in parliament - conservatives, social democrats, liberals, greens and leftists. Especially green parties exist in many countries, but really haven't got any chance in systems that favor big parties - like the US or UK.
The more interesting question is, how large was the input to your 0-1 integer programming, and can you solve it for arbitrary input size and constraints? If so, please send me a copy of your algorithm...
http://xkcd.com/287/
At first, this made the impression that convincing hundreds of people would change the election result. Of course this is not true, because these hundreds are "key" people. You could convince 10,000 people to vote Gore, and Bush still would have been elected.
An interesting thing to compute/measure would be how many more random people had to vote for Gore before he had won the election. That's a more meaningful statistic. Because when you convince someone on the internet to vote, he's a "random" person.
We just suggest our wishes to the electoral college. There is no law that i know of that demands they have to do as we ask.
We don't live n a democracy, never have.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Large constrained optimization problems get solved all the time, algorithms like simplex scale nicely and the computer doesn't care that you've thrown hundreds of variables at it (well, it bogs down a bit, especially with non-linearities).
I've been paid rather well to consult on problems like this. The biggest they thought there was something wrong with their solver, but it was just bad data. The people collecting the data had been given inconsistent instructions, things like "measure at the beginning of the year" vs "measure halfway through the year". Garbage in, garbage out, and no fancy algorithm is going to save you.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Yes, 289 is the _smallest_ number of voters that could be switched to change the result of the election. But that gives a misleading picture of how close it was. You should also consider the largest number of voters that could switch without changing the result: that is several million votes (for example, Texas voted for Bush; switch 24.999% of the votes Texas cast to Bush to Gore, and the result does not change). In other words huge numbers of people (outside Florida and other swing states) could have decided to vote for Gore (or Nader) instead of Bush and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference.
Perhaps the fairest measure of the closeness of an election is: what is the smallest number N of votes such that if you picked N individual votes at random across the whole country and flipped them, there is more than a 50% probability that the result would change?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
So if I understand your analogy, the two icecream vendors must be spreading rumours that the left side of the beach is covered in raw sewage?
American politics is so simple once someone smart explains it!
The Bible speaks far more of the evils of adultery than of homosexuality, yet Evangelical Hacks only care about the latter, not the former. There is actually more in the Bible to support abortion (women who are executed and the fact they were pregnant at the time did not matter) than against it. And one big sin is completely ignored: charging usurious rates on loans. Lambs for Christ should be doing shock protests of Countrywide and CityFinanical, not abortion clinics.
In other words, the outcome of the last few US Presidential elections was basically random. ;) I'm always bemused by the US political system (disclosure: I'm not American), because voters are forced into impossibly broad categories. Either you're a dope-smoking, liberal hippie or your a tightly-wound god-fearing conservative. There's a complete absence of middle ground (barring a couple of fringe political parties that no one takes seriously). I would have a hard time getting up the willpower to vote on election day with so little real choice.
Only 1 vote would have given us President Gore.
Probably true but Joe Lieberman, Gore's VP choice, was pushing for an invasion of Iraq since 1998, and he's been a cheerleader for the invasion (and for much of the Bush policies on everything, in fact). Who knows whether he would have influenced President Gore to take the opportunity to invade Iraq. Remember, Gore thought there were WMD there too, and Lieberman thought Saddam was working with al Qaeda. I think a Gore presidency would have been much less irrational and abusive than the Bush one, but I'm not sure it would have kept the US out of Iraq.
Ever hear of the electoral college? Thus this entire story is irrelevant.
I don't think their actual policies are indistinguishable, but their campaign promises are. Both of the candidates know what's on Americans' minds: economy, war, corruption, whatever. Once the leading candidates get their parties' nominations, they set out to convince the voters that they will fix all of those problems. But they don't want to scare anybody away with big changes, so they make the safest, vaguest, most uncontroversial promises possible. There's only the thinnest sliver of difference left between them, just enough so that voters on the far left and the far right know which candidate belongs to them.
But candidates never keep their promises, whether intentionally or due to ideology being slapped in the face with reality. Once elected, when they don't have to worry so much about offending nobody, they show their true colors through real differences of action.
I suggest you read up on corporate finance because your post indicates a profound misunderstanding of the current economical crisis' ACTUAL source : Deregulation of investmebnt banking. These was lobbied for extensively by two people who'se names you might recognize from the current election cycle : Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Tresury Secretary "Hank" Paulson. Let`s not even go into the Senator`s invovlement in the "Keating 5" savings and loan scandal...
But yes,yes, keep blaming Clinton. It's much easier.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
The winner-take-all selection of state electoral votes isn't something described or even mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.... and it is a mistake to think that it has to be the only system for selecting candidates for the U.S. Presidency either.
I think California would benefit from having a proportional selection of electors, where even a 4%-5% shift in votes would still be gaining a few extra electoral votes for each candidate. It would also give a chance for 3rd party candidates to actually get some legitimate electoral votes... which is perhaps why it won't ever be done.
The method of electing the president is an issue that has been left for the states to decide. Some have a winner take all, others are starting to go to a proportionate count. Originally the president was elected by your congressmen.
Check the wikipedia article on the Electoral College. It's pretty good. Or at least it was yesterday. :)
Well, the Republicans in California actually tried to push through a proportional electoral representation measure back in 2007. [1]
It would wind up shifting 25ish electoral votes to the Republicans, enough to pretty seriously unbalance the election in their favor.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/09/california.split/index.html
People might teach 2D linear programming using geometrical means to some high school but they are decidedly NOT teaching fully blown arbitrary dimension LP with integer constraints like this article is using. Integer programming is an NP-hard problem. I teach this to university seniors.
