Politics

Could states affect gerrymandering outside their state with conspiracy rules?

In puzzling over solutions to gerrymandering, I remain stymied by the following problems:

  • The people in power don't want to undo the gerrymandering that is putting them in power.
  • The courts want to stop gerrymandering but they only overturn rules, they try not to write new ones.
  • States could act, especially a few in concert, but what they do might be overturned by the courts

Arguments were heard this week in a lawsuit attempting to get the supreme court to stop gerrymandering. Courts have been ready to declare that a district is gerrymandered, but are reluctant to force states to adopt some rule on how they draw their districts. The concern is that there is no one best and most fair way to draw districts. You can tell when a district is unfair, but it's up to states to write the rules and the courts to rule on their constitutionality. The plaintiffs have a hope that the courts might rule that any districting is a disenfranchisement, and force states to allocate representatives based on a proportional system from a statewide popular vote.

I have wondered if states can find, on their own, the power to fix this. Many states have already written anti-gerrymandering rules for their own districts, but can they make those have extra-territorial effect.

One way is with an interstate compact. I outline a plan for this here. It has the problem that the counter-gerrymandering might be found illegal by the court. Remember the court is ready to say, "That's not a valid district shape" without saying a formula for what a valid district shape is. They just know it when they see it.

Here's another idea -- possibly unconstitutional as well, but it may be improved with refinement.

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Getting rid of winner-takes-all in the electoral college could backfire badly

A new organization named Equal Votes is pushing to make a supreme court case to undo the electoral college. They hope to use a precedent set in the famous "Bush v. Gore" 2000 election case, which strengthened the application of the equal protection clause to election law. They want to show that the "Winner takes all" approach that 48 states use to hand out electoral college votes is a violation of the idea of one person one vote. States would then not be able to use it.

It's an interesting idea, but I have grave concerns that it might backfire, and badly. Worst case, it could guarantee a Republican President into the indefinite future. Hopefully not, but that's a bad result, even if you're Republican leaning.

My friend Larry Lessig is supporting this, and I don't doubt the theory that it might win. The idea is that since a state could assign its electors in proportion to how its citizens voted, it is depriving them of their rights by not doing so. If you are in a safe state and not in the dominant party, your vote is useless and effectively counts for nothing.

It is far from certain that this logic can win. Winner takes all is of course the norm in democracies. The country only gets one President even though almost half the country didn't want him. States only get one governor. In California, where state legislators are elected by districts and some Republicans get seats, the reality is that the Democrats get complete power, not partial power. And in the current congress, it takes defections or filibusters to stop complete rule by the Republicans (even though, due to gerrymandering, they got fewer votes than the Democrats in the house.)

Voting by gerrymandered district

And this is where we get the first big risk. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, don't do winner takes all. They follow what seems a very sensible plan at first. A state's electoral college delegation is equal to the number of congressional representatives they have: House members plus two. These states select two electors based on statewide vote, and then select the other electors based on the vote in each district. Just like members of congress, the electors represent their "districts."

There is a risk that if the court held that winner-takes-all is invalid, they might not rule that the established district based system is invalid. Equal Votes will ask for that, but they might not get it. If they don't get it, then some states, in particular the gerrymandered states, may decide to follow the Maine system. And being gerrymandered like this, they are likely to return a slate of electors that is not too different from their congressional delegation -- a heavily skewed delegation. Even if many other states use a different system (like the proportional allocation Equal Votes wants) the result would be a college very much like congress. And that's a GOP college.

Why? Because of operation Redmap. This insidious, I would say evil, cheat on the electoral rules was done by Karl Rove and the RNC in 2010. They poured millions into a carefully selected number of unsafe Democrat statehouse seats around the country, enough to swing those statehouses to the GOP. Then they used that power to redraw the districts in those states in a gerrymandered way to favour the GOP. Not just in the congressional elections, but in future statehouse elections, cementing the power indefinitely. It will need a major anti-GOP swing, or supreme court ruling, to fix it.

