Let's build a better electoral system with math

A state's electoral votes are proportionally divided according to the proportion of votes a candidate received.

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>>8486009
>"fair" system
You know there's only one thing that is fair in this world.

in a dictatorship, every citizen's vote is of equal worth

so clearly it is the best option

>>8486009
How about just fucking counting the votes like in every other country?

Four posts in and the autism is already off the charts

>>8486021
>>8486009
>I believe /sci/ can think up some more logical, fair systems based on simple mathematical principles.
this is why no one likes STEMlords. you are basically trying yo do philosophy with math, while rejecting philosophy. you are scum and should kill yourself asap

>>8486009
This post is so reddit it fucking hurts.

The electorate system is based off of the majority of the votes in a state and is a winner take all situation. Look up faithless electors.

>>8486021
because its less prone to rigging, which does happen due to the extreme polarization between views. It also means that the 50% of the population that lives in 1% of the USA doesnt dictate what the other 50% of the population living in the 99% of the USA does. This is the same reason people want to leave things up to the state because things vary dramatically between state to state.
Also, lefties in big states tend to pressure everyone else to vote left through violence and misinformation, so its best that theyre worth less :3

>>8486036
>any threads that aren't blatant shitposting are reddit
>civilized discussion scares me

>>8486037
because its less prone to rigging, which does happen due to the extreme polarization between choosing figureheads. It also means that the 50% of the population that lives in 99% of the USA doesnt dictate what the other 50% of the population living in the 1% of the USA does. This is the same reason people want to leave things up to the state because things vary dramatically between state to state.
Also, righties in big states tend to pressure everyone else to vote left through violence and misinformation, so its best that theyre worth less :3

>>8486009
1) Take all the votes for the candidates get in each state.
2) Divide it by half.
3) The person who has the highest vote wins the state and EC.

Flo: 1.1K Guy A , 1K Guy B
Flo: 550 Guy A, 500 Guy B
Guy A wins Florida.

Alternative.:

The guy who wins the most counties in a state wins the state and the EC.

>>8486039
"Hello 'leddit, the mandela effect has an outdated name, lets think of a new one!"
"We did it leddit!"


How can we make X better
What should we do to improve X
I don't agree with X, lets change it
X works just fine, but it could be better

>>8486042
The second one doesn't address the issue of drastically random population distributions across counties. Michigan for instance, has a shit load of small counties and one or two massive ones that hold the majority of the populace. So I can see it not being elegant to give the state to the candidate with more counties. I think a working system would need to normalize each county.

For example, arbitrarily assuming each county has the exact same number of people equal to the state population divided by the number of counties. Then, awarding 1 point to a candidate every time he/she receives that number of votes.

State population = 1000 people
Number of counties = 20
Number of votes needed to earn one point = 50

>>8486043
>I like X
Fuck you you Xtard and your Y-phobic dumb cancer. Go back to your X and stay there.

am I doing it right ?

>>8486009
You can't "fix" anything without fundamentally changing the nature of government (i.e. from a presidential system to a parliamentary system).

Any system which converts a 49-51 split to a 0-100 split is fundamentally broken by design, and tinkering with how you decide which way the 0-100 split goes doesn't change that.

Even more fundamentally, you're stuck with the fact that, on one hand each individual is just one person out of a few hundred million, while on the other that individual will, to themselves, be more important than the other hundreds of millions combined.

If you live in a city your vote counts for half as much as a vote from someone who lives in a rural area. City is defined as having a population of 500,000 or greater. So if a candidate got 400,000 votes in NYC it would be adjusted to only 200,000 votes so the city dwellers don't overrule the rest of the state which is rural every election. For a candidate to win they should have to win the majority of the city vote AND rural vote.

>>8486009
Perimeter squared over area of the district MUST be less than 20.

>>8486510
fucking electoral college is rigged. its literally made for republicans to win NON STOP

>>8486009
It already exists it's called single transferable vote or runoff voting whichever you prefer.

You don't vote for one candidate you rank them by order of most to least preferred. If your #1 choice candidate didn't get enough votes to win then your vote gets transferred to your #2 candidate and so on and so forth. Obviously I'm simplifying massively but that's the general gist of the system.

>>8486557
It wouldn't work in current America. It would still come down to just the leaders of the two major parties and a tally of the popular vote. For a truly fair system to work it should give third parties a decent chance at winning.

>>8486021
Almost no country aside from the UK (which in itself has tons of problems with gerrymandering and two partyism) does straight FPTP popular vote you retard.

Because it's shit.

>>8486021
Including the 3 million votes from illegals? What could go wrong?

>>8486630
I wouldn't write it off that fast. The voters would need to be educated on how the new system works and that should start up to a few years before a major election. The system should also be trialed in local elections where there is less at stake. Resources regarding and explaining STV should be easily available to the public and should be easily available especially as a major election draws closer.

While STV does tend to drift towards a two party system it's no worse than our current system and has a major plus in it's favor compared to FTPT. No spoiler effect.

>>8486648
>The voters would need to be educated on how the new system works

Then it's already doomed. The last thing I would expect the US people to do is learn about what they're voting on or how, and I say that as an American. There really needs to be a test we should pass before being given a ballot.

>>8486646
>votes from illegals
what kind of retarded system lets random people vote? dont you have to actually register to vote in the us?

>>8486694
Not if you live in California.

>>8486694
to legally vote, yes. Of course, it's racist to require documentation/ID/proof of citizenship from voters. Anyone can just walk up and write a name to cast a ballot of their choice.

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california doesnt decide for the union. get over it.

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>>8486037
>lefties in big states tend to pressure everyone else to vote left through violence and misinformation

>>8486050
>am I doing it right ?
yes

>>8486797
I would say divide CA into two states but that would solve nothing. Whether it's 55 electoral votes or 35 and 20 it'll go blue either way.

They should really find a way to (fairly) lower the number because most of the midwest only get 4-7 and it takes over half the country just to balance out CA's share.

>>8486009
make all the congressional districts have equal amounts of population
they all equal 1 EC
you win by congressional district, Electoral college voters are mandated to vote for who their district votes for.

>>8486851
>make all the congressional districts have equal amounts of population

But how? Someone will have to redraw the lines and there's a huge risk of gerrymandering abuse.

>>8486557
This is the correct answer

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>>8486009
>stuff you said

The current system is fine. The electoral college is a compromise where by states with large populations have a check placed on their influence over the federal government.

The States being sovereign require fair representation for themselves at the federal level.

Having a number of electoral college voters corresponding to the number of house and senate representatives for each state is just fine.

In fact you could already say that the system is skewed to heavily in favor of states with large populations.

Is it really fair to Montana that California gets to have a greater influence over who will be the president of the government at the federal level? The answer is probably no, but that's the compromise that makes most sense.

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>>8486009

Let's just build a better country.

>>8486856
make a computer do it

if the programmers put a bias in there to favor a party someone can simply check the code

>>8486016
What?

>>8486897
Looks pretty neat. But two things: 1) what happens if there's a 25/25 tie, and 2) what happens to the boundaries when enough people move?

The role of the Electoral College was not to have weighted voting, but to lessen the chances of populist candidates from deluding the uneducated masses. It quickly turned into a weighted voting system, that is not unpopular enough to be gotten rid of. And as far as a populist candidate deluding the masses... Welp.

The senate is the branch that is suppose to give weighted representation based on State.

The two party system is the result of winner takes all mechanics. The only way to be a winner is by falling in line with on of the two poles.

Bipolar systems that are balanced will diverge over time. In other words polarization, which often leads to civil war.

1) President is elected on popular vote.
2) House of Representative is ranked choice, percentage distribution voting.
3) Supreme Court is ranked meritocracy.