The statement you quote is not listed in your source link anywhere, since you only linked to wiki's main page.
i'd raise this to +6 if i could
Would have the policies of these alternate Presidents been any different, or would have the results been roughly the same with the same congress, same senate and same courts and only a different President?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This person speaks the truth. It's clear that Gore should have won Florida had every district been counted, but the real tragedy is that election should never have been that close. He made too many strategic errors -- keeping Clinton at bay, trying to come off as a "centrist," ignoring his home state, etc. -- and on top of it he came across in public appearances as a humorless wonk. And he had a right-wing douchebag as a running mate. He took progressive votes for granted; it's no wonder so many voted for Nader. In the end the blame for Gore losing the election lies squarely with Al Gore. That doesn't make the eight years of Bush any more palatable, but still, there it is.
FDR was going to abide by the 2-term limit.
He was going to abide by an amendment that was ratified six years after he died?
The war started in 1939
No one said otherwise. He said the US wasn't attacked until 1941, which is true.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
There is no statistical margin of error in an election since the sum of the ballots is the population in question. All polls that come before an election are an estimation of what that population will be and come from a sampling of eligible voters.
FDR was one of the most popular presidents in history and served more than 2 terms; it was fear of a populist president doing it again that caused them to create a term limit. Term limits on president are not needed (the founders didn't have them;) however, the constitution needs to be brought back... People realize now that one man isn't the problem, it that they are all powerless or corrupt when they get in.
FDR did AMAZING work before the USA finally entered WW2 (which FDR manipulated to happen.) The economy WAS on rebound and had he lived long enough he would have brought the USA to recovery without WW2; I agree it would not have been as quickly without the transformation into a militant nation.
The USA remained a militant nation ever since WW2; needing an enemy to justify the continuation of the industrial military complex that became the cornerstone of the economy and managed to position itself to be politically untouchable. They didn't place their stuff in each district in the nation by accident...Mess with them and the local politicians get flack for lost jobs etc.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-04-03-floridamain.htm#more
MSU's 269 votes would have not swayed the election to Gore except in on one standard and it was not a standard being used in Florida (specifically Palm Beach) or promoted by Al Gore's lawsuit.
Oh, and can we stop talking about this now?
So there is no margin of error.
The ballots cast and counted are the population itself. The margins of error just exist in the informal polls the precede it.
Here is a related post about the 'spoiler' and 'wasted vote' dilemmas inherent in a two party system - (http://fubarpolitics.blogspot.com/2008/09/electoral-blackjack-counting-cards.html). It lays out a case that a basic understanding of the system's simple dynamics can actually allow voters to cast more expressive votes (today, with no changes to laws) and negate the spoiler effect while allowing voters to consider candidates outside of the two major parties.
Just because the problems they solve use 2D, simply because access to a 3D solver means a copy of Mathematica and a PC, not exactly convenient for a school, the principal of solving is the same, and in school we did linear equasions in math only, no graphical, to solve multi-variable equasions. The principal is the same once you use 3 or more variables, it just takes more time and effort to solve. 50 variables is no differnt than 3, and they teach 3 at least in high school, ususlaly just 2 in lower grades.
His inputs did not have 50 variables. The wiki article supported that complexity, but not this guy's equasions. All hes done is calculate the vote difference needed to win the election on the popular level, and also on the electoral level, then analyze the data to find the smallest nu,ber of votes in a state that by itself or in combibation with a couple of others would have swung it. This is not that hard... I wouldn't assign something like this as a nightly homework problem, or put it on a test, but there's no reason a couple of 10th graders working as a team could not design the equasion, which a computer could then have solved for them.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
...your party system will simply apply the art, nee, the science, nee, the engineering methodology...
Unless you're writing in German, the conjunction your looking for is "nay". (I have no doubt that Slashdot users can collectively alter standard English usage, but this is isn't a good case to wield their awesome orthographical power, since "nee" would tend to be confused with "knee" or, god forbid, "née".)
Ok, but here's where the errors are introduced:
When a ballot is "counted" it is being measured or detected,
by an imperfect detection machine.
The voting intention of the voter is being measured or detected,
and then recorded. There is possible error in the meaurement
or detection, and in the recording of the result, and where
manual tallying, there maybe random calculation errors in the
combination (addition) of the results.
This is classic experimental error, introduced by the imperfections/biases
of the measuring and recording systems.
You tell me how you model the statistical effect of that sort of error
on the overall result.
It seems to me that the amount by which recounts differ from original counts
gives us some handle on the size of these measurement + recording errors.
We could assume that each count and recount is a sampling from the "true"
voter intentions of the election, could we not?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
What this tells me is that, if you have good analysis in ahead of time (and with computers and lots of information available this isn't a very high barrier to campaigns with hundreds of millions of dollars available), that you don't have to change very much to commit effective election fraud. In short, you won't need anything like the scale of what the JFK supporters pulled in Illinois in the 1960 election.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So are you saying that our military are not US citizens? besides there is no clear evidence that we would have been attacked without the war(s).
Don't you get it, the election is always between a douche and a turd, because they're the only people who suck up enough to make it that far in politics.
There was no need there for tanks, artillery, or more than a few bombers, which is what largely went to Iraq.
People will always "wonder", but the move was not unreasonable. First of all, the "cotton bale next door" had its own, unrelated, shards, that had to be taken out — long ago.
And second, it was quite reasonable to believe, that the crafty needle would quietly move from the haystack to the cotton bale. Although Saddam's and Osama's distaste for each other was known, what was not as publicized, was Osama's earlier tensions with Mullah Omar. We only learned of it in 2004, when The Atlantic's journalist published his story:
Kicked out from Afghanistan by the US and its allies, Osama could very well have patched up his differences with Saddam, and begin a mutually-useful cooperation.