Don't feed the radical right trolls by counter-protesting them

We're all shocked at the idea of a growing neo-Nazi movement, at the horrible attack in Virginia and the lack of condemnation by the President. It's making us forget that the neo-Nazi radical right are trolls with many parallels to online trolls. And the only thing to do is not to feed the trolls, and definitely don't attack the civil rights that they make use of.

A protest march has 3 main functions:

To fix gerrymandering, a test is needed -- or an interstate compact

One of the key flaws in the US political system is gerrymandering. I have written about this before even proposing my own method of redistricting, but such proposals only have a limited utility.

In this article I present why court solutions have had trouble, and a potentially new approach using an interstate compact.

Gerrymandering is particularly bad in the USA, but it's a general "bug" in many democratic systems. The flaw is often summed up with the phrase "The politicians pick the voters instead of vice versa." When the incumbent legislators and parties can draw the districts, they can bias the system heavily in their favour. In the USA, the house of representatives is currently highly biased towards the Republican party. It is often cited that the Republicans won 49.9% of popular votes for congress but got 55% of the seats. You can't actually add the individual house votes, because people vote (or rather stay away) differently in safe districts than they do in contested one, but the margin is large enough that the trend is clear.

This is in large part due to Operation Redmap which is documented in the book Ratfucked. It truly fits the description "fiendishly clever plan" and exploits the bug to the level of making it close to permanent.

How districts are drawn is left to the states both in the constitution and the law. Some states have moved to create more fair districting rules, the sort of rules you would make up if you were doing it from a nonpartisan standpoint. However, the hard fact is that those states which do this are chumps. It does not make the system more fair if one side stops cheating -- and I do think of gerrymandering as cheating -- and the other side keeps on cheating. It just assures victory for the cheating side going forward. At the same time, having all sides cheat indefinitely is not a good solution either.

The constitution says very little about districting. In fact, it doesn't even demand districts! States could have, if they chose, selected their representatives in a statewide proportional vote. Later federal laws, however, have demanded each person have one congress member, which demands geographic districts. About half the states require the districts be contiguous, but the others don't. The voting rights act and other principles have forbidden drawing the lines on racial or minority grounds, but not on the grounds of "this helps incumbents keep their seats" -- that's still largely within the rules.

In any event, as long as gerrymandering is benefiting the GOP, they are not going to commit political suicide to remove it. States controlled strongly by one party or the other will resist willfully hurting their own parties, though there are exceptions when states have ballot resolutions. The supreme court ruled, barely, that the public can supersede the legislatures on this matter with a ballot proposition, and so that has happened. While the public belong to parties, they are actually more interested in fairness than party loyalty.

A constitutional amendment could fix this, but that's not going to happen. And strong federal law could probably fix it, but that's not coming from houses controlled by the people which benefit from the cheating.

As such, the solution can only come from the courts, or ballot propositions in a balanced set of states.

A good summary of the rules around districting in the different states can be found at this site.

But it's not actually fair play, say the courts

Justices of the supreme court have reportedly all denounced gerrymandering to cement political control. They agree that it violates the principles of the constitution of one person one vote and equal protection, as it effectively eliminates for partisan reasons the voting power of many. Even agreeing with this, for now they feel powerless to stop it.

We can all see gerrymandering happen, but for the courts to do something about it, they would need to define fair and unbiased test which says when it is happening. This is hard, as courts are reluctant to write sets of rules like that -- that is the province of the other branches of government. Courts don't make the rules, they just decide if people are playing fairly by the rules that the other branches created.

So while it's easy for you or I to propose fair rules for districting -- rectangular districts or my own convexity test above -- these just aren't the sort of rules courts are willing to make up. You can't extract them from the constitution. A court can look at a crazily shaped district and know "this is unfair" but it has to come up with a way that the states can objectively know what is fair and what isn't, without being the author of its own rules.

One proposed rule that's been advocated is the voting efficiency gap. Here, they try to measure how many votes were "wasted" because of district design. If a district went 80% for one party and 20% for the other, 30% of party A's votes are wasted, and20% of party Bs, and the difference between these numbers tells how biased that election was.

