It's not that clear cut
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
Leaving aside the issues of media fairness, quality of the candidates, and possible lawsuits in Florida... there are still points to be made for and against the Electoral College. Personally, I am not as wildly enthusiastic about it as you are, but I also don't think it is the Spawn of Satan. (FWIW, I do remember High School Civics class; I think it's possible to have reasonable and REASONED objections to the Electoral College.)
Your points:
* Small states and areas with low population density are not ignored
Let's break this down:
1. Small states are not ignored. True. However, the population of those states would not be ignored in a direct democracy, so the difference to me seems to be that the states per se are what are protected by this: that is, the state government, its affect on the state's residents, and perhaps psychological factors like the populace's identity as a resident of a particular state. Depending upon your feelings about "state's rights", this may be important to you.
2. Areas with low population density are not ignored. For me, this raises the question, "should the government represent the people or both the people and the land?". If it just represents the people, then once again the people would be represented in a direct democracy; the "area" (region, number of square miles, or however you define this) is unimportant, regardless of its population density. There are probably counter-arguments, however, that the "area" is important because the people who live there know more about its resources and possible uses (national parks, logging, etc).
* In the case that something awful happens (the president-elect turns out to be psycho after the election, we've elected the Anti-Christ, or god forbid they die in a plane crash, etc...) the electors don't HAVE to go with the people's vote... they can break ranks and vote whichever way they want to. Remember, a candidate needs 50% of the electoral college to win, or else it goes to the House of Representatives - so in the case of a close election, a few defecting electors can change the process drastically. Not what we want to happen in a normal election, but it's there as a safety.
It is also, I think, a danger in normal elections: if an Elector goes nuts or members of the college are bribed, they can vote against the populace and it's completely Constitutional. Most states have laws which guard against this: for example, the electors may be chosen by the political party of the candidate that wins the most votes. However, the danger exists in normal years as much as the "safety" exists in abnormal years.
* It turns out that each person's vote is more powerful that way. You vote for a small portion of the big vote, but you have a much bigger contribution to your portion of the vote compared to if you just had a general popular election.
I've read (skimmed, technically -- Discover has a lot of fluff) the article reference on Slashdot a few days about this, and I don't think I agree with the conclusions. The basic facts are valid, of course: you do have a bigger say in something that is noticeable, since each state is individually noticeable rather than just the entire coutnry being noticeable.
But does this make your vote more important? On average, I don't think it does. True, every voter in a swing state is more important, but the rest of us are LESS important. I live in Texas; why should I vote, since I knew the state was going to go to Bush? Whereas if we had a direct democracy, my vote would contribute to the final total for a given candidate and would have some importance.
Granted, it would be less important than the votes of Floridians this year, but it would still be more important than it was in Texas: not important at all.
You may say that there is always the chance that Texas would not go to Bush, so my vote is important. That may (or may not) be, but the psychological affect of thinking that my vote is unimportant is itself important. I suspect this is one of the reasons why voter turn-out is so low.
* Finally, it's the only thing that prevents the presidential election from being a full-blown popularity contest. Basically, if we go to a direct-election system, we might as well change the position's title from "president" to "homecoming king".
I disagree that the election would be any more of a popularity contest than it is now.
Why is a popularity contest with rounding error better than one without? Why is a popularity contest for one state better than a popularity contest for the entire country? Why should we have a popularity contest in states that are important (because they are known to be swing states) while the rest of the country is ignored (and possibly left to make a slightly more rational choice)?
There are, however, possible additional arguments in favor of the Electoral College:
1. It discourages people from voting, so voters tend to be people who care
more strongly than most. Hopefully this helps weed out apathetic voters who are just following whims or party affiliation.
2. If swing states are ones which are somehow representative of shifts in
American culture (or at least are representative more often than other
states), then decisions made by swing states represent early responses to
coming issues. For example, Florida has a lot of retirees and first- and second-generation Hispanic Americans. Is that not a preview of America 20 years from now?
If both candidates are basically presenting a centrist message,
swing states may represent a magnification of the small differences
between candidates.
The counter-counter-argument is that the candidates appear centrist only
because we are looking at sound bites, charisma and party affiliation, not
actual policy. If we were looking more at policy, the decision might not
be so evenly split.
I don't mean to argue strongly either for or against the Electoral College (though, personally, I think we would be happier without it). My primary point in this article is that the issue is not as clear-cut as you (or many anti-EC people) have presented it.
As an aside, I personally would like a system with formal "abstain" votes for when you don't like any candidate, and prefferential voting: for example, people could vote for Nader then Gore; if Nader doesn't win, their vote goes to Gore.
One note on this: people who write software for your product don't necessarily have to assign the entire copyright to you. They could theoretically assign to you the right to distribute their patch, or to distribute it under the GPL, or to distribute it in North America, or...
How many rights you require people to assign to you before you accept the patch is up to you. You might choose to only require some subset of the rights be signed over to you, if that would "sweeten" the deal and get more people to work with you.
Does anyone know how much these Alpha boxes will cost? I would certainly be interested in buying one, but really don't want to pay more than I would for a good PC... IMO that money would be better invested in a small Beowulf-ish system -- figure you can build a PC using generic parts (Celeron 300A, two 128 MB DIMMs, 100bt NIC, etc.) for under $800, then $4000 means a 5-node micro-cluster with a switch in the middle. For tasks that can be distributed, you're probably getting more CPU for your dollar.