And then, of course, there was a question of moral high ground. Despite the howls of jealous "international disapproval" and the internal opposition (angry not so much at the war, as at Bush's earlier tax-cuts and reforms of the education system), ridding the world of an asshole of Saddam Hussein's caliber was a Very Good Thing (TM).
That the post-war efforts to rebuild the country were mismanaged and are only getting back on track now, is not an argument against it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Actually, 1 vote would have. As Jon Stewart said, "Bush got the minority vote - Clarence Thomas."
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
My view is that the population in question is the official tally of the vote: all the votes cast minus those that are discarded. It could be due to an imperfect detection mechanism or the voter failing to fill out the ballot correctly.
However, in our system, when the election's over it's over. There's no provision for a revote if the result is too close. If you introduce subjective processes such as "determining voter intent" it is no longer even a population or a sample and concepts such as margins of error don't even begin to apply.
...No, really. One way to measure the effectiveness of a voting system is the power of an individual voter to change the outcome of the election with his/her vote. Vote aggregation systems like the electoral college give an individual voter greater probability of affecting the outcome of a close election. There have been some very good analytical papers about this. Any system that lets a single vote move a block of aggregated votes has this characteristic.
I'm not ready to throw out the Electoral College system. In fact, I rather admire it. Just as I don't want New Yorkers deciding how I should talk or Californians deciding how I should think, I don't want mainstream group-think to decide all the politics of the day, either.
NovaPyro
Yes, I'm sure they did. They have some very interesting numbers here, but they either forgot or ignored one very important thing. Absentee ballots. You see, the absentee ballots are only counted if necessary. That means that don't know how many votes were really cast for either candidate in either election.
The only way this could be valid is IF they actually counted all the absentee ballots in Florida in the 2000 election (because they definitely did not in 2004). Not only that, did this include the military's absentee ballots which Gore wanted tossed out, because they postmarked after the required date, not because they were mailed late but because they couldn't be postmarked any ealier?
These numbers are nice and all, and I'm sure people are using them to sway American votes, emotions, and thought, but they are not valid.
There was a movement for this not long ago, and it was defeated. While proportional division of California's votes would have been good for California, it would have been bad for the policies California's majority favors. If even a third of California's 55 electoral votes were awarded to McCain, Obama's electoral prospects would be significantly dimmer -- it would effectively mean one more coveted large swing state he'd have to put under his belt. And if even GWB can take 44% of California's vote, you have to think that McCain might get more than a third of California's electoral votes.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
1. Are these issues not important? 2. Doesn't everyone have an issue that can turn the tide?
Perhaps the rights of the unborn are a minor issue to you, but to the person 35 miles away from a central office and thus still on dial-up, net neutrality and DRM legislation aren't major issues to them, either. Here on Slashdot, NN and DRM are a much bigger deal.
Bonus points: if they're as easy to get as you make 'em out to be, then there's no law saying that the democratic candidate (not just Obama) can't be pro-life and against legalizing federally-recognized gay marriages. They don't. Because they don't, they give up Evangelical Christian votes in order to gain the votes of the NOW, ACLU, and members of other organizations that hold those beliefs. Joey
The reason we haven't been attacked on American soil is due solely to the magic rock that I keep in my pocket. I put it in my pocket on 9/12/01, and there hasn't been an attack since, except for the numerous (daily?) mortar and rocket attacks on our embassy in Iraq which are probably nothing more than a proximity effect. Same with the hundreds killed and thousands wounded by munitions provided to insurgent Iraqis by the Iranians. In other words, if me and my magic rock leave the USA, you're all fucked.
"269 votes would have given us President Gore"
Thank goodness it was so many,...
I mean there's no way to insure that a 269 votes could get ignored/miscounted/changed. It's not like thousands of votes were unaccounted for, or that there was any suspicion that some votes weren't counted. That would be impossible and there's certainly no way that our current administration would ever be that corrupt.
If they were proven to be though...wouldn't that be treason?
California has 55 EVs, so with a proporational system, each 2% shift in the voting would effect one elector.
I have long said a proportional system should be in use.
I don't support popular vote schemes, since it would encourage states to increase total votes in mal-ways. Hey, lets allow anyone over 13 vote for president, that will increase our importance and get more coverage. And why not paroled felons. And hey, let's let people register and vote the same day. And lets not require any real proof of eligibility. And lets never check for double voting. And people that don't vote, don't matter with a popular only system. So if a blizzard hits, you don't matter. In a EC system, you count wether you vote or not. Which with the slave roots of the country, and the 3/5ths rule, and wide variation by state as to who could vote, the population-driven/EC system allowed PEOPLE to matter and not encourage compitetion in open voting rules.
"I suggest you read up on corporate finance because your post indicates a profound misunderstanding of the current economical crisis' ACTUAL source : Deregulation of investmebnt banking"
You sir, are quite full of shit. The repeal of Glass-Steagall simply allowed regular banks to get into other financial activities... stocks, bonds, etc. It didn't have a damn thing to do A) the government pressuring banks to give home loans to people that didn't qualify for them, and B) banks caving and giving those loans out of fear of being labled "racist". One political schmuck was saying last night that these "ninja loans"... no income, no assetts, were morally good because "the free market doesn't work for poor people".
The Glass-Steagall repeal also wasn't responsible for the culture of easy credit that helped get us into this mess. This is largely a failure of responsibility on the part of all the American people, rich and poor, democratic and republican. We abandoned responsibility, and now the bill is coming due. Victor Davis Hanson had it right... we're victims, but not innocent victims. We stopped seeing homes as a place to live, and starting seeing them as a way to make a quick buck by "flipping" them after some minor improvements. We all did things that made the price of homes shoot through the roof, far above any rational standard, and now reality has set in. The McMansions were never worth a million dollars or more. That was paper inflation, and we greedily, eagerly helped keep their prices inflated. We made it worse by taking out mortgages we couldn't afford.