It's a nice test but one can see immediate flaws. For example, in a state biased 55% to 45%, a "perfect" districting where every district has the same balance as the state would result in 100% of seats for the dominant party. Since one party is strong in cities and the other strong in the country, any geographic set of districts is going to have these "inefficiencies" with inner cities voting 80% Democratic in the same state as a rural district votes 80% Republican -- without any intent to cheat in how the lines are drawn. As noted, proportional non-geographic districts are not going to happen.

The courts, if they are to help us, need a test which will clearly let them tell states, "If you don't draw your districts to match this test, they will be ruled invalid." It's easy to come up with fair, non-partisan tests to use, but the problem is that it is easy and so there are several you could use -- and why should one be chosen over another? The legislatures can choose one option from many, but the courts are not to be arbitrary in that way. Their test has to clearly match some principle they find in the law.

You can propose convexity, or straight lines, or random selection -- but none of them answer the question of "why does the law demand that particular one, vs. another?" They will ask this because any system, even if non-partisan, will benefit one party more than a different choice and thus have the appearance of being chosen from the pool for a partisan reason. And perhaps more than the appearance.

Ballot propositions and a State Compact

Individual states deciding to play fair just cede their power. Perhaps another option is possible -- through a compact of states dedicated to fair districting.

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On voting, sampling, measurement, elections and surveys

Yesterday's post about the flaws in the so-called "popular vote" certainly triggered some debate (mostly on Facebook.) To clarify matters, I thought I would dive a little deeper about what the two types of Presidential elections in the USA are so different they can't be added together in a way that isn't misleading.

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We don't know who won the US popular vote, decent chance it was Clinton

The common statistic reported after the US election was that Clinton "won the popular vote" by around 3 million votes over Trump. This has caused great rancour over the role of the electoral college and has provided a sort of safety valve against the shock Democrats (and others) faced over the Trump victory.

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The terrible power of computer espionage in our world of shame

I have some dark secrets. Some I am not proud of, some that are fine by me but I know would be better kept private. So do you. So does everybody. And the more complex your life, the more "big" things you have done in the world, the bigger your mistakes and other secrets are. It is true for all of us. This is one of the reasons the world needs privacy to work.

The Electoral College: Good, bad or Trump trumper, and how to abolish it if you want

Many are writing about the Electoral college. Can it still prevent Trump's election, and should it be abolished?

Like almost everybody, I have much to say about the US election results. The core will come later -- including an article I was preparing long before the election but whose conclusions don't change much because of the result, since Trump getting 46.4% is not (outside of the result) any more surprising than Trump getting 44% like we expected. But for now, since I have written about the college before, let me consider the debate around it.

By now, most people are aware that the President is not elected Nov 8th, but rather by the electors around Dec 19. The electors are chosen by their states, based on popular vote. In almost all states all electors are from the party that won the popular vote in a "winner takes all," but in a couple small ones they are distributed. In about half the states, the electors are bound by law to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in that state. In other states they are party loyalists but technically free. Some "faithless" electors have voted differently, but it's very rare.

I'm rather saddened by the call by many Democrats to push for electors to be faithless, as well as calls at this exact time to abolish the college. There are arguments to abolish the college, but the calls today are ridiculously partisan, and thus foolish. I suspect that very few of those shouting to abolish the college would be shouting that if Trump had won the popular vote and lost the college (which was less likely but still possible.) In one of Trump's clever moves, he declared that he would not trust the final results (if he lost) and this tricked his opponents into getting very critical of the audacity of saying such a thing. This makes it much harder for Democrats to now declare the results are wrong and should be reversed.

The college approach -- where the people don't directly choose their leader -- is not that uncommon in the world. In my country, and in most of the British parliamentary democracies, we are quite used to it. In fact, the Prime Minister's name doesn't even appear on our ballots as a fiction the way it does in the USA. We elect MPs, voting for them mostly (but not entirely) on party lines, and the parties have told us in advance who they will name as PM. (They can replace their leader after if they want, but by convention, not rule, another election happens not long after.)