The counter argument is that an Alpha workstation would have less latency. I was playing around with an Alpha 21164 at 600MHz running NT the other day... find *.dll took about 1.5 seconds to return 750 items... and the stupid Windows cursor was actually changing for each widget it went across in the explorer window (if you pay attention, it normally doesn't on an Intel, but on an Alpha you really see just how noisy the Windows UI is -- it was actually visually distracting). I can only imagine what Linux would be like on one of these....
So I guess my decision comes down to: do I need a fast workstation or something that is fast for batch jobs? And my answer is: I don't have enough money anyways, so never mind. *sigh*
Slashdot Mirror
Your points:
Let's break this down:
1. Small states are not ignored. True. However, the population of those states would not be ignored in a direct democracy, so the difference to me seems to be that the states per se are what are protected by this: that is, the state government, its affect on the state's residents, and perhaps psychological factors like the populace's identity as a resident of a particular state. Depending upon your feelings about "state's rights", this may be important to you.
2. Areas with low population density are not ignored. For me, this raises the question, "should the government represent the people or both the people and the land?". If it just represents the people, then once again the people would be represented in a direct democracy; the "area" (region, number of square miles, or however you define this) is unimportant, regardless of its population density. There are probably counter-arguments, however, that the "area" is important because the people who live there know more about its resources and possible uses (national parks, logging, etc).
It is also, I think, a danger in normal elections: if an Elector goes nuts or members of the college are bribed, they can vote against the populace and it's completely Constitutional. Most states have laws which guard against this: for example, the electors may be chosen by the political party of the candidate that wins the most votes. However, the danger exists in normal years as much as the "safety" exists in abnormal years.
I've read (skimmed, technically -- Discover has a lot of fluff) the article reference on Slashdot a few days about this, and I don't think I agree with the conclusions. The basic facts are valid, of course: you do have a bigger say in something that is noticeable, since each state is individually noticeable rather than just the entire coutnry being noticeable.
But does this make your vote more important? On average, I don't think it does. True, every voter in a swing state is more important, but the rest of us are LESS important. I live in Texas; why should I vote, since I knew the state was going to go to Bush? Whereas if we had a direct democracy, my vote would contribute to the final total for a given candidate and would have some importance. Granted, it would be less important than the votes of Floridians this year, but it would still be more important than it was in Texas: not important at all.
You may say that there is always the chance that Texas would not go to Bush, so my vote is important. That may (or may not) be, but the psychological affect of thinking that my vote is unimportant is itself important. I suspect this is one of the reasons why voter turn-out is so low.
I disagree that the election would be any more of a popularity contest than it is now.
Why is a popularity contest with rounding error better than one without? Why is a popularity contest for one state better than a popularity contest for the entire country? Why should we have a popularity contest in states that are important (because they are known to be swing states) while the rest of the country is ignored (and possibly left to make a slightly more rational choice)?
There are, however, possible additional arguments in favor of the Electoral College:
1. It discourages people from voting, so voters tend to be people who care more strongly than most. Hopefully this helps weed out apathetic voters who are just following whims or party affiliation.
2. If swing states are ones which are somehow representative of shifts in American culture (or at least are representative more often than other states), then decisions made by swing states represent early responses to coming issues. For example, Florida has a lot of retirees and first- and second-generation Hispanic Americans. Is that not a preview of America 20 years from now?
If both candidates are basically presenting a centrist message, swing states may represent a magnification of the small differences between candidates.
The counter-counter-argument is that the candidates appear centrist only because we are looking at sound bites, charisma and party affiliation, not actual policy. If we were looking more at policy, the decision might not be so evenly split.
I don't mean to argue strongly either for or against the Electoral College (though, personally, I think we would be happier without it). My primary point in this article is that the issue is not as clear-cut as you (or many anti-EC people) have presented it.
As an aside, I personally would like a system with formal "abstain" votes for when you don't like any candidate, and prefferential voting: for example, people could vote for Nader then Gore; if Nader doesn't win, their vote goes to Gore.
How many rights you require people to assign to you before you accept the patch is up to you. You might choose to only require some subset of the rights be signed over to you, if that would "sweeten" the deal and get more people to work with you.
Does anyone know how much these Alpha boxes will cost? I would certainly be interested in buying one, but really don't want to pay more than I would for a good PC... IMO that money would be better invested in a small Beowulf-ish system -- figure you can build a PC using generic parts (Celeron 300A, two 128 MB DIMMs, 100bt NIC, etc.) for under $800, then $4000 means a 5-node micro-cluster with a switch in the middle. For tasks that can be distributed, you're probably getting more CPU for your dollar.
The counter argument is that an Alpha workstation would have less latency. I was playing around with an Alpha 21164 at 600MHz running NT the other day... find *.dll took about 1.5 seconds to return 750 items... and the stupid Windows cursor was actually changing for each widget it went across in the explorer window (if you pay attention, it normally doesn't on an Intel, but on an Alpha you really see just how noisy the Windows UI is -- it was actually visually distracting). I can only imagine what Linux would be like on one of these....
So I guess my decision comes down to: do I need a fast workstation or something that is fast for batch jobs? And my answer is: I don't have enough money anyways, so never mind. *sigh*
Morning. Need coffee.