One finance guy on Bloomberg made an excellent point yesterday. There would be no crisis if these mortgage holders were paying their bills. That's what it all comes down to. So spare me the bullshit about deregulation. This isn't about regulations, it's about responsibility. When the government did try new regulations to reform Fannie/Freddie in 2003, it was blocked, largely by Democrats, because the tightened lending standards for minorities and the poor would have been "unfair".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You see, there you go again. You could have the most incredibly insightful thoughts and opinions, but you lose any and all credibility as soon as you use the term "Nobama". It's akin to "Micro$oft" and such....it immediately makes you come across as childish and immature, and I stopped taking you seriously as soon as I read it.
As long as you apply the same standards to these clowns saying "McSame", fine, I'm with you on that.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
But I have my Tin Foil Hat and I'm reading from the top!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"Everything is the president's fault. Everything.
The devastating hurricanes we've experienced in his administration? Yep, Bush caused them"
Didn't you get the memo? Damnit, I hate it when that happens.
It's not Bush, it's Karl Rove. Get it right! Bush is just a puppet with a hole in his back for Karl Rove's hand. Rove is responsible for everything... before he turns into a cloud of bats and flutters away.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
On a more practical note, how do you think that that is actually going to work? what if someone only votes for president, but ignores the senators, congressmen, and local elections? where does this come from? and do you *really* want people voting only because they want $100? and then one must tie the ballot to the voter in order to accurately verify that they did indeed vote, and there goes our secret ballot.
Of course the opposite of this entire issue at hand is Saddam's means of voting. According to his interview with Dan Rather, he never had this problem - in 1996(?) he won with a 99.6% majority, in 2001(?) he won with a 100% majority.
Joey
I predict that, going forward, we will have more and more of these close elections. The typical voter is unintelligent and uninformed, just waiting to be swayed by a well-crafted emotional appeal. Given the dominance of electronic media, the relative unimportance of what any candidate says or does personally, and the fact that both sides have equal access to the technological tools of persuasion; voter choices will be randomly distributed, leading directly to the 50/50 outcome.
"Thank god we have George W Bush in office to uphold the law and protect the constitution. Who knows what a bleeding heart liberal like Al Gore would have done with it?"
Considering that he's telling his followers to do "civil disobedience" to halt new coal plant construction, gee, as President, he probably would have stopped any new power plant construction, period. I don't care what you think of Bush, if you can't see that Gore has a messiah complex, you're blind. Yeah, lets put a guy like that in the oval office, where he can "save us" whether we like it or not.
Gore is also a longtime proponent of the "living Constitution" theory... that it's "living, breathing, and evolving", and that the actual text doesn't matter, as long as we interpret it correctly "for the times".
So never mind that tenth amendment thing... the "times" say federalism is outmoded, so out it goes, baby!
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
popular vote doesn't decide the next US president, no matter how uselessly complex the mathematical analysis used. it's a SYMBOLIC VOTE, which is why i don't bother. it sickens me how few people i've mentioned this to have any clue what the electoral college is or does. 100% of the popular vote could go to one candidate, and still another candidate could win the election. wasting tax dollars re-analyzing a million mis-interpreted "hanging chads" in florida was a shameless red herring. only in america... *sigh*
"Second, they showed that if there been a full statewide recount of all counties, Al Gore would have received more votes than Bush"
Uhhh, Who did? Not the newspapers doing the recount study. How about a link on that?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Even though all independent news agencies in the EU have reported that Gore in fact did win in Florida, the reality is the only VOTE that had to change was the US Supreme Court.
It all comes down to one bitter female justice who hated Gore, actually - Sandra Day O'Connor.
She is the one to blame for our long national nightmare and our massive national debt and string of failures.
NEVER forget this FACT.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A slashdroid wrote-
"Would have the policies of these alternate Presidents been any different, or would have the results been roughly the same with the same congress, same senate and same courts and only a different President?"
Here is the reality check you asked for-
Ah look into the Gore Presidency-
1st 8 months progress without much fanfare as Bush's first did then wham 9/11, and from there history as we know it changes.
-the response to 9/11 is designed after the response to WTC93 and the US Criminal Justice System is tasked with the investigation and implicit in this is the fact that since its not a national security matter but a "criminal act" as deemed by this liberal democratic administration, there is no resulting military response, in any way shape or form or anywhere, anytime.
-a short time later more attacks here and abroad and yet gore holds fast and declares to the world, "these fiends who have committed these criminal acts...". In terrorist havens all over the world the laughter at this american response and strategy emboldens them further and they grow in strength, number and sophistication.
They realize their leaders were right all along, Americans are weak cowards and will soon be confined to the north american continent as american planes, crusise ships, corporate, military and private interests abroad are attacked along with our allies who mirror the american posture of bending over and proclaiming "thank you sir may I have another"
-meanwhile back at the mansion where the 22k per month energy bill sits on a desk, Al decides its time to save the world from the evils of CO2. He deems it enemy#1 and introduces broad sweeping legislation to cap american industrial output and limit future growth in the interest of "the planet" and in time the country reels into an economic depression as massive unemployement ensues, the dollars falls and in time the GDP drops by 25% in one year. This economic crisis is unlike the current crisis in both scope and cause since it was a self imposed decline based on dubious if not suspect political based science and the country is suffering as it never has in its history and our enemies prosper in the power vacuum initially created and based on a liberal democratic administrations ideology that these acts are "criminal" and not "acts of war" and do not require a military response.
Ultimately a power vacuum perpetuates as the worst economic crisis ever has forced the american govt to stop spending, meaning the global US Military presence previously tasked with protecting coastal waters of allies or shipping lanes free from terror has been retracted and terror on high seas is commonplace.