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>>8486918

Eh, it's an autistic exercise, really. What happens if Puerto Rico becomes a state? Etc.

Here's another one...

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PREFERENTIAL VOTING

>>8486951
That looks a little more reasonable but the problem I always see when someone tries to split CA is they do it horizontally which one change anything. The western coast is very liberal compared to the valley and eastern parts which mostly vote Republican. To make a split worthwhile it would have to be a vertical bisection of the state.

>>8486958
>doesn't want to vote for a major party
>ends up having to vote for a major party

So what is the difference? In the end his vote was thrown away just the same. Is just like Dems and Reps dominating things here.

Presidential election is one man one vote.
All congressional districts are drawn by a non-partisan committee run by the federal government.
States can opt in to have their districts drawn by this federal committee

In 20 or so years after people calm down over this "drastic" change, then you can start talking about ranked voting to break up the big parties

>>8486951

I can imagine a Texan looking at this chart and seething over with anger. That, or simply replying with a flat, confident

"No."

>>8486974
>Presidential election is one man one vote.
actually it isn't. But its fine anyways. see >>8486866

>>8486842
People bitching about how California should be nerfed in the electoral college should actually look at the math and realize that it already is and they're just failing to realize how big the state is.

If you count number of people a state has compared to the electoral votes it gets, those Midwest states often end up with half as many voters per electoral vote as California does. So one vote in that state has literally twice the sway as a vote in California. I don't recall the numbers off the top of my head but there are some states where the disparity is is such that a vote there is worth nearly five times what it would be in California. If you were to make it truly "fair" for each voter California would end up with at least a half dozen more votes than it already does.

As a Californian, it irks me that my vote counts for a fifth of some fuckwit in the midwest's vote does.That said I don't think my state deserves more Electoral Votes because every State should be able to have a say in the Election rather than it be dominated by the large ones.


Personally I'm in favor of changing the system so that all the states award the Electoral Votes they get for their representatives proportionately (Based on total population and not per district to avoid gerrymandering.) After that whoever gets the most votes statewide gets the last two.

>>8486969
no initially Beremy had a plurality, but Plom won because he was the one most people were content with. Plom must also adapt and not alienate the Wakkun voters next time to get re-elected as the Wakkun voters liked him better than Beremy, making him win.

>>8487085
>mad over the fact people acknowledge California's over-representation
>As a Californian
lmao

They should just put a cap of 30 EV on California. No matter how many more people move there it's at the point where it is staying blue forever. New residents should just accept that fact their extra votes won't matter just as California Republicans have to accept their votes will never matter either.

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>>8486951
Rate my prediction map based off this election's results

>>8486951
>Kansas City on Missouri
>Oklahoma City on Kansas

stop m8

>>8487136
Kansas City is in Missouri in real life my dude

>>8487118
>California's over-representation
>Votes literally count less
>people want it to count even less
>literally arguing for landmass based voting
>Rule by majority is bad
>so instead, we will have rule my minority

Mind numbing.

>>8487148
the Union wasn't founded with democracy on mind, it was with the "no taxation without representation" mindset.

>>8486009
>-How to make sure every vote gets counted. For example, republican votes in California mean literally nothing.
This isnt a problem of the system, this is why it works.
>-How to make sure every state and county within is weighted fairly, regardless of size.
This is already done by weighting by population.

The problem is people feel tyranized because their votes seem meaningless when the majority in their district votes against their ideals.

The simple solution is this: you either add more representatives in the government and cut the existing districts into smaller slices, so more people can properly be represented in Washington, or you keep things the way they are and increase states rights while limiting Federal power to defending, taxing, and funding the states, and not exerting explicit social law over them. This way, social law demanded by some guy in Alabama can't be forced upon someone in California and vice versa.

The system works, we either just need more of it, or less of it, depending on your tastes, to adjust for our growing population.

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>>8487123
Had The Terminator been US born and eligible to be POTUS he would have won his home state.

>>8487155
The electoral college was not founded for the sake of giving rural states more representation. This new rural weight is a POST HOC bullshit.

There was never an argument about landmass based voting. The Senate is the closes thing to that, and it is also not landmass based voting.

It is was never used a justification until recently because it is fucking stupid.

Hey too many white people, make their votes count less.
Hey too many protestants make their votes count less.
Americans literally make up 100% of the electorate, might as well give them no vote.

What's wrong with popular vote? Not everything needs to be complicated.

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>>8487155
actually this

>>8487175
>What's wrong with popular vote? Not everything needs to be complicated.

this >>8486866

>>8487175
People in Missouri don't want people in California to interfere with their theocracy. Even though people in St Louis, don't want people in Fort Lost in the Woods, to impose their theocracy.

>>8487123
>cap Cali
That makes no sense. If more people move there, then it should get more EV. If it doesnt, then you would effectively be tyrannizing the people who don't get a say there as a result of the unfair cap not corresponding to population like it does for the other states.

>>8487155
Ok, so lets just cut out the votes from states that don't have an overall contribution to taxes, and weight states that contribute most to taxes.

>>8487175
Simple popular vote can be rigged by simply rigging the machines or omitting ballots from the count. By making the system complex and having states self report their winners to everyone, it becomes harder to rig the election.

>>8487118
I'll admit my bias. But the state is not over represented. If the state was actually over represented than the 3 million Californians that vote red would actually had an impact on elections. If you go by raw vote count, California had the 3rd highest number of votes for Trump. As it stands right now those 3 million votes would literally have had just as much of an impact on the election if they'd been tossed in the garbage. That's hardly over representation.

I've always been conceived that the only reason people bitch about it being over represented is because it always votes blue rather than the fact that voters here have any impact on the election.

>>8487191
Then the states that don't have an overall contribution also don't pay taxes because you are reducing their representation due to taxation

>>8487188
They don't care. They just don't like the fact that California has a say in anything, because they are SJWs.

Im no expert but id say that each county rather than state is appointed a certain number of votes so that way its based on a smaller proportion meaning that smaller places in big states can get their voice heard too.

>>8487200
Your statement makes no sense.

I am advocating that federal welfare states that steal from the rest should not get any votes.

>>8487175
Electoral College gives the smaller states the ability to not have their voices steamrolled by people in the larger, more urban states.

The only issue with it is that 98% of the states allocate the votes based on winner takes all rather than giving each candidate a share based on their share of the votes, with the winner getting a few extra.

>>8486009
Let's decrease the power of government so the system to choose them doesn't matter so much and then no one will be mad about it.

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>>8487194
This is bordering on "MUH CALI OVER REPRESENTATION" levels of stupidity.

>>8487208
>Electoral College gives the smaller states the ability to not have their voices steamrolled by people in the larger, more urban states.

This was never the intention purpose or justification of the EC. Maybe the Senate, but not the EC.

>>8487212
thanks for correcting the record.

>>8487212
I don't think California is over represented. It is probably under represented in our current system. I'm just saying that I agree with the idea of the EC because pure popular vote is easier to rig than something with several layers of complexity. We want a complex system precisely because it's hard to figure out and keep people in power indefinitely.
We should make it more complex of anything by doing what i said in
>>8487159
with adding more representatives in the house based on smaller population based district sizes for each state. Each district must have equal population and we'd have to ensure the lines are drawn arbitrarily. Make the house a clusterfuck. In turn, it is harder to also gerrymander the districts inside the states. And lastly it would be a good idea to make all states divide up their electoral votes based on their district subvoting instead of giving 100 percent of their votes to one person.

>>8486969
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE

These videos do a good job of breaking it down

Benevolent dictators would be the best system tbqh

>>8486975
can confirm this is how a lot of Texans react to things of this nature.
t. Chicagolander living in Yeehawland

>>8486557

Range voting is better yet.