In these systems it's quite likely that a party will win a majority of seats without winning the popular vote. In fact, it happens a lot of the time. That's because in the rest of the world there are more than 2 parties, and no party wins the popular vote. But it's also possible for the party that came 2nd in the popular vote to form the government, sometimes with a majority, and sometimes in an alliance.

Origins of the college

When the college was created, the framers were not expecting popular votes at all. They didn't think that the common people (by which they meant wealthy white males) would be that good at selecting the President. In the days before mass media allowed every voter to actually see the candidates, one can understand this. The system technically just lets each state pick its electors, and they thought the governor or state house would do it.

Later, states started having popular votes (again only of land owning white males) to pick the electors. They did revise the rules of the college (12th amendment) but they kept it because they were federalists, strong advocates of states' rights. They really didn't imagine the public picking the President directly.

Most voting is about the next election, not this one.

When people vote, what do they think it will accomplish? How does this affect how they vote, and how should it?

My apologies for more of this in a season when our social media are overwhelmed with politics, but in a lot of the postings I see about voting plans, I see different implicit views on just what the purpose of voting is. The main focus will be on the vote for US President.

The vast majority of people will vote in non-contested states. The logic is different in the "swing" states where all the campaign attention is.

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The social networks could hold great political power due to GOTV. Should they?

The social networks have access (or more to the point can give their users access) to an unprecedented trove of information on political views and activities. Could this make a radical difference in affecting who actually shows up to vote, and thus decide the outcome of elections?

I've written before about how the biggest factor in US elections is the power of GOTV - Get Out the Vote. US Electoral turnout is so low -- about 60% in Presidential elections and 40% in off-year -- that the winner is determined by which side is able to convince more of their weak supporters to actually show up and vote. All those political ads you see are not going to make a Democrat vote Republican or vice versa, they are going to scare a weak supporter to actually show up. It's much cheaper, in terms of votes per dollar (or volunteer hour) to bring in these weak supporters than it is to swing a swing voter.

The US voter turnout numbers are among the worst in the wealthy world. Much of this is blamed on the fact the US, unlike most other countries, has voter registration; effectively 2 step voting. Voter registration was originally implemented in the USA as a form of vote suppression, and it's stuck with the country ever since. In almost all other countries, some agency is responsible for preparing a list of citizens and giving it to each polling place. There are people working to change that, but for now it's the reality. Registration is about 75%, Presidential voting about 60%. (Turnout of registered voters is around 80%)

Scary negative ads are one thing, but one of the most powerful GOTV forces is social pressure. Republicans used this well under Karl Rove, working to make social groups like churches create peer pressure to vote. But let's look at the sort of data sites like Facebook have or could have access to:

  • They can calculate a reasonably accurate estimate of your political leaning with modern AI tools and access to your status updates (where people talk politics) and your friend network, along with the usual geographic and demographic data
  • They can measure the strength of your political convictions through your updates
  • They can bring in the voter registration databases (which are public in most states, with political use allowed on the data. Commercial use is forbidden in a portion of states but this would not be commercial.)
  • In many cases, the voter registration data also reveals if you voted in prior elections
  • Your status updates and geographical check-ins and postings will reveal voting activity. Some sites (like Google) that have mobile apps with location sensing can detect visits to polling places. Of course, for the social site to aggregate and use this data for its own purposes would be a gross violation of many important privacy principles. But social networks don't actually do (too many) things; instead they provide tools for their users to do things. As such, while Facebook should not attempt to detect and use political data about its users, it could give tools to its users that let them select subsets of their friends, based only on information that those friends overtly shared. On Facebook, you can enter the query, "My friends who like Donald Trump" and it will show you that list. They could also let you ask "My Friends who match me politically" if they wanted to provide that capability.

Now imagine more complex queries aimed specifically at GOTV, such as: "My friends who match me politically but are not scored as likely to vote" or "My friends who match me politically and are not registered to vote." Possibly adding "Sorted by the closeness of our connection" which is something they already score.