As a result Oil is now 15.00 a gallon and since the sitting president has proclaimed CO2 enemy#1, there is no movement on growing the american energy sector in the face of the trickle that is international oil trade due to terrorism and Uncle Al in his state of the Union Address of Janurary 2003 instructs us all to "stand together" and "tough it out". Riots, bread lines, welfare roles grow but the Govt has no money, thousands starve or freeze or are killed as crime soars
-but AL is steadfast in his belief that CO2 is the real enemy and proclaims, "the future will thank us" and in the shadows Al Qeada and their global affiliates are now entrenched in many strongholds and prosper in the absence of the americans military response that was under Bush. As a result their media effort rivals a hollywood pr push, they're popularity grows and expansion continues into weak countries or countries seeking alignment with "the enemy of our enemy" and that list starts with Iraq.
And then what we thought couldn't get worse gets worse, in the early morning hours of July 4, 2006, the dawn of the United States 230th Year since the countrys founding, a nuclear device is detonated from a small water craft moored a hundred yards off battery park, the devastation is massive and the death of an american city is the result
ALL BECAUSE SOME A
The point of the study is that your votes are only really important if you're in a swing state. I would actually inquire about the counter-point: as a California voter, how many times was California decided by less than 1% of the vote in the state? I'm guessing that number is pretty small, hence it's not really important at all if you vote in a non-swing state.
"And yes, it'd be a rosy and happy world if mortgage holders could pay back mortgages that are pretty much slanted directly against them, but they can't. The idea was that they'd go through a cycle of refinancings and somehow stay on top of it, even with refinancing, there's no way some of these mortgage holders could've paid off their mortgages. Even worse is that commentators and financial analysts were saying that it was a great time to buy homes and to get a mortgage
Slanted against them? What the hell???
Whose fault is it that these people went out and got mortgagees they couldn't afford? Did the government or banks hold a gun to their heads and say "hey you, go buy that house"? What???
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
This is precisely why such a movement to change the system within states generally fail. There is too much focus on the current election rather than thinking in the long term how it will benefit all of the political parties... and encourage candidates to fight for each electoral vote in every state rather than simply consider some states to be "safe" and ignore what is going on there.
Colorado defeated a similar measure in 2004, which would have given Kerry some additional electoral votes. Colorado Democrats were so interested in wanting the whole thing that they ended up with nothing... and it was the official opposition by the Colorado Democratic Party that ended up killing the measure.
California won't always be a "blue" state in presidential elections... and when that changes, the Democrats would be wishing they had that 1/3 of the electoral vote for the state.
I think most Americans take citizenship far too lightly, as well as the "franchise right" that comes from being a registered voter.
One of the most special and memorable experiences I went through was the naturalization conference in front of a federal judge with my brother-in-law when he became a U.S. Citizen. He had to go through an interview and demonstrate knowledge about our government that I don't think most high schools seniors could pass.
In some ways, I wish the "native born" citizens would have to go through a similar process just to be able to earn the right to vote. I think it would show up at least in terms of the level of maturity in political discussions, which we currently don't have.
Only two states have a different voting method: Maine and Nebraska. And those are still winner-take-all but are modified to be decided at the congressional district level instead of at the state level.
Colorado experimented with a proportional voting system, but the referendum about it failed in the 2004 election. A few other states like California have also tried, but have also found it difficult for political parties to give up temporary advantages of the current system.
You got it wrong. Let me correct the text for you:
Linear problems are easy-peasy. A 50-simplex is solvable by-hand.
P.S. The US election result optimization is a linear problem.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
Smaller states will always appear to be crucial to the outcome when they are not. The correct way to have viewed this problem would be to determine the changed outcome based on % of total vote in a state which must be changed and how that would modifiy the electoral outcome. Saying one needs to change 15K votes in say, Deleware where it amounts to >5% swing is to claim a very unlikely outcome. Far more likely is the swing of 1/2 or 1% of votes, even if that amounts to more votes in nominal vote terms.
Terrorism was on the Clinton Administration's radar and would probably have been on Gore's too; he didn't forget that the Cole and WTC attacks happened during his vice presidency. He would have taken a report titled "Al Qaeda determined to attack in U.S." seriously. For whatever good that would have done. It still would have happened, largely because it was a type of attack we hadn't seriously considered.
So 9/11 would have happened, and we would have invaded Afghanistan, because I can't imagine any President was a big enough peacenik that they wouldn't, or who could ignore the cries of the public to strike. Hell even Europeans and Canadians were cheering and volunteering to help when we said we were going to go kick the Taliban's ass.
But we would not be in Iraq. Nobody except the neo-cons was championing that cause after 9/11, and without the bully pulpit of the Oval Office, nobody would have listened to them. Nobody with any power would have even thought that was a sane thing to do while the occupation of Afghanistan, "Graveyard of Empires", was still ongoing, much less a prudent and wise thing to do.
I'm not even saying he would have been a good president cus I don't think he would have been, but so what the president we got wasn't good either and we wouldn't be in Iraq. That's more than enough for me.
The enemies of Democracy are
1) With the Electoral college system there is only perception of any state actually deciding
the outcome, its not reality. Without the Electoral College, every election would be
decided by California or NY, no thank you
2) the reason is that the polling and REPORTED results for "X" state happened to occur later
in the process than the other states and the feeble brained perceive this as a
determining factor when in actuality, the same results would have probably occurred no
matter when the results were tallied
THERE IS NO SHIFT IN THE OUTCOME, ITS SIMPLY ALL EYES UPON THE LATE RESULTS WITH THE MOST CONTROVERSEY SURROUNDING THE LAST STATE TO RETURN THE FINAL RESULTS AND THE "PERCEPTION" OF THIS STATE IN "DECIDING" THE OUTCOME
USE ALL THE FUCKING MATH YOU WANT YOUR WASTING YOUR TIME
The only exception to this would be Florida 2000 for example where "exit polls" were used by the MSM to decide the election for Gore and influence the remaining voters who had yet to cast their ballot!