>>8487255
>Yeehawland
I don't kno wwhy I find this so funny
Sides are in orbit

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>>8487175

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>>8486902
Well you know the thing about chaos. It's fair.

>>8486866
>A made-up entity called a state getting treated fairly is more important than the bigger made-up entity named the country. Also it's more important that the state have a fair voice than that individuals within that state get a fair voice.

Why is it that the vast majority of people who flock to the banner of states' rights live in welfare states that contribute less than average to GDP and take more in tax money than they give?

Because they don't want anyone else's voice to count. Never forget it.

>>8487203
I like this idea. Sort of a mini-electoral college for each state to decide who wins, then that state gets its votes in the nationwide vote.

>>8487232
These videos are cute. I like them. Thanks.

>>8487299
>they don't want you to have a voice that is shouting 'throw money at them'
This is just noise, detrimental policy, regulations on business and old people all contribute largely to the numbers presented in the slew of "new articles" made to push that narrative. The states that are hurt the most by the federal government also contest it, and they need the welfare for a reason.
Those also did not take into account
>infrastructure investment
>preferential population-center focused business deals and opportunities
>energy and "grant" cost
>education/bail-out subsidies, equity
>welfare and employment provided by state governments at massive detriment and bailed out by federal policy
I lurk /sci/ for a variety of reasons but this level of conspiracy theory (the states are just suicidal, I swear) makes me think I took a turn for /x/.

Keep the college but make two changes

1. Electors no longer exist, state electoral college votes are cast automatically according to the result of the election

2. State EC votes are split proportionally according to the proportion of votes each candidate gets in the popular vote

>>8487289
What's stopping gray areas from ruling over blue areas? They have exactly the same voting power.

>>8487352
Actually if you do the math, some of those grey areas have more voting power than much of the blue.

>>8487352
That maps is a little misleading. The blue areas of the cities almost always do vote democrat, but the grey areas are not guaranteed to 100% vote republican (though many do). Overall there's much more risk of some grey areas siding with blue than the cities ever siding with red so it still gives the advantage to democrats.

>>8486009
just go to a popular vote but ban the false dichotomy we have now.

The only problem with a popular vote is voter participation rate, if we have more realistic choices I feel more people would vote.

T. trump voter

Popular vote should never happen until many new safeguards are in place to reduce fraud as much as possible. Just some quick ideas:

Mail in voting only. You get two ballots, you fill them out identically, and mail one to counting facility A and the other to counting facility B. There are bar codes on the envelope and ballot to track it and once its read that fact is entered into a computer to confirm it. Why two counts? To make sure no funny business goes on in one. At the end of the tally they compare values and they better damn well be the same within a very miniscule margin of error. Both counting facilities would be party independent and audited and investigated thoroughly before and after each election. Also needless to say there has to be a system in place to verify ballots are only sent to legal US citizens and printed on paper that cannot be copied or forged, like it has to have a watermark that the counting machine needs to read to verify it.

There's probably more things that need to be done but that's at least a start.

>>8486009
The problem with 'fairness' is that it is a matter of opinion.

>>8487412
Direct popular vote is still bad, it directly leads to a 2 party system

If you are going to use the popular vote you should have a transferable vote

>>8487423
Fraud is so small scale as to be meaningless

>>8487430
Some reports say 3 million illegals got to vote this last election. The difference between Trump and Clinton was 700,000 last I saw. It could have a huge effect, especially when each vote actually matters in a popular vote system. If people think they can get away with it they will.

>>8487432
Get actual proof of that and then we can talk

Besides which voter turnout is abysmally low, if people though their vote actually mattered turnout would be higher and fraud would matter even less

>>8487436
That's the thing, it is impossible to prove since there's no record of these people.

>>8487445
Then you cant assume that its real or happening on any meaningful scale

>>8487412
There is no false dichotomy, two parties is just the inevitable result of using fptp.

>>8487447
You can't assume it isnt

>>8486042

How the fuck would dividing everything by two change anything.

>>8487454
Yes I can. If there is no evidence for a thing you assume there is no thing

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How would /sci/ divide the states by watersheds?

>>8487432
The 3 million reports are bullshit. A lot of the reports of mass voting by illegals are basing their shit on California's recent decisions to:
1) Allow people without proof of legal residency to get a driver's license.
and
2) Make it so that people who get drivers licenses in the State are automatically registered to vote.

Its easy to see why people would think that this means illegals are being registered to vote. The issue with that is that California is the only state with these policies. None of the other states with large illegal populations have a comparable "easy way" to somehow slip a million illegal immigrants into the voter rolls without anyone noticing. (Those other states are also mostly red so they would definitely notice such an act) In addition, only people who were eligible to vote were registered to vote and while I don't know exact numbers, I don't think that anywhere close to 3 million illegals have been granted licenses in the past 2 years.

Its also worth pointing out that the Republican party lost the popular vote in the state by roughly the same margin this election as they did the last election. As I mentioned these policies only came into place last year so even if they did somehow enable massive voter fraud, that voter fraud made no difference in the outcome of the election.

>>8486866
Agreed, the EC makes a lot of sense and balances the influence of higher population states. The only problem is that there's no point campaigning in a non-swing state.

I think a certain portion of the electors should automatically go to the winner with the rest going to the runner up unless the winner passes a certain threshold. Say, the Dems get 2/3 of California electoral votes unless they can get over 70% of the votes or something like that. That would make it worth it for the Republican to spend at least some time in CA.

>>8487480
Where the fuck did you get that idea? You can't assume something is false unless you have evidence pointing towards it being false, and the same for it being true.

>>8487722
if there is no evidence for a thing, then yes, you assume there is no thing.

>>8487746
What would make you assume one way or the other? If there's no basis for an assumption, you don't make one.

>>8487795
Occams razor. No thing is simpler than a thing, given a lack of evidence either way you assume no thing

>>8487830
>Occams razor
Is literally a logical fallacy in proper logic.

You had me up until there, but try again later.

>>8487830
>Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
I make no assumptions, you make one which isn't based on anything.

>>8487795
you use evidence to justify a belief in a thing
if there is no evidence, there is no justification
if you can't justify the thing, then the position to take is "no thing"

>>8487878
No it isn't. What is compelling you to take one side? This isn't about existence vs. nonexistence, it's about truth vs. falsehood. Neither is inherently simpler than the other.

Instead of making my assertion P, I can make my assertion ~P. If there's no evidence for either case, I can't default to either option. Here, the assertions are that the vote count is manipulated or that it is fair. It isn't logically sound to believe one or the other arbitrarily; Occam's razor is not logically rigorous, and it's arguable whether it even applies in this case.

>>8487890
>What is compelling you to take one side?
the fact that there is no evidence to support the claim

there is no evidence to support the claim, therefore I default to the position of non-belief in the claim

>>8487436
Fraud is harder to detect precisely because voter turnout is low. 1 in 2 Americans doesn't vote, and ut has been recorded that dead people are still registered in some places. Votes can be faked in a couple areas and nobody would be any the wiser until well after the election during an auditing because the numbers wouldn't look fishy on election night itself.

>>8487710
Isn't that how the primaries work? I guess it varies by state but there was a threshold that determined if you got more delegates. Could work, but seems more complicated that it needs to be. In this day and age with every rally being streamed live on Youtube you could argue there's no real advantage to campaigning since the whole world can see your speech. It's more a matter of getting them to care enough to watch.

