Yes it's a compelling analogy. I just find it striking this event is closer to the end of the Vietnam war 22 years before Job's return to Apple in 1997, than the 27 years from 97 to today. There are almost certainly HN readers who weren't alive in 97, and yet the Jobs story works much as "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it" vietnam era quotes work: they're part of the culture now.
I doubt we have many 13 year old HN people but it won't be long before there's a cohort here who lived entirely in a post Jobs world.
I think he's somewhat addressed that in the article by pointing out that state by State polling is more inaccurate then the national polls in part because it's done so rarely. So I guess using the national pulling as a proxy for state is something they feel is more accurate when they try to figure out the electoral college results.
I would find it interesting if pulling in these days is actually able to figure out anything. In addition to the polling problem itself, we have two frontrunners who have probably garnered more "not that one" votes than any previous race in history.
Au contraire, the popular vote should be the only metric that counts. The electoral college and the per-state weighing of votes are pointless and detrimental, as is the first-past-the-post system that has brought about the U.S. two-party system, a system that is almost as bad as a single-party one.
Instead I suggest one should move to abolish the electoral college and instead count votes directly. The candidates should all be on the ballot. Then use Approval Voting where each voter gets to mark all candidates that they like.
There should be a French-style second round in case the top winners are too close together, say inside a 1% or 5% margin—in other words you could never win by a single vote, you'd always need hundreds of thousands of votes.
I would also go same way and remove states. Just move everything under centralized federal government. Or maybe keep them for some regional offices, but all deciding power should rest on congress and senate. And even there, getting rid of voting districts and just electing top x number of candidates seems most reasonable solution.
I do not agree. As an analogue, consider "files". Files are good. But do not put each letter in a file of its own. I've seen projects that experimentally used one method definition per file which was also not very workable. But don't put all of your data into a single file, either.
People will want to have local representation, which means local elections and boundaries for the reach of local government. When it comes to state-wide and national elections, either re-use these existing boundaries or determine districts using a fair algorithm. The way that politicians get to gerrymander their own seats is an ongoing scandal.
With approval voting replacing first-past-the-post, districts in presidential elections would be reduced to a mere organizational function. No redrawing of arbitrary borders should influence the outcome. It will still be important to ensure open and fair procedures; nobody should be forced to drive a car to reach a single distant mail ballot box or voting station only to have then to queue up for hours. This and other measures have been used in the past to defraud voters.
> Au contraire, the popular vote should be the only metric that counts. The electoral college and the per-state weighing of votes are pointless and detrimental
Yeah, no thanks. Two wolves and a lamb deciding on dinner. We are a republic and not a direct democracy intentionally because the founding fathers realized that mob rule is stupid.
As if the difference between "republic" and "rule of the mob" is decided by having an electoral college. People are getting every bit as riled up for and against candidates as if they voted directly. The only thing that the electors are good for is adjusting counts such that smaller states get proportionally more votes. I find this practice questionable when it comes to electing the president, and on the other hand, that much could be done without an electoral college, at all. On the other hand, if you still want an electoral college, make it so that the weights are evenly distributes—that one Californian voter has as much weight as one from Rhode Island, and that electors representing all the candidates that people voted for are apportioned seats in the college (no winner-takes-it all delegations). The college can then serve as a 'buffer' to prevent the rule of the mob (for people who believe they indeed fulfill that function).
To further my point I looked up the French presidential election procedures; I found the German article more informative than the English one, so I had Copilot translate that one. Turns out there were several referendums over the decades where French voters changed the rules, and they of course vote directly for a candidate. Before you can become a candidate, you have to secure a certain level of support from incumbent elected politicians; there's also a modicum of territorial distribution to the rules to ensure no single region can dominate (wonder how well that works). Anyhoo if you think that France's system is Rule of the Mob then here's why that is so; if you think it's a relatively stable, relatively democratic country, then here's how they manage to be a republic and still allow people to vote directly for presidential candidates:
The election of the French President is governed by Articles 6 and 7 of the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic. Since a referendum in 1962, the President has been directly elected by eligible voters. If no candidate receives an absolute majority of votes in the first round, a runoff election is held between the two candidates who received the most votes in the initial round.
In every election so far, a runoff has been necessary. The highest vote share in the first round was achieved by Charles de Gaulle in the 1965 presidential election with 44.6%.
The term of office for Presidents was reduced from seven to five years through a referendum in 2000. Since 2002, the French elect the head of state and the members of the National Assembly for five-year terms. Re-election is possible any number of times, but no more than two consecutive terms are allowed.
To run for election, a candidate must be at least 18 years old and eligible to vote. Additionally, they must gather at least 500 signatures from supporters who hold elected political offices. Approximately 42,000 officeholders are eligible, including mayors, National Assembly members, senators, and regional or departmental councilors. These signatures must come from at least 30 different departments or French overseas territories, with no department contributing more than one-tenth of the required signatures (i.e., 50 signatures).
