Friday, November 25, 2011
Who is visiting my blog from Moscow?
I seem to get a number of visits from someone with an IP address in Moscow.
Hello Moscow!
I can't help but wonder who in Moscow is checking my blog and why. It would be nice to think someone found something I wrote at least mildly interesting. I'm not even convinced my 4 "followers" find my blog all that interesting...
So...Moscow...say Hi sometime.
Spoiler vote is BS
Our political system here in the USA is very broken.
The voting system is particularly bad. I'm of the opinion that the voting system we have may in fact be unconstitutional in that it allows states to draw districts that will have the effect of disenfranchising minorities that otherwise would have representation. Just quickly think about this example: Imagine a voter base of 100 voters. We'll chop those voters up not by arbitrary criteria, but rather based upon the theoretical way in which they would like to vote...or their actual political opinions about the type of representation they would like. We'll pretend that there are 30 people who consider themselves Red, 30 Blue, 10 Green, 10 Yellow, 10 Orange, and 10 Purple. If we allow the populace to elect 1 representative for every 10 voters, we'll end up with 3R, 3B, 1G, 1Y, 1O, and 1P. If instead we draw a district map and have the subset of 10 people within the district elect someone based upon a "plurality" such as we do, then we'll end up with a government that is likely made up of 5R and 5B. All the minorities are likely to be eliminated from representation. I believe that it can be proven that all district maps will have the effect of eliminating minority representation and disenfranchising voters.
In our given example, a typical district will have 3R, 3B, 1G, 1Y, 1O, and 1B voter. All the minorities are likely to be given a false choice between a B or a R representative. It's likely that a typical district will have 7 out of 10 voters not really like their representative. Compare that to the district-less voting where every minority capable of getting 10 votes gets a representative.
Then Imagine a single seat election, like for governor. Chances are that the R and B candidates will be leading in the polls. Chances are good that 70 out of 100 of our voters won't really like whomever ends up winning if we jut do straight plurality voting. Range voting would guarantee that the most preferred candidate would win any single seat election.
Multiple seat elections, such as for congress would be better off using a proxy vote system, or at the very least using re-weighted range voting.
I'll go on more about that another time.
I just got riled up because I saw Chris Mathews make the same stupid spoiler vote argument I've heard so many times before. He said essentially this: "when you vote for a third party candidate, you aren't voting for a winner, but instead you're depriving someone else of your vote and you are spoiling the election and wasting your vote." This whole idea is nonsense for a number of reasons.
Once again, I'll jump into an example to point out what I consider the absurdity of this argument. Imagine that Satan and Pestilence (of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse fame) are leading in the polls and that Jesus (or insert your favorite good being here) is also running but trails badly. It seems like Chris would say that you are wrong, even foolish, to vote for Jesus when he trails in the polls. It seems like Chris ignores the fact that you don't want either of the leading candidates to win. Here, it seems as if Chris assumes, and makes an ass of himself, that you have a preference of the leading candidates and thus you ought to vote for one of them. To tell the truth, I would in fact be a little surprised if Chris wouldn't back down given my example and admit that the problem here in fact is all those claiming that they will be voting for Satan or Pestilence, as it is clear that Jesus (or insert optimum candidate here) would be better by nearly every imaginable measure. Perhaps Chris (along with most sane people) would also admit that any voting system that would bias the system and give us this false choice of Satan or Pestilence is in fact part of the problem. Perhaps, he would even admit that the media spoon feeding us who we ought to vote for or not because they supposedly can or can't win is part of the problem...but I doubt it.
Our system of voting in the USA is nearly the worst possible one you could come up with. It is almost guaranteed to disenfranchise voters and cause massive polarity. However, the only two ways we can hope to overcome this problem is to A) vote for the candidates that don't favor the biased system such as the Republican or Democrat, or Ron Paul, or B) have a bloody revolution.