Also are you titwits still arguing about the illegals thing? I don't know anything about that but I did see an article last summer that I did not save so I can not post it for you that showed one precinct had 100% democrat voter results which people knew was wrong because many republicans in that area said they voted after these results came out. It had to do with an electronic polling station. Apparently all someone has to do is go in and edit a spreadsheet and bam, results are rigged.

national popular vote via ranked-choice ballots

>>8487830
rather
no thing is simpler than this specific thing

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You're looking at it the wrong way. America isn't one country, it's a confederation of 50 states. So instead of having one election, it has 50 mini elections which together determine the president.

>>8488405
This. It's not a hard concept to grasp. There is nothing wrong with the electoral college. The election has never been about getting the most votes, or even winning the most states, it's getting enough electoral votes. Trump may have "lost" the popular vote but he never campaigned to win it either. Every candidate designs their campaign around winning swing states. Trump just did it better than the career criminal.

>>8487480
>If there is no evidence for a thing you assume there is no thing

No you can just be agnostic, unless the claim is so extraordinary that it isn't consistent with reality as you know it. Basically if you can't measure voter fraud, don't be so sure of how often it happens either way. If you can't measure the number of invisible pink unicorns, assume it's zero.

>>8487897
>there is no evidence to support the claim, therefore I default to the position of non-belief in the claim

Believing the contrary is not non-belief, assuming you're the same anon who said this >>8487430

>>8489269
He isnt

>>8488405
>America isn't one country, it's a confederation of 50 states.
for over a century, it's been well-established that we are one country, not merely a collection of states. that's why we say "the United States is" not "the United States are". and also why secession is illegal without the consent of the federal government.

>>8487155
Weird then that your country's capital is literally flying "taxation without representation" on their license plates.

>>8487208

That however defies any kind of democratic thought. So what, if the majority votes X, you start arguing that somehow the other party is less represented and thus want to change the way the election works?
Jesus Christ, it really shows that US way of actually "doing" democracy is deprecated.

>>8487205
You realize that this would only further polarize the country, only that that time, half of it would live in a tyranny?

>>8487289

Again, democracy is not about the fact that every square mile gets equal representation in an election but that every person gets equal representation.

So if you'd simply count the popular vote, it would not really matter where which votes come from.
The only thing that would change is the way that parties do their election campaigns (focussed on the cities of course, but how is that bad, the biggest part of the population lives in cities, so it would be an actual representation).

Basically, right now the system is fundamentally undemocratic and the only reason it stays is out of tradition and out of Republican fear as they stand to lose the most from a popular vote (since 2000, there would have been ONLY Democrats as presidents if the popular vote had counted)

IMO the problem isn't with the voting system itself, but is emergent from the partisan campaign system.

In a perfect world (read: I understand this could never happen), candidates would be totally anonymous. Instead of primaries, the people vote on issues that they wish to see addressed by each anonymous candidate. Then the candidates address each one specifically and release their positions to the public -- all while the voters have no concept of partisanship, name, gender, race, etc. (there could be some regulations about who is able to become a candidate/maybe we can allow electorates to vote to nominate some number of candidates to the ballot). After a preferential vote from this pool, the top two (or more depending on the nuances of this theoretical system) candidates are revealed to the public and a very short amount of time is allotted to debating before the final, general election. This way the opportunities for lobbying/bribery are limited since candidates will not air commercials, set up campaign teams, etc.

More realistically, we could easily change the voting process to a system where most of the voting is done electronically from smartphones. Each voter registers an account linked to their thumbprint. Each vote is submitted to any number of independent "counting" agencies, where results from different collection services are compared against each other to ensure accuracy. People without thumbprint-detecting phones will still be able to vote in person or by mail and those votes will be counted by several independent entities as well.

>>8490047
you really want to vote for some people you don't know anything about anon?

>>8490049
Yeah it feels like a massive leap of faith, but I feel like it would lessen the hold that legitimate sociopaths have on winning elections. Our current system is almost entirely non-issue based and is mostly a matter of public appearance.

But yeah either way I would want the general election candidates to be transparent to the public.

>>8490028
What you're describing about cities is why the founding fathers pushed for a republic -- to avoid dense factions of like-minded voters that can singlehandedly swing an election. The needs/beliefs of cities are vastly different from the rest of the country. Cities are typically liberal because the citizens thereof are well-represented by big government ideas like social programming, extensive funding for infrastructure through taxes, public services, regulations, etc. While these ideas serve nearly half of the country that lives in a small portion of America's land-area, they're pretty disruptive to just about anyone else living outside of city limits who would have to pay higher taxes, suffer prohibitive industrial/economic legislature and everything else without reaping the benefits by living in the city.

I'm not arguing that the EC is effective or a good thing at all, but the motivations are legitimate (until you get into gerrymandering and other sketchy methods). My belief is that the federal government should concede some of their power to states to choose how counties are taxed and receive funding and programming.

>>8489422
People also say "data is" instead of "data are". People are not smart with grammar.

>>8490073
>"I'm an alumni of..."

triggered.

>>8490028
>but how is that bad, the biggest part of the population lives in cities, so it would be an actual representation

They would be literally (literally) zero (0) reason to ever visit any place other than LA, SF, NYC, and maybe Miami. It's basically a big middle finger to anywhere else saying they are not important because time is limited so why waste time in some Kansas town of 5,000 when you could get your point across to 70,000 at an arena in Los Angeles. And if you're doing that no candidate is going to even address the corn biofuel angle which is important to those people of Kansas.

>>8490047
>most of the voting is done electronically from smartphones

God help us then. Never trust anything that doesn't have a paper trail. Electronics are too easy to hack, alter, or glitch out.

>>8486958
Preferential voting still incentivizes you to put the maximum distance between the two strongest contenders, when you prefer one over the other, and you assume that only they can plausibly be elected.

IL - Ideal Losers
GP - Good party
BP - Bad party
CF - Crazy Fuckers

You're more likely to get Good Party in with the strategic GP/IL/CF/BP than with the naive IL/GP/BP/CF.

Consider a five voter example:
V1 - IL/GP/BP/CF <- ranking preferences naively
V2 - GP/BP/IL/CF <- doesn't trust non-mainstream parties, likes GP
V3 - BP/CF/IL/GP <- voting strategically for BP
V4 - BP/GP/CF/IL <- doesn't trust non-mainstream parties, likes BP

If you vote IL/GP/BP/CF, then GP got the fewest votes, so V2's counted as his second choice and Bad Party forms the government, even though 3 of 5 voters prefer Good Party over Bad Party, because more had Bad Party for their first choice.

If you vote GP/IL/CF/BP, then IL got the fewest votes, so V1's counted as his second choice, and Good Party forms the government.

In the simplest terms, your first-place vote is the most likely to be used to choose the government, while your last-place vote is the least likely to. It's safest for an acceptable choice to win a majority in the first round.

tl;dr Australia a dumb

>>8490072

I get it, and of course the rural population must not be ignored.
But right now the system is still only kept in place because the GOP could dissolve tomorrow without it.
However, right now, there is literally a minority candidate up for presidency and a minority managed to get a majority in all houses of government.
No matter how one interprets it, this makes little sense.

>>8490086
Right now, most campaigning is intensely focused on swing states, so it would be the same except the city only campaigning would probably cost less, giving more of an equal footing for third party candidates (something that I feel is desperately needed in the US to keep the other two parties in check as, quite frankly, they both suck right now).

>>8490352

Additionally, another idea:

In Germany, we have a system where if you get 40% of the popular vote, you get 40% of the seats in the parliament (with some details like you need to get 5% to enter parliament at all) that get assigned by popular vote.

To adjust for a possible over-representation of cities, the other half of the seats gets filled by direct vote of a candidate in electoral districts (Wahlbezirke).