Compare to what we have instead: 5 mountain lions and 10 sheep deciding what to have for dinner. Voting is by district, with each district electing representatives to attend the meeting where dinner plans will be proposed and voted on.
The number of representatives allocated to each district is based on population, but must be a positive integer, and the dinner planing meeting is capped at 8 representatives.
Mountain lions are solitary. The 5 mountain lions live in 5 different districts. The 10 sheep all live in the same herd, which is in a 6th district.
By population then each mountain lion district should get 0.533 representatives, and the sheep district should get 5.333 representatives. But representatives must be a positive integer, so the mountain lions districts have to each get rounded up to 1. And with the meeting capped at 8 that only leaves 3 for the sheep.
Which is still better than the population of 10 counties that tend to vote they same exact way every time on two different coasts separated 2500 miles deciding on a single person to represent 335M people, 50 states and countless districts in between.
I am not arguing that what we have is perfect, it’s not…but direct democracy or god forbid these ranked choice and run off voting schemes don’t improve our ability to get anything but more of the same two shitty political parties and their same two shit candidates that rise to the tops of their respective political cesspools.
If it were up to me, sortition would be how we select a president.
RCV and multi-member works in other countries for their parliaments, I'm not sure why it wouldn't work in the US (the president is a different issue, given it's a single person with lots of power).
Mob rule sucks. However Kropotkin would correctly point out that, in representative democracy, as soon officials are elected their opposite candidates are prey. Direct democracy prevents this, IE two sides disagree with each other & coexist without fear.
In representative democracy there's little to stop the officials from passing laws to suppress opposition or passing laws to hide the fact that they are doing so. In direct democracy, even while you may be in majority in the issues that do not impact your opposition negatively, you still need to convince the voters to actually attack them. Laws to obfuscate things are less likely to pass. Consequently to be in the minority; to disagree will be more dangerous in reprentative democracy. Thus Kropotkin's point in my interpretation was that (since the voters will inevitably be occasionnally wrrong and in these cases those who were right will be needed once the problems shows) this will effectively corrode a community: in the next election there may not be opposition because they have left away.
Perhaps I am dense or perhaps you are unclear, but I am still unconvinced how what you are describing as positive attributes of a direct vs representative democracy for the US would or could be any better than what we have now. It seems like you are assuming that there is no and never could be tyranny of the majority…or perhaps that’s a feature in your analysis that you feel is a net positive.
In a smaller homogeneous country you could have a point (including our individual states), but in a country as large, diverse, and powerful as the united states it seems to me that you need that balance of power spread amongst the entities of the country..both the people in the form of their representatives and the states via their representatives (i.e. senate and electoral college) as it relates to election of the executive.
In general, parliaments will always have issues where there is no one representing them. For example privacy, encryptation, drug issues are commonly underrepresented here in Europe. This means for example that altough 1% agrees that privacy laws matter most to them, they may not have representatives. Additionally, the existence of parties in the parliament may lead to suppression of the "represenativeness" of certain representatives.
Then, ALSO, representative democracy encourages politicians to make decisions to maximize vote count, instead of "good" alternatives. Additionally, with direct democracy if you really want to go against someone, you need to either make very clever legislation with a hole that others won't notice or to gain majority support for that. To convince a majority to vote to suppress your enemies can be difficult. If for nothing else, for the fact that small parliaments are likely to have disproportionate numbers of psychopathic and/or incompetent representatives at times.
Voters tend to choose based on partisan loyalties and short-term possibly out-of-control events rather than holding politicians accountable for decision-making. If there are no representatives to hold accountable, this is not as much of problem. Past elections can be reviewed in time, say new decisions by default re-voted biannually, to minimize the short term bias. This is called "Continuous" voting.
Direct democracy has worked well for the Swiss. With modern technology I do not believe that at scale continuous direct democracy where one gets to vote from their phone on elections rolling every 24, 36 or 48 hours would fail.
Balance of power can of course be handled with (1) ministeries (2) presidential elections (3) judges. One could say that ministeries are representative, but the reality is that ministers (1) cannot form coalitions like parliaments (2) have measurable highly clear "performance" which can be tied to salary (3) will be much more likely chosen to represent what voters want because in every election for health minister the voters will be solely divided based on what they want from health minister, whereas representative democracy makes minister and other seats strategic tools.
Because national polling is more frequent, and you can pretty closely approximate a state result with a national poll plus a fixed “lean” for each state.
It isn't clear to me why we should weigh fundamentals less in relation to polling on the basis that it has a higher variation at this point of time in the cycle. Couldn't it be that it has higher uncertainty and it's more accurate (in terms of expectation) x days before the election, compared to polling?
32 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 62.0 ms ] threadI doubt we have many 13 year old HN people but it won't be long before there's a cohort here who lived entirely in a post Jobs world.
* That the model which 538 used up until 2022 puts Biden's chances of winning at 28%
* That the new model (which puts the candidates at "about even") is owned by Disney
Yeah, that tracks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight#2020_U.S._elec...