Don't throw away your vote on a major party -- vote 3rd party and mean something

It's common for people to write that those who vote for a minor party in an election are "throwing away" their vote. Here's a recent article by my friend Clay Shirky declaring there's no such thing as a protest vote and many of the cases are correct, but the core thesis is wrong. Instead, I will argue that outside the swing states, you are throwing away your vote if you vote for a major party candidate.

To be clear, if you are in one of the crucial swing states where the race is close -- and trust me, you know that from the billions of dollars of ad spend in your state, as well as from reading polls -- then you should vote for the least evil of the two party candidates as you judge it. And even in most of the country, (non-swing) you should continue to vote for those if you truly support them. But in a non-swing state, in this election in particular, you have an additional option and an additional power.

Consider here in California, which is very solidly for Clinton. Nate Silver rates it as 99.9% (or higher) to go for Clinton. A vote for Clinton or Trump here is wasted. It adds a miniscule proportion to their totals. Clinton will fetch around 8 million votes. You can do the un-noticed thing of making it 8 million and 1, and you'll bump her federally by an even tinier fraction. Your vote can make no difference to the result (you already know that) and nor will it be noticed in the totals. You're throwing it away, getting an insignificant benefit for its use.

Of course, the 3rd party candidates had no chance of winning California, or the USA. And while they like to talk a pretend bluster about that, they know that. You know that. Their voters know that. 3rd party voters aren't voting to help their candidate win, any more than Trump voters imagine their vote could help him win California, or Clinton voters imagine they could affect her assured victory.

Third party voters, however, will express their support for other idea in the final vote totals. If Jill Stein gets 50,000 votes in California, making it 50,001 doesn't make a huge difference, but it makes 160 times as much difference to her total than a Clinton vote does, or 100x what a Trump vote does. Gary Johnson is doing so well this year (polling about 8% of national popular vote) that his voters won't do quite as much to his total, but still many times more improvement than the major party votes. Clay argues that "nobody is receiving" the message of your vote for a third party, but the truth is, your vote for Clinton in California or Trump in Texas is a message that has even less chance of being received.

A big difference this year is that the press are paying attention to the minor parties. This year, you will see much more press on Johnson's and Stein's totals. It is true that in other years, the TV networks would often ignore those parties. In some case, TV network software is programmed to report only the top two results, and to make the percentages displayed add up to 100%. This is wrong of the networks, but I suspect there is less chance of it happening. Johnson will probably appear in those totals. Web sites and newspapers have generally reported the proper totals.

Does anybody look at these totals for minor candidates? Some don't, but the big constituency for them is others interested in minor parties. People want a tribe. Many people don't want to support something unless they see they are not alone, that others are supporting it. Johnson and Stein's poll numbers are already galvanizing many more votes for them.

This is how third parties arise, and it happens a lot outside the USA. In the USA it has't happened since the Republicans arose in the 1850s, tied to the collapse of the Whigs. Prior to that multiple parties were more common. Of course, there have been several runs at new parties (Perot/Reform, Dixiecrat and American Independent) which did not succeed. But if everybody refuses to actually vote for the 3rd parties they support because it is viewed as a waste, of course no 3rd parties will ever arise. Having a slim chance at that is one of the things to drive 3rd party voters, because that slim chance still means making a bigger difference than a meaningless extra vote for a major party.

This is how most political change happens. Because people see they are not alone. That's how small marches and protests grow into bigger ones until leaders are toppled. It's how small movements within big parties, and whole 3rd parties rise.

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A smarter successor to Trump is even scarier, but it's coming

Social media are jam packed with analysis of the rise of Donald Trump these days. Most of us in what we would view as the intellectual and educated community are asking not just why Trump is a success, but as Trevor Noah asked, "Why is this even a contest?" Clinton may not be, as the Democrats claim, the most qualified person ever to run, but she's certainly decently qualified, and Trump is almost the only candidate with no public service experience ever to run. Even his supporters readily agree he's a bit of a buffoon, that he says tons of crazy things, and probably doesn't believe most of the things he says. (The fact that he doesn't actually mean many of the crazy things has become the primary justification of those who support him.)

