* re: votepair, was: Obama, our first president by quota
Topics: Democracy
22 Mar 2008
From: Ervan Darnell
It's really unfortunate that votepair.org seems not to be gearing up for 2008.
I believe it was shutdown as illegal vote selling.
I even think we discussed this years ago. I'd be in favor of sweeping reform that allows open vote selling. But absent that I think the electoral college system actually has some plusses and I am opposed to (for instance) this idea of a state compact to subvert it by pledging delegates in block based on popular votes. Vote swapping is somewhere between the two.
I know this will be another idea like opposing open primaries, that "fairness" will be the objection. Oh, incidentally, a Ragnar member wrote to me privately this week and confessed that [s]he voted in the opposite party as a spoiler, so I'm adding that to my evidence this is a real risk despite your (Vince's) thinking it not a problem. Indeed, your wanting to vote out of district is a bit like the spoiler voting in its own right. Just like you want to let Democrats spoil Republican decisions, you want to let to Californians spoil Ohio decisions (though the party spoiling aspect is far worse as there the conflict of interest is much stronger).
Here's my brief defense of the electoral college:
1) "Fairness" in voting is nonsense. It's a process for producing results, not a right. A voting process that produces more socialism is broken and one that produces more freedom is a working one. To say that one gains the right to vote but loses the right to free speech is nonsense that only a liberal could believe (if, for instance, a censorship provision were up for a vote). So, I'm interested in the game theory/utilitarian aspects of voting, not some notion of perfecting the degree to which I'm my neighbor's slave. Accordingly, I throw out 90% of all anti-electoral college arguments as having no sensible objective.
Specific points:
2) The more ways you let the rules be changed, the more ways the rule makers will game the system to get a particular outcome. The obvious case is not letting felons votes. Jeb Bush rigged the list of who was a felon so as to exclude several thousand legitimate voters in Florida in 2000. While I'd prefer in utopia that you get votes based on taxes paid, I want a system for which the rules cannot be changed once set (I'd let felons vote, their votes can't be less informed than those in San Francisco anyway). So, I'm suspicious of all reform proposals as having an agenda other than a better voting process. In this particular case, the obvious agenda is that more populous states are more liberal and they want to dilute existing conservative votes in the electoral college.
3) It makes less difference than it seems to which party wins once you normalize by campaign expenditures. The idea that the popular vote diverge from the electoral vote is true only because the electoral college system causes the campaign money to chase swing states. Were every state in play, the campaign money would go elsewhere, and the campaign topics as well, such that the popular vote would be different. That is, the popular vote in an electoral college system is different than the popular vote in (counting) the popular vote system. To say 'oh look, a discrepancy in the two' is not a meaningful observation by itself.
4) We need more states's rights, not fewer. This moves us in the wrong direction of diluting states' ability to make local decisions.
5) A popular vote would lead to more divisive candidates. Campaigns have two strategies broadly: they go head to head and vie for the independent swing vote, or they can focus on single-issue extreme voters and try to pull them over based on one issue, or possibly just to get them to overcome their apathy and vote (the Karl Rove strategy). In an electoral college system, states with strong leanings are not in play. Thus, it's not in the interest of candidates to campaign there, nor in their interest to appeal to more extreme voters (as much). Instead, candidates have to focus on swing states, which are by definition, in the political center of the country, and thus candidates converge on policies in the political center instead of trying to weigh the two extremes to see which can win. In the long run, this produces more not only a more moderate campaign strategy, but more moderate politicians. Obviously, I dislike where the political cente
r is, but governing from there is much better than swinging far left and far right. This doesn't negate my point (3). There I'm saying it won't affect which party wins, in this point I'm arguing you will get less suitable candidates whichever party wins.
At 06:16 AM 3/22/2008, Vincent Kargatis wrote:
Ervan Darnell wrote:
We have in common our vote not counting, and being free to vote our
conscience.
It's really unfortunate that votepair.org seems not to be gearing up for 2008. A wonderful idea, I got paired with a Bush-opposing lib from Ohio - basically, each pair gets to share a slice of cake and keep a half for later too. Evidently its motive was anti-Bush, but the virtue of the idea has nothing to do with a specific election, and I'm depressed they aren't keeping it up (in the absence of electoral reform).
v
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Ervan Darnell
ervan@kelvinist.com http://www.kelvinist.com
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