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I forgot to post this a while ago: Tim Hawkins and the "homeschool family". Prairie Home Sausage is kind of funny - and has a picture of a really neat merry-go-round.
Lastly, being in NH during the presidential primary has been annoying. Apparently, phone calls have gotten cheap enough that most of the candidates have been calling. Some of them, most notable Obama and Clinton, like to call multiple times just to make sure that we have heard of them. Obama's volunteers were surprised that they weren't the first to call, since they had printed out lists (and call from all over the country), so it is strange that they would have sent out duplicate lists. Clinton's supporters said that the computer just calls every number in order, and each phone doesn't talk to each other, so it was quite likely that I would get called within five minutes from the same office.
I don't know if that should be filed under persistence or incompetence.
I thanked the Huckabee supporters at the polling place for not calling, I think only Huckabee and Paul didn't call us. (as a side-note, that means I get to stick to my mom's statement that she gives the callers - that she won't vote for anyone who calls, particularly after 10PM (that was Obama). Unfortunately for mom, McCain did call once, but she is going to vote for him even though he called.
One of the Clinton supporters that I talked to on the phone didn't apologize at all for calling three times in the same hour because, "what do you expect - if you're going to have the first primary, you should expect it". I pointed out that we have always had the first primary, and it hasn't ever been this bad before. The Concord Monitor had a number of letters to the editor about it this year. I expect that NH (at least) will push for an expanded do-not-call list to include the politicians too, which would be really nice.
"Jesus Take the Wheel" is performed by Carrie Underwood, who won American Idol one season.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
Plurality voting systems become 2 party systems.
Personally, I think we *have* to introduce some measure of non-plurality voting to the election process. There's a lot of options but I think the easiest one to implement would be approval voting aka "Check all the candidates who are okay with you" Some other voting methods might be even better but I think the simplicity of not having to rank your choices is more important for easy adoption.
I think there's a lot of "anybody but X" sentiment in voters minds, particularly in 2004 but clearly it doesn't get reflected in vote totals. There is presently virtually no cost associated with having a large portion of the voters absolutely hate you and I think there should be.
It does seem like a ranking system would be good, and more accurate, but you are probably right, that the complexity of people knowing enough to rank people in an order might be hard, at least in the smaller elections - in Pittsburgh, we have a hard time figuring out who is going to be on the ballot when we show up. I suppose if we got the paper, we would be more informed, or at least more informed with whatever bias that particular paper has.
Definitely people had the "anybody but X" in 2004, but it seems like this election, at least so far, the X is less specific, that I have heard that statement made about most of the people who have a shot in getting elected. Hrm, haven't heard that about McCain though, that would make mom happy.
Approval Voting isn't ranking, it's checking. Think of it as a switch from a radio button (one person only) to checkboxes on a web form. This makes it simpler and quicker than ranking systems like runoff and condorcet voting both for the voter and for the vote counters. So I think it would be the easiest alternative to adopt.
If you read the research in voting methods, people differ on which method is the absolute best, but 3 generally agreed upon facts are that 1) "pick one" sucks a lot, 2) approval voting is the easiest alternative, and 3) approval voting does not perform significantly worse than alternatives.
Approval voting is a special case of Range Voting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting). In range voting, voters give each candidate a score (from 0 to 99, for example; 0 to 1 is approval voting), and the scores are totaled up. Approval voting might be preferable in practice just because it's so easy to understand, but range voting has a lot of advantages. It satisfies the monotonicity criterion, the favorite betrayal criterion, the participation criterion, the consistency criterion, independence of irrelevant alternatives, resolvability criterion, and reversal symmetry. (see the link above for details)
Yep, I understand that there are alternatives that might be better. But I think that keeping things simple is more important, especially for Florida voters :-P. Approval Voting has good usability performance and is the most easily adoptable both in terms of interface design and in terms of people's comfort level. If you look at the regret chart, you see that when people are voting strategically as is the case in the real world, there is apparently no difference between range and approval voting. Not sure I totally believe that but I can see why it would be close.
Do you have any opinion on whether you prefer Range Voting to Condorcet Methods or Runoff Methods strictly from a theoretical standpoint? The only method I don't like besides Plurality is Instant Runoff Voting. There are other runoff methods that are okay with me but not IRV. Eliminating the person with the fewest "most popular" votes is kinda dumb. I see it has bad performance when tested also.
Because it's so hard to reform a political system, it's important not to let quibbling over which method is "best" divide the reformers and prevent any meaningful reform at all. I'd prefer to unite with a group that has a good chance of success implementing my 3rd or 4th favorite vote-counting method, rather than standing up for the "best" method and getting nowhere.
I would divide methods into acceptable / not acceptable. I'd place plurality and IRV into not acceptable. I'd place approval, range, condorcet, and possibly some funky runoff voting techniques into acceptable.
I agree, Phil.
Well, now that all of the problems are solved, now you just need to convince the rest of the country...
Most of the rest of the country doesn't vote. I'd rather just keep this in mind for when I pick a restaurant among friends.
I'll say that one really big waste of time is the "popular vote" movement. Both our republican president and our democrat congress have historically low approval and the answer is a change whose ultimate effect would be what exactly? The only thing I can typically see happening is that instead of having to focus on several states, you'd just have to focus on several cities. The parties have the polsters and resources to figure out who they can ignore either way.
If you want to whip out a bunch of theoretical arguments, I can point out that for example, the electoral college localizes electoral problems like "My precinct has a billion votes for candidate A". More realistically, any time the popular vote difference is X, any district with a greater difference than X would probably be challenged and in Y2K, that would have been a lot of places.
I just don't see how the popular vote would fix anything that would justify any excitement over it. The problem is that we're deciding which electable politician we hate the least instead of, for example, which candidates would be at least "okay" to elect.
I don't think any electoral "reform" would help with low approval ratings. (1) People like to complain, and the media like it when people complain. (2) This country is so diverse, making half of us happy will likely displease the other half. (3) We have little or no knowledge of history and less of economics, so what makes us happy now could very well result in unhappiness down the road. (4) We have so little understanding of the rest of the world that we can get a clear view of neither what needs to be changed nor of what we ought to appreciate.
I disagree. First of all, right now, we have a supermajority of people unhappy with both the president and congress. Getting half of americans to be happy with either would be a big improvement.
Making the change to approval voting etc. has real statistical and theoretical reasons for producing objectively better outcomes.
If you really think that no voting system change(s) can make for a happy electorate, I guess that implies that you think that no voting system at all can make for a happy electorate. The next logical question is, why are you in favor of dictatorship, and when are you moving to North Korea?
:) :) :) :)