But it is a contest, and while it looks like Clinton will probably win it is also disturbing to me to note that in polls broken down by race and sex, Trump is actually ahead of Clinton by a decent margin among my two groups -- whites and males. (Polls have been varying a lot in the weeks of the conventions.) Whites and males have their biases and privileges, of course, but they are very large and diverse groups, and again, to the coastal intellectual view, this shouldn't even be a contest. (It's also my view as a foreigner of libertarian leanings and no association with either party.)

The things stacked in favour of the Republican nominee

There have been lots of essays examining the reason for Trump's success. Credible essays have described a swing to nationalism and/or authoritarianism which Trump has exploited. Trump's skill at marketing and memes is real. His appeal to paternalism and strength works well (Lakeoff's "strong father" narrative.) The RNC also identified Hillary Clinton as a likely nominee 2 decades ago, and since then has put major effort into discrediting her, much more time than it's ever had to work on other opponents. And Clinton herself certainly has her flaws and low approval ratings, even within her own party.

It is also important to note that the chosen successor of a Democratic incumbent has never in history defeated the Republican. (In 1856 Buchanan defeated the 1st ever Republican nominee, Fremont, but was Franklin Pierce's opponent at the convention.) This stacks the deck in favour of this year's Republican. Of course, Wilson, Cleveland, Roosevelt the 2nd, Carter and Clinton the 1st all defeated incumbent Republicans, so Democrats are far from impotent.

The specific analysis of this election is interesting, but my concern is about the broader trend I see, a much bigger geopolitical trend arising from technology, globalization, income inequality and redistribution among nations as well as the decline of religion and the classic lifetime middle class career. This big topic will get more analysis in time here. I was particularly interested in this recent article linking globalization and the comparative reduced share for the U.S. middle class. The ascendancy of the secular, western, technological, intellectual capitalist liberal elite is facing an increasing backlash.

Where Trump's support comes from

Trump of course begins, as Clinton does, with a large "base." There is an element of the Republican base that will never tolerate voting for Clinton almost no matter how bad Trump is. There is a similar Democratic contingent. This base has been boosted by that 2 decade anti-Clinton campaign.

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Politics: Leave 2nd amendment to the states, and never say the word "Trump"

Political debate is going overboard these days. I travel overseas all the time and if I reveal I live in the USA, you can't stop people from asking about Trump. It's getting frustrating and boring. But to avoid contentious topics, let's talk about guns!

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Bloomberg (or another moderate) could have walked away with the Presidency due to Trump

Michael Bloomberg, a contender for an independent run for US President has announced he will not run though for a reason that just might be completely wrong. As a famous moderate (having been in both the Republican and Democratic parties) he might just have had a very rare shot at being the first independent to win since forever.

Here's why, and what would have to happen:

  1. Donald Trump would have to win the Republican nomination. (I suspect he won't, but it's certainly possible.)
  2. The independent would have to win enough electoral votes to prevent either the Republican or Democrat getting 280.

If nobody has a majority of the electoral college, the house picks the President from the top 3 college winners. The house is Republican, so it seems pretty unlikely it would pick any likely Democratic Party nominee, and the Democrats would know this. Once they did know this, the Democrats would have little choice but to vote for the moderate, since they certainly would not vote for Trump.

Now all it takes is a fairly small number of Republicans to bolt from Trump. Normally they would not betray their own party's official nominee, but in this case, the party establishment hates Trump, and I think that some of them would take the opportunity to knock him out, and vote for the moderate. If 30 or more join the democrats and vote for the moderate, he or she becomes President.

It would be different for the Vice President, chosen by the senate. Trump probably picks a mainstream republican to mollify the party establishment, and that person wins the senate vote easily.

To be clear, here the independent can win even if all they do is make a small showing, just strong enough to split off some electors from both other candidates. Winning one big state could be enough, for example, if it was won from the candidate who would otherwise have won.

