Monday, March 6, 2017
Are we having a fair election
Are we having a fair election
A few weeks ago I was helping our daughter to prepare a power point presentation about the upcoming US presidential elections. We spent a lot of time trying to understand the Electoral College system and thinking how to explain this to the other 9-year olds.
US Electoral College is not something straightforward and every four years I have to be reminded how it works. It is not intuitive - the majority doesnt always rule, as had happened four times in the past with the most recent in the year 2000 when George Bush won the presidency while loosing by 543,816 votes to Al Gore. It doesnt look fair at all - candidate can concentrate his campaign on the 11-12 largest states only, winning these states and not even bothering to get a single vote in the rest 4/5th of the country. These largest states will provide the required 270 electoral votes.
Silly us, why then we use this ridiculous system? I have searched the net for answers. It is believed that the founders feared trusting local folk with direct election of the president. Presidential campaigns have not been such lavishly funded and well-organized processes back in the late 18th century Lack of media and limited travel capabilities led to candidates being known mainly locally. How much that local New Jersey candidate may know about matters in the South? And what Southerner may have heard about this Jersey candidate without a Cable, radio and a car? It was proposed to choose a few educated and well-respected noblemen who will make this important decision on peoples behalf: electors. They will make sure to study the candidates. And in order to force the presidential candidates to address such electors across the whole country, they agreed to require the winner to get the majority of the all electors votes. This would also limit the number of candidates making the process simpler. Now it starts to make sense, but mainly in these specific historical settings. Nowadays, our candidates cross the country on a daily basis, we know more about them than we may want to. Do we still need such a complex system?
Turns out my daughter and I were not the only ones troubled with the electoral math. A recent MIT conference was devoted to this topic. Mathematicians and political scientists debated what is fair and why. It was noted that smaller states have an advantage in the current system as they get more electors per capita. It was pointed that the process of each state uniting behind a single candidate has an important political meaning. Few alternatives were proposed - an obvious popular vote, a bit cumbersome ranking system with each person marking the degree of his preferences for each candidate, and a system in which votes would be awarded by multiplying each states popular vote percentage by its number of electoral votes. You can read more in the MIT news here, I was just glad someone else was worrying about that.
Yesterday my daughter shared with me that they had a free lesson. While the teacher was busy discussing something with the boys, she told the girls to pick a game to play in the school yard. A few games were proposed and the girls voted who wants what. The problem, as my daughter stressed, that there is a group of four girls that always vote together. Shall one of them really want a specific game, they all vote for it. And guess what, their game always won! Does it remind you of anything? It is not a direct analogy with the Electoral College system but perhaps there are cases when uniting behind one choice does make sense.
US Electoral College is not something straightforward and every four years I have to be reminded how it works. It is not intuitive - the majority doesnt always rule, as had happened four times in the past with the most recent in the year 2000 when George Bush won the presidency while loosing by 543,816 votes to Al Gore. It doesnt look fair at all - candidate can concentrate his campaign on the 11-12 largest states only, winning these states and not even bothering to get a single vote in the rest 4/5th of the country. These largest states will provide the required 270 electoral votes.
Silly us, why then we use this ridiculous system? I have searched the net for answers. It is believed that the founders feared trusting local folk with direct election of the president. Presidential campaigns have not been such lavishly funded and well-organized processes back in the late 18th century Lack of media and limited travel capabilities led to candidates being known mainly locally. How much that local New Jersey candidate may know about matters in the South? And what Southerner may have heard about this Jersey candidate without a Cable, radio and a car? It was proposed to choose a few educated and well-respected noblemen who will make this important decision on peoples behalf: electors. They will make sure to study the candidates. And in order to force the presidential candidates to address such electors across the whole country, they agreed to require the winner to get the majority of the all electors votes. This would also limit the number of candidates making the process simpler. Now it starts to make sense, but mainly in these specific historical settings. Nowadays, our candidates cross the country on a daily basis, we know more about them than we may want to. Do we still need such a complex system?
Turns out my daughter and I were not the only ones troubled with the electoral math. A recent MIT conference was devoted to this topic. Mathematicians and political scientists debated what is fair and why. It was noted that smaller states have an advantage in the current system as they get more electors per capita. It was pointed that the process of each state uniting behind a single candidate has an important political meaning. Few alternatives were proposed - an obvious popular vote, a bit cumbersome ranking system with each person marking the degree of his preferences for each candidate, and a system in which votes would be awarded by multiplying each states popular vote percentage by its number of electoral votes. You can read more in the MIT news here, I was just glad someone else was worrying about that.
Yesterday my daughter shared with me that they had a free lesson. While the teacher was busy discussing something with the boys, she told the girls to pick a game to play in the school yard. A few games were proposed and the girls voted who wants what. The problem, as my daughter stressed, that there is a group of four girls that always vote together. Shall one of them really want a specific game, they all vote for it. And guess what, their game always won! Does it remind you of anything? It is not a direct analogy with the Electoral College system but perhaps there are cases when uniting behind one choice does make sense.
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