By the way, this system was implemented by the US after World War II so I am not claiming that US Americans are idiots for having their system!

>>8490352
>GOP could dissolve tomorrow without it
You could not seriously say that:
1. A party who was won the popular vote in the recent past and currently controls both legislatures would collapse if there was a shift to something else.
2. If it was something else the strategy would change accordingly. Neither party actually want the system to change at all, not even Trump now because he won due to electoral college. As an example both campagins detailed on how if it were by popular vote they would pretty much just sit in NYC and give hundreds of interviews.
3. If it were popular vote the people from both parties that don't normally vote because they are in an uncompetitive state (ex. Texas or New York) would all probably vote.
4. Above all of this both party's coalitions are extremely fragile, especially the Democrats as they lack any sort of unifying figure for their coalition now that the Clinton dynasty is by all means dead.

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>>8489246
>There is nothing wrong with the electoral college

To quote CGP Grey, "Who would watch a sport where through some arbitrary rule, the winner lost 7% of the time?"

Federal policy affects everyone, so everyone's vote should count the same. The electoral college disproportionately favors less-populated states.

>>8490400
>1. A party who was won the popular vote in the recent past and currently controls both legislatures would collapse if there was a shift to something else.

Ok, true, I misremembered that, I thought that Bush's second term was also like the first one, my mistake

>2. If it was something else the strategy would change accordingly. Neither party actually want the system to change at all, not even Trump now because he won due to electoral college. As an example both campagins detailed on how if it were by popular vote they would pretty much just sit in NYC and give hundreds of interviews.

Obviously, yeah

>3. If it were popular vote the people from both parties that don't normally vote because they are in an uncompetitive state (ex. Texas or New York) would all probably vote.

I don't get your point? More people voting is always good, isn't it?

>4. Above all of this both party's coalitions are extremely fragile, especially the Democrats as they lack any sort of unifying figure for their coalition now that the Clinton dynasty is by all means dead.

Personally, I think a splintering into smaller parties may be good for US politics. Having to compromise seems something that has been lost in American political discourse.

>>8490416
>To quote CGP Grey, "Who would watch a sport where through some arbitrary rule, the winner lost 7% of the time?"
God, that guy is so much less smart than he thinks.

First of all, democracy doesn't work. This is one of the founding priciples of the USA, and is one of the most consistently-observable patterns of history: a country straightforwardly ruled according to the popular will collapses almost immediately. Avoiding simple majority rule of the whole country was one of the most important goals of the men who designed that system.

Voters have to be given a particular, limited role, and kept within it: the people must select those who are fit to rule them, within the constraints of the constitution. The raw majority isn't more likely to make good choices than a well-balanced support base from different regions.

The electoral college was never about who has the support of the majority of voters winning. For instance, the number of electors is determined by counting the population of the state, not the number of voters (and originally, only white male landowners could vote -- slaves were counted into the population at a specified fraction of their true numbers), with an additional skew toward less populous states.

Secondly, the popular vote is affected by the electoral college. Campaign strategy and voter participation are both affected by awareness of how the system works.

Thirdly: cheating. Elections are run by the state governments. Once you get a dishonest one in, they can add a lot of votes to the popular tally, so a popular vote would further incentivize cheating.

>>8487085
What's the difference between what you're proposing and just popular vote?

>>8490551
Whoops, I didn't finish this thought.
>Secondly, the popular vote is affected by the electoral college. Campaign strategy and voter participation are both affected by awareness of how the system works.
...and therefore, we have no idea about what the popular vote would have been in any given election if it was the popular vote that mattered and not the electoral college. The campaigning would have been different, the voting would have been different.

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>>8490551
>The raw majority isn't more likely to make good choices than a well-balanced support base from different regions.
I agree with you on this point, but that's why we have both Congress and the Judiciary Branch. The President can't change laws, he can only affect how they are enforced. Without laws, a president is nothing but a figurehead.

We elect congressmen (who in turn affect the presidency) based on what laws we think they should create at a federal level (and Congress is based on what you mentioned, a broad base from different regions. The Midwest will lean Rep. and the coasts will lean Dem.). The point of choosing a president is to make someone accountable to what the country as a whole feels we should be doing.

On this point:
>The electoral college was never about who has the support of the majority of voters winning
In Federalist 10, Madison writes that the weakness of democracy is to prevent demagogues from taking office. At the risk of angering /pol/, this is exactly the type of thing that was supposed to prevent someone like Trump from winning, and it did not work.
>Secondly, the popular vote is affected by the electoral college.Campaign strategy and voter participation are both affected by awareness of how the system works.
Here's where I sigh out of a sense of desperation. My parents say "It's a game where the rules are weird, but everyone knows the rules, so it's fair," and I like that, but that's still no excuse to keep a 200-year old experiment that's failed regularly to represent the people.
Again, despite being an American citizen, I"m having a tough time justifying how someone with a 1.5 MIL vote lead won't be president.

>Thirdly: cheating
This doesn't happen at nearly the rate you think it does.
>Sauce: http://www.factcheck.org/2016/10/trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/
Your reasoning also doesn't account for how other Western democracies that rely on the popular vote don't have cheating.

>>8486009
I hate how inorganic the state borders are.

>>8490613
>>The raw majority isn't more likely to make good choices than a well-balanced support base from different regions.
>I agree with you on this point, but that's why we have both Congress and the Judiciary Branch.
...and more importantly, the Senate (which has 2 members for each state, regardless of population) and the Electoral College (which has a number of electors from each state equal to its combined senators and representatives).

The office of the chief executive especially needs this protection from the tyranny of the majority, since it's one of the most abusable positions, as we saw with Obama, who basically flipped both birds to the legislative branch and did whatever the fuck he wanted.

>>Thirdly: cheating
>This doesn't happen at nearly the rate you think it does.
At least 3 million non-citizens voted illegally, nearly all in Democrat-controlled states. Cheating is rampant, and the rules have been set up (again, in Democrat-controlled states) to enable it. Not only not requiring voter ID, not only registering voters without requiring evidence of citizenship or looking at records that could catch non-citizens, but stuff like posting the registered voter list at the polling site, so a fraudulent voter can just pick a name.

>this is exactly the type of thing that was supposed to prevent someone like Trump from winning
What, a rule-of-law centrist who sometimes says mean things? Trump won because he was the only one who promised to guard the physical and economic borders against third-world invaders and the globalist elite. Even from the primaries, nobody else took a firm stand on this, which most of the country demanded.

It's working how it was supposed to work.

>>8490613
>factcheck.org
The leftist tactic is to infiltrate, or otherwise pretend to be, unbiased authoritative institutions, then spread propaganda as if it were simple, inarguable fact.

This election season has been an absolute shitshow in that regard.

>Your reasoning also doesn't account for how other Western democracies that rely on the popular vote don't have cheating.
Most Western democracies don't have elections for their chief executive. Look at all that grey in the "Head of State" map:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_voting_systems_by_country

Anyway, who says they don't have cheating? There are few countries that dig so deeply into their own dirty laundry, and air it so openly, as the USA.

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>>8490688
>At least 3 million non-citizens voted illegally, nearly all in Democrat-controlled states
Gonna need a source for that...

>The office of the chief executive especially needs this protection from the tyranny of the majority, since it's one of the most abusable positions, as we saw with Obama, who basically flipped both birds to the legislative branch and did whatever the fuck he wanted.
And remind me, why did he do that? It's almost as if a certain political party was stubborn enough to grind progress to a standstill led him to use the powers of the presidency as a check on Congress's inaction. Obama tried to compromise, but it just didn't work.