I would find it interesting if pulling in these days is actually able to figure out anything. In addition to the polling problem itself, we have two frontrunners who have probably garnered more "not that one" votes than any previous race in history.
Instead I suggest one should move to abolish the electoral college and instead count votes directly. The candidates should all be on the ballot. Then use Approval Voting where each voter gets to mark all candidates that they like.
There should be a French-style second round in case the top winners are too close together, say inside a 1% or 5% margin—in other words you could never win by a single vote, you'd always need hundreds of thousands of votes.
People will want to have local representation, which means local elections and boundaries for the reach of local government. When it comes to state-wide and national elections, either re-use these existing boundaries or determine districts using a fair algorithm. The way that politicians get to gerrymander their own seats is an ongoing scandal.
With approval voting replacing first-past-the-post, districts in presidential elections would be reduced to a mere organizational function. No redrawing of arbitrary borders should influence the outcome. It will still be important to ensure open and fair procedures; nobody should be forced to drive a car to reach a single distant mail ballot box or voting station only to have then to queue up for hours. This and other measures have been used in the past to defraud voters.
Yeah, no thanks. Two wolves and a lamb deciding on dinner. We are a republic and not a direct democracy intentionally because the founding fathers realized that mob rule is stupid.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A4sidentschaftswahl_in_F..., translated by Copilot:
The election of the French President is governed by Articles 6 and 7 of the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic. Since a referendum in 1962, the President has been directly elected by eligible voters. If no candidate receives an absolute majority of votes in the first round, a runoff election is held between the two candidates who received the most votes in the initial round.
In every election so far, a runoff has been necessary. The highest vote share in the first round was achieved by Charles de Gaulle in the 1965 presidential election with 44.6%.
The term of office for Presidents was reduced from seven to five years through a referendum in 2000. Since 2002, the French elect the head of state and the members of the National Assembly for five-year terms. Re-election is possible any number of times, but no more than two consecutive terms are allowed.
To run for election, a candidate must be at least 18 years old and eligible to vote. Additionally, they must gather at least 500 signatures from supporters who hold elected political offices. Approximately 42,000 officeholders are eligible, including mayors, National Assembly members, senators, and regional or departmental councilors. These signatures must come from at least 30 different departments or French overseas territories, with no department contributing more than one-tenth of the required signatures (i.e., 50 signatures).
The number of representatives allocated to each district is based on population, but must be a positive integer, and the dinner planing meeting is capped at 8 representatives.
Mountain lions are solitary. The 5 mountain lions live in 5 different districts. The 10 sheep all live in the same herd, which is in a 6th district.
By population then each mountain lion district should get 0.533 representatives, and the sheep district should get 5.333 representatives. But representatives must be a positive integer, so the mountain lions districts have to each get rounded up to 1. And with the meeting capped at 8 that only leaves 3 for the sheep.
I am not arguing that what we have is perfect, it’s not…but direct democracy or god forbid these ranked choice and run off voting schemes don’t improve our ability to get anything but more of the same two shitty political parties and their same two shit candidates that rise to the tops of their respective political cesspools.
If it were up to me, sortition would be how we select a president.
In a smaller homogeneous country you could have a point (including our individual states), but in a country as large, diverse, and powerful as the united states it seems to me that you need that balance of power spread amongst the entities of the country..both the people in the form of their representatives and the states via their representatives (i.e. senate and electoral college) as it relates to election of the executive.
In general, parliaments will always have issues where there is no one representing them. For example privacy, encryptation, drug issues are commonly underrepresented here in Europe. This means for example that altough 1% agrees that privacy laws matter most to them, they may not have representatives. Additionally, the existence of parties in the parliament may lead to suppression of the "represenativeness" of certain representatives.
Then, ALSO, representative democracy encourages politicians to make decisions to maximize vote count, instead of "good" alternatives. Additionally, with direct democracy if you really want to go against someone, you need to either make very clever legislation with a hole that others won't notice or to gain majority support for that. To convince a majority to vote to suppress your enemies can be difficult. If for nothing else, for the fact that small parliaments are likely to have disproportionate numbers of psychopathic and/or incompetent representatives at times.
Voters tend to choose based on partisan loyalties and short-term possibly out-of-control events rather than holding politicians accountable for decision-making. If there are no representatives to hold accountable, this is not as much of problem. Past elections can be reviewed in time, say new decisions by default re-voted biannually, to minimize the short term bias. This is called "Continuous" voting.
Direct democracy has worked well for the Swiss. With modern technology I do not believe that at scale continuous direct democracy where one gets to vote from their phone on elections rolling every 24, 36 or 48 hours would fail.
Balance of power can of course be handled with (1) ministeries (2) presidential elections (3) judges. One could say that ministeries are representative, but the reality is that ministers (1) cannot form coalitions like parliaments (2) have measurable highly clear "performance" which can be tied to salary (3) will be much more likely chosen to represent what voters want because in every election for health minister the voters will be solely divided based on what they want from health minister, whereas representative democracy makes minister and other seats strategic tools.