...it ultimately took a world war to bring-back full employment. Without the war, FDR would have been voted out of office in 1940, and the recession would have stretched through most of the 1940s.
I hear this all the time from self-proclaimed conservatives - "war is good for the economy". This is fundamentally false. War is uniformly bad for all sectors of the economy other than war profiteers willing to practice fraud. The thing that saved FDR's economy was the death or permanent incapacitation of half a million American workers, which caused the same sort of painful economic realignment that Bush's "bailout" is attempting to prevent.
It's not the war. War does not benefit the economy. Massive die-offs, such as often (but not always) occur in war, is what redefines labor/capital relationships, particularly when the market is rigged through legislation to prevent the failure of industry segments.
Losing a war, or being involved in a prolonged occupation, might remove enough workers from the pool to fix the economy. You'd need to risk a far greater number of lives in 2008 than 1945, though.
Why would a greedy algorithm not work here? Say, using a measure of electoral votes/per popular margin?
If politics were a mere matter of numbers on a level playing field, this whole exercise would have value. But it doesn't.
Case in point: 2004.
"While it is true that had Kerry won Ohio, he would have won the election, he would have needed 59,301 voters to switch their vote from Bush to win the state. That number is more than the 57,787 votes (in New Mexico, Iowa, and Colorado) needed to affect the election that's listed here. "
You might deduce then that the smart move would have been to go after voters in those three states instead of going after voters in Ohio because it would have meant less voters to turn. The problem is that Ohio has 1.5 million more people than those three states combined, meaning a larger pool to get switchers out of, and has 1/6th the land area, making it a lot easier to campaign in.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
You have completely misunderstood what the parent is talking about. Linear programming doesn't mean solving systems of linear equations, it means maximizing a target function within a system of linear constraints. There is a way to do this geometrically when there are only two variables, which you might have seen in high school, but that approach doesn't work when there are three variables or more. In that case, you would use the Simplex algorithm. It can be done by hand, but the principle is not even remotely the same, and it is certainly not taught in high school.
The University of Richmond has recently created an interactive database with maps of voting in previous elections. You can look as far back as 1884 and you can break down the maps by state, county, ethnicity, margin of victory, etc. The website is http://americanpast.richmond.edu/voting/ if you want to check it out. They are still working to expand it and add information such as immigration patterns and voting stats for women. It takes a huge amount of memory so it can be a little slow to load. It's a great resource though!
the problem itself can be solved much more efficiently by dynamic programming than ILP, and it's not particularly challenging.
But Bush not only did nothing, he did several things which actually worked against the US being able to stop the 9/11 attacks:
- he effectively demoted Richard Clarke, a bipartisan terrorism expert, from cabinet meetings and put no one in his place
- he completely ignored Clarke's anti-terrorism proposal and put nothing in it's place
- he held not one single meeting about terrorism in his first 8 months in office
- he then went on an unprecedented month-long vacation in August, during which he got the PDB about Bin Laden, and responded by clearing some more brush for the cameras.
Then with the Anthrax attacks, we get another total clusterfrak of an investigation which may have found the right guy - after he committed suicide and can't actually defend himself.
Way to go.
I'm really tired of excuses for GWB. He simply didn't do his job. It would be bad enough if he tried and failed - but he doesn't even try.
And it's the same way he didn't do his job, that gave us the disastrous Katrina 'response'(where he ignored the problem and did **nothing** for an entire weekend), turned our first surplus in decades into the 4th-largest deficit in US history, and most recently fiddled while our economy melted down.
He's got jsut a few months left in office, thank God! But it's important to remember just how bad a President he was - so we don't ever elect anyone as terrible as him again.
GWB really is a complete and total, objectively verifiable disaster.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
For example, I think the current goalpost for victory in Iraq is "A solid stable government with free voting for it's people, that is relatively free of violence and strife."
Let's say that's so - and this new stable government of Iraq freely decides of it's own choosing that they're not going to sell us any of their oil.
Will that mean victory?
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Oops, thanks. Integer problems are just as easily solvable by hand as problems posed in the reals, then?
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Okay Sandbags, put up or shut up. Let's see you solve a trivial linear programming problem using just high school algebra. No fair researching any books or articles on linear programming or asking for help from anybody, no fair resorting to combinatorial enumeration. Just use those amazing high school algebra skills of yours:
Maximize z = 6X1 + 14X2 + 13X3
subject to:
0.5X1 + 2X2 + X3 <= 24
X1 + 2X2 + 4X3 <= 60
Xi >= 0 for i = 1, 2, 3.
Are votes counted in this article from the *people* in the U.S. or were they from the Electoral College?
A quick search shows that Gore won by a large margin with the *people* in the U.S., but Bush won with votes from the Electoral College.
Since the U.S. has the Electoral College, what is the point of the votes that us regular people cast?
It seems that if we didn't decide our president based on the Electoral College, we would have had different presidents in some cases, and Bush would have no means to rig his re-election.
That 300 people can influence the outcome of an election means that a well worded post on a website like slashdot or something awful could take the election.
Americans have an horrific record for voter turnout. You are not powerless. Let this be a lesson to all. It looks like you will soon have another chance to use your voice.
If you fucking waste it I will be laughing as your country descends into a violent and suffering filled anarchy. (Laughing helps me deal with grief)
Yeah, they couldn't possibly manage to get to the polls because they are only open from 6am to what 8 to 10 pm depending
I imagine these "employers" in the inner city "black neighborhoods" have "employed" a system of physical restraint where they deny the "black vote" by locking the doors or securing their persons and dare I say with chains and this massive conspiracy is implemented in the early hours of election day as the "bosses" arrive early and stay late to then be able to ensure total control and deny the vote in these areas and make the black man suffer!