But I can see we're getting away from the issue at hand.
There's a definitive difference between filtering the power of a democracy and putting a stranglehold on it. The electoral college has led exacerbated that god-awful train of thought that "My vote doesn't matter,"

>>8486694
Each state is a soverign entity. The us state = european country thing is not a meme. States have a certain number of electoral votes which are based on their population, but not on a linear scale. This is to ensure that each state, even the smaller ones, are still important. There would be no reason for a small country to decide to become a state if they were going to suddenly be meaningless.

The only flaw in our current system is that its been skewed. The way its supposed to work is you vote for your electors, who go off and decide who becomes president. At some point presidential candidates started running openly and people began voting 'for electors who said they would vote for x candidate', instead of what was intended; just electing an elector you trusted to represent your values.

Id say we should just go back to that, with people electing an elector. The media wont allow it however since they make so much money covering the campaigns.

There is actually a mathematical theorem on voting systems
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem
There is no perfect voting system, sorry OP.
One could try to compare them though, instant runoff voting seems like a good system but it's hard to measure exactly why. You could try and research that.

>>8490735
>And remind me, why did he do that?
Because he felt that he should get whatever he wanted, as president, and Congress was just in the way.

>Obama tried to compromise, but it just didn't work.
This is the opposite of what he did. He relentlessly abused the veto power. The presidency is an *executive* position, as in the person who executes the policy set by others. The veto power is meant for the President, who has to implement them, to reject practically unworkable laws, not for him to dictate to Congress what laws should be passed and refuse to sign anything else.

For instance, when Congress wanted to repeal Obamacare, as one of the main goals of majorities in both houses, that should have happened. Maybe he could have asked for some concessions in return for letting it pass, but this is the kind of thing that's supposed to be primarily up to Congress. Instead, he was absolutely unwilling to compromise on this issue, and even willing to shut down the government by vetoing any budget bill that didn't include Obamacare funding, sabotaging the federal government in retaliation for this omission.

Being "willing to compromise (but not on this, or that, or that other thing)" is not being actually willing to compromise. It's just not caring about some things, and therefore being willing to use them as bargaining chips to get the things you won't compromise on.

When Trump promises to build a wall and deport illegal aliens, that's a promise to effectively execute the policy already enshrined in law. He's talking about being effective in the executive role. Most of the things he has talked about doing are part of the executive role, or Congress has been wanting to do for a while.

>>8490745
>Each state is a soverign entity.
Not really though. For instance, there's no way for a state to secede and one of the fundamental roles of the federal government is to ensure that each state has a "republican form of government".

>>8490819
It is a nebulous and unique quality of a US state. They are sovereign, but just what that entails is not clearly defined. There have been concepts like 'shared sovereignty' and 'partial sovereignty' thrown around before. Officially sovereignty is a quality of a US state. Of course it cant just go off entirely on its own, either. That the specifics have never been formally proclaimed is probably one of the mechanisms which allow for the success of this form of government. After all defined rules are subject to loopholes, broad concepts keep people from pushing the issue to the line, both state and federal powers wouldn't want to risk their spheres of influence potentially being cut short if the issue ever called for an exact and precise ruling..

I rather like it as it gives a sort of mysterious unworldly quality to the whole thing.

>>8490352
>minority candidate up for presidency

I don't know what this means. If you mean Trump didn't win the popular vote Hillary also only got 48%, same as he did. Both are technically the minority since 52% of the country disliked each.

>>8490416
>arbitrary rule

There was nothing arbitrary about this.

>winner lost 7% of the time

Trump was the winner because he got all the needed electoral votes. The entire election is to win electoral votes, not individual votes. The winner wins 100% of the time in this system.

That guy is just salty as fuck his rape enabling candidate got rekt.

>>8486009
Force people to live in states that align with ther views

>>8490850
>broad concepts keep people from pushing the issue to the line
With high federal taxes and the threat of withholding federal funding from states that don't comply with any agenda the federal government wants to push, there is basically nothing that can't be controlled centrally.

So maybe if you wanted state sovereignty, you should have spelled that out a little more clearly, because what you've honestly got are provinces.

>>8486902
death

>>8490907
Oh hell no. I've lived on the west coast my whole life. I'm not about to abandon my homeland to make way for a parade of cucks.

[spoiler]Better out than in i always say[/spoiler]

>>8486009
But Electoral College was never about fair elections. It's a combination of having states elect the president and having people directly elect the president. It makes perfect sense in the historical context when Union was young and states were actually worried that they might subject to others because others had more people even though politically they were just two states. Electoral College makes this compromise pretty neatly actually.

Problem is no one defines themselves as the citizen of their state anymore. Everyone thinks of themselves as a citizen of USA with no obligation to their respective states. Electoral College in this context will never be fair, no matter what you do. You can just abolish and do something proportional.

>>8486009

It's easy and pretty simple

No way will small states vote to repeal the current Electoral College System, since 3/4 of the states are needed to alter any Amendments

So,

Rather than winner take all, which most states have adopt the Maine and Nebraska system

Electors are given to the winner of each congressional district, the 2 electors representing the number of Senators is give to the popular vote winner of the state

Each state still gets the curremt number of electors, based on Senate and Representative seats, so that doesn't change, but every elector is now on play, no more "safe" states no more taken for granted areas, every congressional district is in play, the race to 270 becomes more difficult, it requires the nominees to get out the vote everywhere, opens up the possibility of 3rd and 4th party candidates getting a chance to effect to outcome

Any change should also require all states to turn their re-districting over to an independent panel, that is required to keep districts as geographically tight as possible with no regard to party or ethnic make-up

Will it happen, not as long as Congressman are elected over and over, nothingnin it for them

Would like to see the President, the Senate and the House each restricted to a single term each of not more than 6 years and no retirement

Dream on, Dream on

>>8486009
Just watch Grey videos

>>8486009
Nothing will change, because in order for it to change, those in power would need to give it up. It would take a day to end gerrymandering, implement ranked voting, and automatically register every citizen to vote. But doing so would undermine the power of the establisbed parties

>>8491547
Wouldn't work. The House would end up deciding it almost every time, effectively turning us into a parliamentary system. Not that that would be a particularly bad thing.

>>8491417
>Problem is no one defines themselves as the citizen of their state anymore.

That's weird to me that people would think that way. Whenever I go to another state I definitely feel out of place, like a foreigner, like I'm getting stares that I don't belong. And when I see an out of state license plate it definitely catches my attention. Not that I'm super loyal to my state since I only moved here four years ago, but I do like it. I'm glad I don't identify with Arkansas or something.

>>8491684
>says continually how FPTP is the worst system
>makes a really hostile video against the EC after the election saying he wants it to be FPTP

He's not only a hypocrite, but an idiot.

>>8491547
I think would be better to split electoral votes based on percentage of the popular vote across the entire state than by district. With whoever comes out on top still getting the last two votes. That way you avoid the difficulty of making sure that redistricting is done independently of political parties.

>>8486530
Are you... literally autistic?

>>8490012
We have it so the majority cannot outright oppress the minority. Leaving things at a straight up 50% vote is a sort of fucked up way of going about things when it comes to deciding the future.

A combination of Australia's preferential voting, anonymous candidates not named until 6 months before the election who must share their beliefs and platforms without being seen by the public, and requiring all states to split up their electoral votes proportionately would be the perfect system.
Only problem is it would be difficult to implement

>>8490073
but the thing is, people USED to say "the United States are". and then things changed, starting around the time of the civil war. which was coincidentally the time a lot of men died fighting for (among other things) the primacy of the collective over its constituent parts.

>>8492370
>anonymous candidates not named until 6 months before the election who must share their beliefs and platforms without being seen by the public
This is absolute nonsense. You're voting for the candidate, not just their platform. If you're not interested in who they are and how they've behaved in the past, you're not voting responsibly at all.