You can side with Chris Mathews and continue to throw your vote away on typical republicans and democrats and you'll get more and more corruption and eventually a collapse of society, perhaps into revolution. Or, you can try to vote some honest people like Ron Paul into important offices despite the fact that that you'll need to fight an uphill battle against the system and the "polls" won't show you to be winning right away.
The voting system is particularly bad. I'm of the opinion that the voting system we have may in fact be unconstitutional in that it allows states to draw districts that will have the effect of disenfranchising minorities that otherwise would have representation. Just quickly think about this example: Imagine a voter base of 100 voters. We'll chop those voters up not by arbitrary criteria, but rather based upon the theoretical way in which they would like to vote...or their actual political opinions about the type of representation they would like. We'll pretend that there are 30 people who consider themselves Red, 30 Blue, 10 Green, 10 Yellow, 10 Orange, and 10 Purple. If we allow the populace to elect 1 representative for every 10 voters, we'll end up with 3R, 3B, 1G, 1Y, 1O, and 1P. If instead we draw a district map and have the subset of 10 people within the district elect someone based upon a "plurality" such as we do, then we'll end up with a government that is likely made up of 5R and 5B. All the minorities are likely to be eliminated from representation. I believe that it can be proven that all district maps will have the effect of eliminating minority representation and disenfranchising voters.
In our given example, a typical district will have 3R, 3B, 1G, 1Y, 1O, and 1B voter. All the minorities are likely to be given a false choice between a B or a R representative. It's likely that a typical district will have 7 out of 10 voters not really like their representative. Compare that to the district-less voting where every minority capable of getting 10 votes gets a representative.
Then Imagine a single seat election, like for governor. Chances are that the R and B candidates will be leading in the polls. Chances are good that 70 out of 100 of our voters won't really like whomever ends up winning if we jut do straight plurality voting. Range voting would guarantee that the most preferred candidate would win any single seat election.
Multiple seat elections, such as for congress would be better off using a proxy vote system, or at the very least using re-weighted range voting.
I'll go on more about that another time.
I just got riled up because I saw Chris Mathews make the same stupid spoiler vote argument I've heard so many times before. He said essentially this: "when you vote for a third party candidate, you aren't voting for a winner, but instead you're depriving someone else of your vote and you are spoiling the election and wasting your vote." This whole idea is nonsense for a number of reasons.
Once again, I'll jump into an example to point out what I consider the absurdity of this argument. Imagine that Satan and Pestilence (of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse fame) are leading in the polls and that Jesus (or insert your favorite good being here) is also running but trails badly. It seems like Chris would say that you are wrong, even foolish, to vote for Jesus when he trails in the polls. It seems like Chris ignores the fact that you don't want either of the leading candidates to win. Here, it seems as if Chris assumes, and makes an ass of himself, that you have a preference of the leading candidates and thus you ought to vote for one of them. To tell the truth, I would in fact be a little surprised if Chris wouldn't back down given my example and admit that the problem here in fact is all those claiming that they will be voting for Satan or Pestilence, as it is clear that Jesus (or insert optimum candidate here) would be better by nearly every imaginable measure. Perhaps Chris (along with most sane people) would also admit that any voting system that would bias the system and give us this false choice of Satan or Pestilence is in fact part of the problem. Perhaps, he would even admit that the media spoon feeding us who we ought to vote for or not because they supposedly can or can't win is part of the problem...but I doubt it.
Our system of voting in the USA is nearly the worst possible one you could come up with. It is almost guaranteed to disenfranchise voters and cause massive polarity. However, the only two ways we can hope to overcome this problem is to A) vote for the candidates that don't favor the biased system such as the Republican or Democrat, or Ron Paul, or B) have a bloody revolution.
You can side with Chris Mathews and continue to throw your vote away on typical republicans and democrats and you'll get more and more corruption and eventually a collapse of society, perhaps into revolution. Or, you can try to vote some honest people like Ron Paul into important offices despite the fact that that you'll need to fight an uphill battle against the system and the "polls" won't show you to be winning right away.
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