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Gaming 3 party elections

This proposal on the upcoming federal election talks about some interesting gaming of the voting system.

In Canada, there are 3 (and sometimes more) strong parties. This is true in much of the world; in fact the two-party USA is somewhat unusual. However, with "plurality" style elections, where the candidate with the most votes takes the seat even though they might have well under a majority, you can get a serious difference between the popular vote and the composition of the house. Americans see the same in their Electoral college and in gerrymandered districts.

The author, who wishes to defeat the incumbent Conservative party, proposes a way for the other two parties (Liberals and New Democrats) to join forces and avoid vote splitting. The Liberals and NDP are competitors, but have much more affinity for one another than they do for the Conservatives. They are both left-of-centre. This collaboration could be done at a national party level or at the grass roots level, though it would be much harder there.

Often in parliaments, you not only get splitting within the race for each seat, you get a house where no party has a majority. For minority governments, one party -- usually the largest -- strikes a deal with another party for a coalition that allows them to govern. Sometimes the coalition involves bitter enemies. They cooperate because the small party gets some concessions, and some of their agenda is passed into law, even though far more of the dominant party's agenda gets passed. Otherwise, the small party knows it will get nothing.

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Nate Silver is Not God and other political musings

In the wake of the election, the big nerd story is the perfect stats-based prediction that Nate Silver of the 538 blog made on the results in every single state. I was following the blog and like all, am impressed with his work. The perfection gives the wrong impression, however. Silver would be the first to point out he predicted Florida as very close with a slight lean for Obama, and while that is what happened, that's really just luck. His actual prediction was that it was too close to call. But people won't see that, they see the perfection. I hope he realizes he should try to downplay this. For his own sake, if he doesn't, he has nowhere to go but down in 2014 and 2016.

But the second reason is stronger. People will put even more faith in polls. Perhaps even not faith, but reasoned belief, because polls are indeed getting more accurate. Good polls that are taken far in advance are probably accurate about what the electorate thinks then, but the electorate itself is not that accurate far in advance. So the public and politicians should always be wary about what the polls say before the election.

Silver's triumph means they may not be. And as the metaphorical Heisenberg predicts, the observations will change the results of the election.

There are a few ways this can happen. First, people change their votes based on polls. They are less likely to vote if they think the election is decided, or they sometimes file protest votes when they feel their vote won't change things. Vice versa, a close poll is one way to increase turnout, and both sides push their voters to make the difference. People are going to think the election is settled because 538 has said what people are feeling.

The second big change has already been happening. Politicians change their platforms due to the polls. Danny Hillis observed some years ago that the popular vote is almost always a near tie for a reason. In a two party system, each side regularly runs polls. If the polls show them losing, they move their position in order to get to 51%. They don't want to move to 52% as that's more change than they really want, but they don't want to move to less than 50% or they lose the whole game. Both sides do this, and to some extent the one with better polling and strategy wins the election. We get two candidates, each with a carefully chosen position designed to (according to their own team) just beat the opposition, and the actual result is closer to a random draw driven by chaotic factors.

Well, not quite. As Silver shows, the electoral college stops that from happening. The electoral college means different voters have different value to the candidates, and it makes the system pretty complex. Instead of aiming for a total of voters, you have to worry that position A might help you in Ohio but hurt you in Florida, and the electoral votes happen in big chunks which makes the effect of swing states more chaotic. Thus poll analysis can tell you who will win but not so readily how to tweak things to make the winner be you. The college makes small differences in overall support lead to huge differences in the college.

In Danny's theory, the two candidates do not have to be the same, they just have to be the same distance from a hypothetical center. (Of course to 3rd parties the two candidates do tend to look nearly identical but to the members of the two main parties they look very different.)

Show me the money?

Many have noted that this election may have cost $6B but produced a very status quo result. Huge money was spent, but opposed forces also spent their money, and the arms race just led to a similar balance of power. Except a lot of rich donors spent a lot of their money, got valuable access to politicians for it, and some TV stations in Ohio and a few other states made a killing. The fear that corporate money would massively swing the process does not appear to have gained much evidence, but it's clear that influence was bought.