>>8490047
>More realistically, we could easily change the voting process to a system where most of the voting is done electronically from smartphones. Each voter registers an account linked to their thumbprint. Each vote is submitted to any number of independent "counting" agencies, where results from different collection services are compared against each other to ensure accuracy. People without thumbprint-detecting phones will still be able to vote in person or by mail and those votes will be counted by several independent entities as well.


lmao have you never seen gatchaman or something

>>8486975
Have to admit it stokes irrational anger in me
That said, I have reason to be upset.
>California -> North, South California and Mojave
>North, South Dakota -> Dakota
>Florida -> North, South Florida
>Oklahoma City in Kansas
>Utah has more of RL Nevada than Nevada, and barely retains a plurality of RL Utah
>Some natural borders, the Mississippi, Missouri and Columbia river, are retained, others discarded entirely
I mean of course it's based on population distribution and natural-looking borders aren't to be expected, but if that's the case there's no reason to keep some of them. Let all of the borders be jagged and weird.
Would I be spending so much time on this if I were an Oregonian? Probably not.

The North/South Florida border is oddly reminiscent of the 38th parallel. There's even Tampa Bay for the border to settle to after a Florida War

>>8490238
is there a fix to this problem?


also, even if you put the largest distance between the strongest contenders, it still is better than if you only had 2 viable options to vote. This way people can at least rank preferred in-between choices (that are not as strong).

>>8486009
I personally would prefer a system with more restrictions as to who is allowed to vote. If I cringed every time someone told me that they voted for X candidate "just because" I would get a job as a Micheal J Fox impersonator.

Is it too much to ask to say I want a more responsible electorate?

>>8492351
>We have it so the majority cannot outright oppress the minority.
So the minority oppressing the majority is a better option?

>>8492797
>I personally would prefer a system with more restrictions as to who is allowed to vote.
this would be cool but will never happen, stupid people are much easier to control/convince them to vote for you

>>8486009
>People are required to take a test on the policies of each candidate and also just general politics questions
>Their score decides how much their vote counts
Problem solved forever

>>8492866
Yea, that's true. The bigger issue would probably be a moral/ethical one.

Say you make an argument that only a person that lies above a specific threshold of intelligence can vote. Even in the least biased scenario where we just define intelligence by IQ, what's to stop people from saying that someone with X belief is automatically 15 points lower on an IQ scale than someone from Y belief and then altering testing protocol accordingly in order to stop people with X belief from voting?

I would love to see it happen, but I don't think it could be done while ensuring a test would be fair and impartial. We would have to wait for our robot overlords to become intelligent enough be able to proctor a test for us, and by then it probably would be a moot point.

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>>8487601

>>8492797
I've been thinking about this a lot lately and came up with some ideas. tl;dr you have to have served your country in some capacity or have something substantial at risk in order to be given the privilege of voting.

If you serve in the military, law enforcement, are a fire fighter, you can vote. If you're putting your life on the line for your country you have a far larger stake in its future. Can't serve because you're 400 lbs overweight? That's okay, there are ways to volunteer for government places in desk job roles that go toward helping the aforementioned people. Fulfill X amount of time and that will still qualify.

Be a business owner. As in your it is YOUR name on the papers, not your brother's, parents', etc. It's pretty twisted imo that these 18 year old protesters/rioters are out there helping to decide the fate of this country with their vote when they have literally zero stake in it and know nothing of real economics. If you save up for decades, open a store, and pump your life savings into it then you definitely have more at risk than the kid playing the new Pokemon for 17 hours a day.

I'm sure there's more qualifications you could think up but those are the main two. Basically have something at stake to serve as an incentive for responsible voting. I think it would still be fair because the volunteer thing would be open to everyone if they really care and they would still be helping a good cause on the side.

>>8492705
>is there a fix to this problem?
To this specific one? Certainly. For instance, the Australian system can be modified by also having you set a threshold of acceptability. Only the two above the threshold of acceptability on the most ballots are considered as possible winners (the two acceptable to the largest number of voters), and then the votes are tallied according to preference.

As to the general problem, for any system with more than two options, strategic voting will always give an advantage over honest preference voting.

In the system I just described, the strategic move of ranking plausible opponent parties as unacceptable can result, in some scenarios, in an even more unacceptable choice being elected, so the strongest move to get what you prefer can have bad consequences, while the safest move can result in an inferior result.

>>8494049
Hey, how about this? Just let white men who own land (not under mortgage or other lien) vote.

>>8494603
kill yourself

>>8494662
I guess a country that ran like that would just end up as a total disaster and nobody would want to live there, eh?

>>8494877
yes

>>8486009
>le electoral college is about fairness mem
america is not a democracy, it is a republic consisting of states, government and the people.

The purpose of the electoral college is giving states representation in government, and it also acts to give underpopulated rural counties voices

>>8486021
first past the post is retarded

someone can win a majority gov't with 20% of the vote

>>8494049
So is this how people way back when tried to justify only letting land owners vote? How do people who live in this country and have a future with it have nothing at stake when voting? The kind of retards you seem so fixated on already throw away their votes on joke candidates.

(((CGP Grey)))

>>8486009
>better system
What defines that?

>with math
What defines that?

The last people who attempted to apply scientific law and empiricism to governance and democracy were the communist regimes of the last century, and look how that turned out.

Scientific governance is a joke.

There's nothing to fix. The electoral college is fine. Trump would have never been elected given the past, it's the popular vote (of each red state) which change the nature of elections

>>8486009
Trump won already cuck grow up get over it.

>>8494049
Your logic is retarded as it excludes a lot of working class people from voting and essentially creates an oligarchy.

Small groups of similar people like firefighters and police officers will always tend to vote similarly. This can be exploited and weaponized as a means to keep dissenting voices silent by ensuring they never gain any political foothold.

But you say: Why don't these dissenters become policemen or firefighters in order to change the system? Ignoring the fact that that may not be a career they want to pursue or that the market might be over-saturated it's is likely that people with different political opinions will be shut out from those professions. You will be scoped out when you apply to ensure your political ideology falls in line with other firefighters and police officers. Too different, too likely to vote different, you aren't getting a job.

In such a system I can become educated and become and engineer. I go to work for a private company and pay my taxes. It is not fair that I do not get to vote because I didn't serve in the military or other public service roll. I give back to my community. I am a taxpayer and I build and repair things that get sold on the market. Decisions in Government will affect how I live and it is my right to have a say.

I know you are trying to get back at liberal arts majors who make bad decisions and other people you perceive to be lazy but you hurt a lot of other hard working people in the process with systems like this. This is very dangerous thinking.

>>8486009
>a lot of people are seriously considering abolishing the electoral college in favor of a purely popular vote
And those same small states that benefit from the existence of the electoral college are not going to allow a Constitutional amendment that will get rid of it.

Next thread

Doesn't purely popular vote account for everything that you're asking for. OP?

The ideal voting system allows all citizens to vote, elects a candidate that only a supermajority of citizens agree on, and one that biases the election slightly such to reduce the odds of extremist candidates winning (on left or right) and increase the odds of more moderate people. You won't have pure moderates each time but the left right swing will be less pronounced. This biasing is an essential failsafe in case large swaths of the citizens are somehow convinced to vote irrationally. It will serve to prevent the rise of any kind of totalitarian rule.

It needs to be carefully balanced though. Too much bias and the citizens never end up electing someone who represents their interests.

>>8494916

Get off /sci/ please. That is entirely impossible unless you are speaking about coalitions which makes your point still wrong

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>>8495614
Before you tell someone to get off sci, you should probably check yourself to see if you're wrong.