What is really happening is that race bating idiot ninnys like you have taken this ball and have run with it so far for so long and with total cooperation from the MSM that people acutally believe this shit is commonplace when it is as rare as anyone here with a lick of sense.
The real election thieves are democratic wards in philly, chicago etc where you vote early and often.
Organizations that assist in this- ACORN or some of these dopey mayors who are more concerned with the Felon vote rather than the military
Democrats and Republicans have both become very good at choosing their positions based on what 51% of America wants - and when some part of their platform is unpopular, they change their ideology to get back to 50% of the vote.
How many need to compete to have the maximum competition? If someone else can do the same thing, you only need one person competing. And anyone can adopt any issue platform here.
That's the secret to American democracy - all candidates try to steal each others best ideas, and scrap their own worst ideas, and by election time, the country gets basically the same "issues" regardless of who is elected.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I like you. I come from overseas you see. Is there any way you could record the learning process between not caring and caring so that other Americans may learn from it? I find it impossible the amount that your stupid government influences my life. I don't get a say in it though. It makes me really upset when Americans say "everything is the same, everything sucks, and you should give up on trying to make a positive change in any part of your life or any part of your country"
If you want to destroy your country and your life thats fine but could you at least vote for a government that wont fuck with me as well?
In return I will make sure my coutry doesn't mess with your life. (I feel reasonably confident that simply as a politically minded citizen I can at least keep an eye on that for you.)
The trick to being an informed voter and an effective citizen is to listen between the elections. Everyone gets so fired up about elections because it's a competition and we love competition! But realistically elections are not the most important part of being a member of this democracy. You get the best insight and can have the most impact by staying tuned in and engaged.
Elections make everything crazy, including candidates. But if you already know the issues and candidates you can have a much better view of what is really going on.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Look again. That link was not a quote. It does not link to a wiki, but to rollingstone.com. The article at Rolling Stone is an unbelievably thorough and meticulously referenced proof that the 2004 election was indeed rigged to keep Bush in office.
Oops - the ranking system made the parent appear to be a different post, (#25166927)
They didn't teach us the algorithms that are actually needed to solve it, but they taught us how to pose questions as linear-programming problems, how to solve simple 2d ones geometrically, and use off-the-shelf computer tools to solve more complex ones. I.e., exactly what this grad student did.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What is the error margin on counting the ballots? There is some degree of error, and I bet it's bigger than 1% using the balloting techniques that have been employed over the years. If the results of the election are closer than what you can accurately count, it's a tie. That's what should have been declared in 2000 - Florida law would have sent that to the state legislature, which had a Republican majority, and it would have gone to Bush. At least that would have been both following the rules and logically consistent.
Let's be straight about this. The result was already in favour of the losing candidate. You can bet that if the vote was 1% more or less either way, it wouldn't have made a shred of difference. Those who believe that the US elections are for anything other than a fancy show are deceiving themselves. Exit polls don't lie, but diebold machines can very easily.
Scoop's special USA coup feature covers it all very well.
Greatest Show On Earth! Everybody will be watching! The Game, the Meta Game, and the Meta-Meta Game! --Each one alone worth the price of admission!
Don't miss it!
Nobody knows what will happen! Nuclear exchanges not ruled out!
Getcher tickets now! As John Oliver put it:
"George Bush will not be remembered by history as the best president. . , but if he buckles down and works really, really hard before November, history might just remember him as. . ."
Stewart: ". . . The worst president?"
Oliver: "The last president."
Nervous laughter from the crowd.
Getcher tickets now! On November 7th, the doors will close. --And you might not be allowed back out again! (Actually, January is where I see things getting really interesting. So Live, Love and Learn the heck out of 2008! If things get rough after that, you're all welcome to crash at my house. Big Slashdot slumber party! I bet we could build an awesome new world. We'd have the best battle armor and we could call ourselves the "Brotherhood of Steel" or something cool like that.)
Cheers all, do your best and fear nothing!
-FL
The US Constitution defines the protections US citizens have from their Government. The US Government has established in the courts the precedent that members of the US Military is not protected by the US Constitution. Ergo, the US Military are not US citizens from a legal standpoint. However, I don't see how this relates to my post. Those enlisted have most certainly lost. Mental health care within the military is pathetic at best, non-existent at worst, which is why you're seeing a huge spike in suicides and other preventable psychiatric-related conditions. The injury levels from Iraq and Afghanistan are unimaginably high, with many of those injured lacking any serious possibility of future employment, and with the press reporting many cases of troops having their pay docked or withdrawn entirely because they were hospitalized. If you only get paid when you don't do your job, you do indeed lose if the only way to survive IS to do your job.
So, yes, the military have lost. Massively. Not just the individuals, either. The US Navy had its funding slashed dramatically, leading to the cancellation of many key projects, from the start of the war in Iraq onwards. The airforce has lost a B2 stealth bomber and it wasn't from hostile fire. The accidental transport of nukes was also due to failures indicative of infrastructure decay and lack of resources. And how the hell do you lose a Predator to small-arms? Bet you 1000:1 it was lack of maintenance and/or lack of manpower, not Pakistan's soldiers being able to hit a black target on a black night at extreme range. The generals won't get the lucrative book deals, not without violating laws governing classified information. That means the market is open only to Defense secretaries and the Commander in Chief. The former won't get nearly as good employment opportunities, which means Bush is the true winner.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Statistics will admit to anything if you torture them enough, and this guy's gone out of his way in that department.