I'm working on a solution to this, however. More to come later on that.

Ballot Propositions

While there have been some fairly good ballot propositions (such as last night's wins for Marijuana and marriage equality) I am starting to doubt the value of the system itself. As much as you might like the propositions you like, if half of the propositions are negative in value, the system should be scrapped. Indeed, if only about 40% are negative, it should still be scrapped because of the huge cost of the system itself.

New panoramas of Israel, and of course a proposal for peace

I'm back from our fun "Singuarlity Week" in Tel Aviv, where we did a 2 day and 1 day Singularity University program. We judged a contest for two scholarships by Israelis for SU, and I spoke to groups like Garage Geeks, Israeli Defcon, GizaVC's monthly gathering and even went into the west bank to address the Palestinian IT Society and announce a scholarship contest for SU.

It will be tough reversing Citizens United

There are a large number of constitutional amendments being proposed to reverse the effects of the recent US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Here the court held that Citizens United, a group which had produced an anti-Hilary Clinton documentary, had the right to run ads promoting their documentary and its anti-Clinton message. It had been held at the lower court that because the documentary and thus the ads advocated against a candidate, they were restricted under campaign finance rules. Earlier, however, the court had held earlier that it was OK for Michael Moore to run ads for Fahrenheit 9/11, his movie which strongly advocated against re-electing George W. Bush. The court could not find the fine line between these that the lower court had held, but the result was a decision that has people very scared because it strips most restrictions on campaigning by groups and in particular corporations. Corporations have most of the money, and money equals influence in elections.

Most attempts at campaign finance reform and control have run into a constitutional wall. That's because when people talk about freedom of speech, it's hard to deny that political speech is the most sacred, most protected of the forms of speech being safeguarded by the 1st amendment. Rules that try to say, "You can't use your money to get out the message that you like or hate a candidate" are hard to reconcile with the 1st amendment. The court has made that more clear and so the only answer is an amendment, many feel.

It seems like that should not be hard. After all, the court only ruled 5-4, and partisan lines were involved. Yet in the dissent, it seems clear to me that the dissenters don't so much claim that political speech is not being abridged by the campaign finance rules, but rather that the consequences of allowing big money interests to dominate the political debate are so grave that it would be folly to allow it, almost regardless of what the bill of rights says. The courts have kept saying that campaign finance reform efforts don't survive first amendment tests, and the conclusion many have come to is that CFR is so vital that we must weaken the 1st amendment to get it.

With all the power of an amendment to play with, I have found most of the proposed amendments disappointing and disturbing. Amendments should be crystal clear, but I find many of the proposals to be muddy when viewed in the context of the 1st amendment, even though as later amendments they have the right to supersede it.

The problem is this: When they wrote that the freedom of the press should not be abridged, they were talking about the big press. They really meant organizations like the New York Times and Fox News. If those don't have freedom of the press, nobody does. And these are corporations. Until very recently it wasn't really possible to put out your political views to the masses on your terms unless you were a media corporation, or paid a media corporation to do it for you. The internet is changing that but the change is not yet complete.

Many of the amendments state that they do not abridge freedom of the press. But what does that mean? If the New York Times or Fox News wish to use their corporate money to endorse or condemn a candidate -- as they usually do -- is that something we could dare let the government restrict? Would we allow the NYT to do it in their newspaper, but not in other means, such as buying ads in another newspaper, should they wish to do so? Is the Fox News to be defined as something different from Citizens United?

I'm hard pressed to reconcile freedom of the press and the removal of the ability of corporations (including media ones) from using money to put out a political message. What I fear as that to do so requires that the law -- nay, the constitution -- try to define what is being "press" and what is not. This is something we've been afraid to do in every other context, and something I and my associates have fought to prevent, as lawsuits have tried to declare that bloggers, for example, were not mainstream press and thus did not have the same freedom of the press as the big boys.

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