The attached pic shows it is possible to win the current 2016 election with 23% of the popular vote.

>>8495635
Note, I didn't mess with DC and that I think 2 of those smaller states award proportionally or have special rules, but the gist of it is true.

>>8495614
>>8495635
>>8495638
Second note, it's actually possible to win the EC with 0% of the popular vote, because it is entirely legitimate to have faithless electors.

>>8495635

He was referencing the guy talking about direct popular vote.
The retarded American way of voting can go fuck itself in terms of this discussion as it has little to do with democracy.

Same applies to >>8495649

>>8495654
>it has little to do with democracy.
Good thing America is a republic and not a democracy then :^)

>>8495665
Is it fun being wrong?

>>8495555
Cool quads.

How about to vote you have to show the current year's tax return to prove you are not a degenerate?

and to the REPUBLIC for which it stands

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>>8486009
Just elect the president based on the popular vote

Done

Changing the system is enormously more difficult than working within the limits of the system. If californians are so unhappy that living in california weakens their vote, why don't a bunch of them migrate to the midwest? That would expand urban development in the interior of the country, and transform the political landscape of the US forever, all without having to pass any unpassable legislation.

Oh right, californians are a bunch of conceited limousine liberals who would kill themselves before moving to a flyover state. They'd much rather get drunk and wave dumb signs at protests in blue counties and pretend that it's making a difference.

>>8486530
What in the actual fuck is this?

>>8496967
Direct popular vote elections are terrible. The EC is bad but its better than fptp

>>8491547
>No way will small states vote to repeal the current Electoral College System, since 3/4 of the states are needed to alter any Amendments

You don't need to alter the amendment, actually.
>http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
It's a pretty cool idea. When enough states decide to vote for the national vote winner, the national vote winner will automatically win.
And this is in the self-interest of the majority of states, as currently a few battleground states receive a disproportionate amount of attention.

File: Screenshot_20161111-230521.jpg (922KB, 1079x2050px)

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>>8496989
Why?

Becuase looking at our current election says otherwise

>>8497046
There is a video somewhere in this thread that explains it really well

>>8497073
Then point it to me

>>8497046
>pic

Yeah I'm sure that TOTALLY happened.

>>8497109
>>8487232

Here they are

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>>8497181
I've watched the video and the electoral college we HAVE still doen't fix the 2 party system he goes into for most of the video.

The electoral college still makes gerymandering WORSE as the voters arn no longer held a singular popular votes but as a group whole irregardless of what individuals voted.

This video is more about how multiparty systems turn into. 2 party systems

Infact counting individual popular votes for the canidate actully destroys gerymandering as long as you have no districts and count individually. Votes won't be suppressed.

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>>8497180
Well yea it did

But hey you can believe anything you want.

>>8497270
>The electoral college still makes gerymandering WORSE

How? Winning states is decided by the popular vote.

>>8497563
The whole state gets counted for its electoral college "points" meaning if it there is a majority of "dog" voters if you can split them up with "cat and bug" voters.

Popular=majority

Spliting up the majority is exactly what gerymanding is

>>8497277
not evidence

>>8497594
Like I said you can believe anything you want.

>>8496989
The EC is first past the post. The CGP Grey video is a video against systems like the EC...

I don't think you understood the video very well.

>>8497594
>>8497596
http://ktla.com/2016/11/16/fbi-report-shows-spike-in-hate-crimes-nationwide-crimes-against-muslims-had-sharpest-increase/

Between 2016-11-09 and 2016-11-16 here were 206 reports of incidents involving anti-immigration, 151 anti-Black, 51 anti-Muslim, 36 anti-woman, 80 anti-lgbt, 60 swastikas and general anti-semitism, and 27 anti-Trump.

But we're now in the age of fake news where facts no longer matter.

>>8486009
gtfo shill
no sorrow for soros

WHY is /sci/ full of liberal cucks

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>>8497777
I see Kek is among us
Please show /sci/ the light
This board believes they are scientifically enlightened but they deny biological differences between humans
/sci/ is creationist tier in scientific literacy

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PROBABILITY MASS VOTING

Everyone gets one (1) vote but is free to split it among their choices in any way they like so long as they sum to 1.

In practice you can let each voter put as many stars as they like next to each choice, then divide by the total number of stars put.
(Leaving your ballot blank with zero stars is treated equivalently to a spoiled vote.)

E.g., in pic related there are four choices (A-D) and this voter has just cast 2/6 of a vote for A and D each, 1/6 of a vote for B, and no votes for C.

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>>8497819
Sorry, the denominator should be 5, not 6 (so 2/5, 1/5, 0, 2/5).

But that calculation error doesn't change the model.

>>8497760
The EC is not a direct fptp popular vote

>>8497765
And how many attacks by Hillary voters against Trump voters were there? Like the white man in Chicago who was beaten and had his things stolen by blacks just because he voted Trump on election day? Is there even a number for that or is the MSM trying to suppress those facts too because it doesn't fit their agenda?

>>8497777
Because to be /sci/ that typically means you are in college, aka liberal safe zones whose only purpose is to expand the liberal hivemind.

>>8498230
He told you, 27 anti-trump crimes.
But facts don't matter to you, do they ?

>>8497819
This idea has been thought of many times before, and it doesn't work because of game theory. Due to strategic voting you are always always best off allocating the entirety of your vote to a single person.

Ranked voting works because there is no opportunity cost. I.E. if I don't get my first choice, then I am not hurting any of my other choices.

>>8497919
It is not a direct popular vote, but it is first past the post.

>>8486842
California here, you have no idea.
Jefferson, aka Northern California is almost exclusively red.

>>8487352
For one, gerrymandering.
For two, that map is based on congressional districts, which are linked to states.
The tendency is that the entire state turns out blue even though all the gray areas voted red.
This is because almost all states have a stupid system where the "winner takes all", and gray areas end up getting steamrolled in states with huge blue populations.

So essentially, pick your poison. Gerrymandering violently tears apart voting districts to shear a whole state in favor of one party.
The current system essentially only has one "voting district", aka a state, and the winner completely steamrolls the gray zones.

They both fucking suck.

>>8486842
It would be 35 and 22, or some other numbers adding up to 57. Two extra electors per state.

>>8499058
>it doesn't work because of game theory
If you're appealing to game theory, then you'll know that building a perfect voting process is a provably futile endeavor thanks to Arrow' impossibility theorem (and its variations, e.g. Gibbard–Satterthwaite).

> Due to strategic voting
This assumes that voters are perfectly rational beings who
(a) vote with the sole objective of maximizing the (microscopic) probability of deciding the outcome of an election, and
(b) always play the Nash equilibrium strategy, know that every other voter always plays the NE strategy, and so on ad infinitum.
Both assumptions get shot to pieces the moment you step into the world of empirical, revealed preferences. Homo economicus is a discredited model of human behavior, in case you didn't get the memo.

>you are always always best off allocating the entirety of your vote to a single person.
So voting is a dominance-solvable game. I don't think anyone's disputing that.
But that's what we have already, and considering the amount of butthurt it's generating, I think introducing an illusion of choice may not be a bad thing, especially since the goal of voting is not only to elect the most preferred choice but also to maintain voters' faith in the legitimacy of the voting system.
Also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoy_effect

>>8486020
That's actually not true. The dictator's vote is worth more than everyone else's

>>8499377
>Jefferson, aka Northern California

>the bay area is not part of norcal
you're not from california, you're not even from the west coast

>>8486012

RELIGION AND POLITICS POLL

>RELIGION AND POLITICS POLL

http://www.strawpoll.me/11739588

>RELIGION AND POLITICS POLL

RELIGION AND POLITICS POL