Just for example, have a look at his evaluation of the 1988 election. Less than 2%, he says. We are talking here about an election that was an extremely clear landslide. Okay, so it wasn't quite the epic skunking of '84, but it wasn't anywhere near close, either. Less than 2%, he says, but that's if you can cherry-pick the *specific* half-a-million-plus votes you want to change. At that point you might just about as well rearrange the districts until they all look like salamanders. Note too that in some cases he's changing the outcome in states that could have been called with a high degree of confidence *months* before the election, e.g., Montana. Sure, that's only 10739 votes, but what would it have taken for Dukakis to actually *get* those 10739 more votes in Montana? Note that that's not 10739 more people coming out to vote for him; that's 10739 people who voted for Bush changing their mind and going for Dukakis instead. In Montana, in 1988. Yeah, *that* could've happened, maybe, in some alternate universe where everyone wears a goatee. I remind you, in 1988 the iron curtain had not come down yet, and Reagan was *fantastically* popular even in the moderate states; in the conservative rural states he almost may as well have been the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Bush made sure to be seen in public with Reagan a lot that year (go figure; funny how McCain hasn't been seen in public so much with his son). Sure, 10739 isn't very many votes. But the voters in some of those states *knew* where their states' electoral votes were going, and the turnout reflects that; if it had been a closer race, turnout would have been higher.
Even the 1984 election, which is about as decisive as a blowout can ever get in a country with actual free elections and more than one candidate, comes in at less than 7% in his reckoning. That ought to tell you something about how his numbers are constructed. I live in a major swing state and have only ever met one person who admitted to having voted the other way in that one.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Nice try, but the fact is, the Republican group, in charge of managing the election outcome, knew, beyond any doubt, that far more than enough votes had been cast for Gore, in the State of Florida, and then not counted, based on flimsy interpretation of flimsier guidelines, to give Gore the Presidency.
269 votes??? Guess again, pal, and put away the calculator and the 'models.' Two (2) votes, only, would have accomplished the same outcome, and both of those votes, of course, were on the Supreme Court.
Next thing you know, this guy's going to come up with 100k guys kept Nixon from beating Kennedy, when, in fact, one guy was responsible: Mayor Richard Daley.
The terrorists that Afganistan was supporting.
Iraq, not so much.
Tell me this Obi-wan, what are the chances of presidential elections being so close, so often? How come the U.S. voters are so magically divided evenly down the middle on the issues? What is more probable: That we seem to be almost 50/50 on who to run for president, or, that one candidate cheats more than the other to get just ENOUGH votes to win?
>>The US Constitution defines the protections US citizens have from their Government. The US Government has established in the courts the precedent that members of the US Military is not protected by the US Constitution.
Members of the military are subject to the UCMJ, which has a different set of procedures and protections, but it's not like military members suddenly become PNGs when they enter.
>>Ergo, the US Military are not US citizens from a legal standpoint.
Lols. By this argument, anyone who goes to family court to handle a divorce proceeding isn't a US Citizen because he didn't use the normal legal system.
>>And how the hell do you lose a Predator to small-arms? Bet you 1000:1 it was lack of maintenance and/or lack of manpower
It's a predator. The point of the whole thing is this: who cares?
Couple of things.. the US Military is insane about mental health. Any vet literally gets a lifetime "come in for free" card. Not only that, but they call and mail you shit all the time about it. Your comment about injured soldiers losing pay and not being taken care of is mis-directed. That particular problem is for National Guard and Reserve and is the responsibility of the state government once released from national duty. It is a failure of the State's gov and State's reserve components. But to be fair, States never had to deal with this type of thing in the recent past.
The only other thing i'd like to comment about is that poor UAV. Commanders have always had this failure to understand and utilize newer equipment and unconventional tech/units. They want some recon done and say hey.. that UAV is unmanned and nobody will bitch if it get's shot. You wouldn't believe how many have been shot down, or how many have crashed in a storm. I think too much weight was put into the Predator, i'm a fan of the Global Hawk and Desert Hawk myself.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
5 people telling the other 4 what to do
that's not freedom or choice
the system is defunct
reboot
*DrugCheese rants*
Just goes to show how different things could be today if those damn dead people would stop voting after they're buried...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Linear programming with n variables and m constraints (n not necessarily equal to m) involves solving up to $C_n^m$ times a series of p x p matrices, with p= min(m,n). The usual algorithm is the simplex , which is indeed not that hard but not up to high school level. You need a good command of linear algebra to really understand it, especially the corner cases. A very bright 10-12th grader could probably understand it and program it too. However, an efficient way to solve LP was not found until 1984, so LP is not that easy.
Now the article is about LP with integer constraints (i.e. integer programming or IP). This is much harder. There are no known efficient way to solve IP. The whole field of combinatorial optimisation is not taught until university after a good course on linear algebra and discrete mathematics.
However, an efficient way to solve LP was not found until 1984, so LP is not that easy.
Depends on how you define efficient - worst case, or average case. Karmarkar's algorithm has a polynomial bound for the worst case, which Simplex doesn't, but in practice Simplex often beats Karmarkar. Sort of like Quicksort vs. Heapsort - the latter gives guaranteed worst case performance at O(n log n), but in practice people prefer Quicksort. Even though it can perform as O(n^2) in a worst case scenario, such performance occurs only a handful of times in a combinatorially large space of orderings.
Bush won by one vote: five to four -- in the Supreme Court.
"Democracy." It's just a slogan.
Observe that Jack Kennedy would have won even if Illinois had gone to Nixon. Republican pundits like to claim that Joe Kennedy bought the presidency for JFK there, yet the data shows that while Joe might have played dirty in Chicago, this was in the end irrelevant. Jack would have won regardless.
Integer problems are in general quite complex to solve. Not the US election, which was the case here. It's easily approachable as a linear continuous problem, then constrain critical variables and then a brute-force search on the 10 or so critical states.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you