On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Nathan Newman wrote:
--> But first Michael interjected:
First off let me say that I completely agree with you that Instant Run-off is the place to start, and that local elections are the place to start. And from there move up. Getting instant runnoff on a national basis would be the culminating rather than the initial step.
As for that culminating step, getting people to give up the electoral college for instant runoff voting, I still completely dispute that that it's a mathematically impossible to pass such an amendment because it would be against small states' interests.
> But with the electoral college, Wyoming's voters triple their
> proportionate voting strength
That would only be true if Wyoming and California were the only states voting. If the choice being voted on is yes/no, and another small state is tripling its voting strength in the opposite direction, this "strength" is cancelled out at the same moment it is bestowed by the same crazy system that bestowed it. It's an illusion, an artifact of half done math, of simply ignoring the cancelling role played by random variation.
> While not great power either way, such small states recognize that they
> would be almost completely ignored if Wyoming had only as much electoral
> power as a city like Oakland or Jersey City (two cities where I've lived
> with similar populations to that state).
As opposed to being completely ignored now because it's incontestably Republican? Especially Wyoming, where the result is such a foregone conclusion that everyone already knows today which way the state will go in 2008. If they ever got as much coverage as Oakland got last year it'd set a record. The only reason Bush and Cheney visited there for an hour on their way to somewhere else was that they needed to try and convince people that Cheney lived there. And that's the most Wyoming will ever get for "tripled" voting strength: a whistle stop. That's not an interest. That's barely a sop to vanity.
It is true that if you held a referendum simply on giving up the electoral college -- which would be the equivalent of saying "Vote here to give up your privilege to a whistlestop" -- then of course it would lose to a rational electorate because that's pure downside, even though it's a tiny downside. But of course that's not the choice you'd pose. You'd offer instead a positive gain, the chance to vote for a third party without getting screwed. They wouldn't be giving up the EC. They'd be gaining Instant Runoffs. You'd bundle the two together. And if rational voters in small states voted their expressed interests they would take it. The idea that math makes it impossible is wrong, IHMO. Freedom to express themselves is a real interest that lots of people care about. "Tripled" voting strength on the other hand is a truism that isn't true. It's not a matter of getting people in small states to vote against their interests. It's a matter of dispelling illusions.
I hasten to add this is only true for the EC. In the Senate and in the House, disproportionate voting strength is a baleful reality and I agree with the critique that it would take a revolution to fix it. But not the EC. It would only take a cross between the term limits movement and the ERA movement to change it. And both of them were rather weak tea as movements go. It's not hard to imagine such a thing happening again.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com