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The Next President

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Its pretty unlikely Ross Perot got almost 20% of the popular vote when he ran and zero electoral votes. 

 

It's worth pointing out that Ross Perot spoiled his own candidacy repeatedly in 1992, even "dropping out" for several weeks, nominally because he was afraid of taking enough electoral votes for the decision to go to the House of Representatives, but also intermittently because he claimed that the Republican Party had blackmail on him and because he didn't trust or take the advice of his own campaign managers. It's really wild to think that he had 39% of the vote in polls at one point, though!

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Hahaha yeah Ross Perot was a trip.

 

Personally I think the idea of a viable 3rd party in the U.S. is nonsense. Politics is all about coalition building. In a parliamentary system you have procedures for different political parties to form governing coalitions, so then you end up with functioning minority parties. But in the American winner-takes-all approach to democracy of course there will always be a strong trend towards two political parties that try to represent as large a community as permitted by their general ideological axis.

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By voting for a 3rd party candidate you're no longer voting for who will win, but instead sending some other message. But because it's just a box you tick, there's no way of interpreting that message! It may be "I want this person to be our President." It may be "I want the Green Party to be eligible for public funding." It may be "This candidate most closely aligns with my ideological beliefs about how government should work." The ballot counters have no way of knowing what your motivation was in voting for a 3rd party candidate.

This is the same with voting for a major party candidate, there is no way to know if you 100% support them, or hate their guts but are terrified of the alternative. 

I wish we had a 'I object to the system' box.

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Agreed Cordeos. A vote for Hillary that is "I support the democratic party platform" is indistinguishable from a Hillary vote that says "I'm just really scared of what Donald Trump will do" but I think they both communicate "I am voting for the candidate that I think a. should win and b. has a reasonable chance of winning." I would argue that when you vote for a 3rd party candidate there's more room for interpretation as to what that vote can mean.

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The lead-up to the 2016 US presidential elections have been very visible even here in Finland. For a really long time, as well. The US presidential elections always get some coverage, but Trump certainly made it more visible far earlier. I would like to add the caveat that as a foreigner one always has a distorted view, and weird stuff always gets the most attention. Finland is also a small, for the most part relatively secular and extremely homogeneous country. This makes the cultural differences sometimes seem baffling and huge.

The past week I've tried to gain some kind of an understanding of the elections. I've read a few pieces online, and I've read a fair bit of this thread as well. From this relatively distant and safe perch, the rise of Trump seems to speak of a fundamental societal failure. This certainly is not an isolated phenomenon, and not limited to US. We here in Finland also have seen it, a sharp increase in demagogue and populism in general. To me that seems to be the true danger that Trump and Brexit represent. Both UKIP and the republicans are merely exploiting what has become acceptable, and unfortunately people who are afraid seem to be willing to accept anything.

I get that the elections aren't about this, and whoever wins, nothing final will happen. However, to me it seems Trump very much personifies the abandonment of reason over passion. He represents fear-mongering, complete lack of responsibility, personal or otherwise. He says he's outside the system, but he seems to offer the worst of the system, combined with elimination of some of the benefits. It is this that scares me. Trump himself seems just another narcissistic sociopath. For a combination of reasons, some people will rather listen to such a person than anything reasonable.

Even if Trump doesn't get elected, the political landscape in US and Europe has been changed. We will be living with consequences of this for a long time, and the discourse will be, well, it will hardly be discourse. If Hillary wins, this doesn't change. However, if Trump wins, I believe the change will be bigger, the consequences will be worse and wider reaching. I shudder to think what the future of politics would be. Democracy will be meaningless if the political landscape is completely removed from facts. This is why I think it would be important for Hillary to win, and for Hillary to win with a comfortable margin.

However much people are frustrated with the system, the sad fact seems to be that slow and incremental change is the way to go. The past 15 years have been hard, and in some regards we as the western world have not improved. But by and large the direction has still been net positive. Based on historical precedence, breaking the system leads to French Revolution way more often than it does Ghandi. And even that lead (several) India-Pakistan wars.

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Its pretty unlikely Ross Perot got almost 20% of the popular vote when he ran and zero electoral votes.

I think the goal is to win Johnson's home state of New Mexico or pothead state Colorado and then hope for the best, as noted here.

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Here's a video that goes over the spoiler effect

 

 

I'm not actually 100% sure it's accurate but it seems so to me. Lots of people have probably already seen this.

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What this person see as the disadvantage of the FPTP system, others see as the advantage.  The FPTP system is supposed to promote strong coalitions.  Rather than a party becoming just "Gorillas" the parties are supposed to become owl and gorilla coalitions that find common ground and ideally legislative representation.  The effect of this is that it tends to promote the more moderate and common ground policies of either coalition.  I know in the U.S. this was rather intentionally built into our electoral system (among other checks against extremist candidates  such as the electoral college and 100 years of senate appointments).  This trends towards incremental change makes it very hard for any minority political ideology to get outright representation.  However, it also has made our political system very resilient against extremist democratic take overs.  In the 1930s when fascist movements were taking over many of the European governments, similar movements existed in the U.S. (including American Nazi movements and KKK off-shoots).  However, due to our electoral system and political culture, these movements largely failed to penetrate our national politics. 

 

Sadly, other systems that solve the "spoiler effect" have their own (sometimes) worse problems.  The math of instant run off voting can lead to effects where ranking a candidate higher actually hurts them.  That means it's a system than can quite literally reverse a voter's intentions.  Normal run-offs are expensive.  Proportional representation only works for legislators, takes power from candidates and gives them to parties, and tends to diminish geographical representation in favor of party representation.  Single Transferable voting forces parties to campaign against themselves, requires higher voter knowledge (since you're usually choosing between many candidates often of the same party), and has the IRV problem of mathematically making it possible to penalize a voter for ranking their preference higher.  All of these systems, baring proportional representation also make the actual act of voting more confusing.  That might not seem important, but our 2000 presidential election was literally decided by confusing ballots in Palm Beach Florida. 

 

I'm not saying FPTP is awesome, but I think that video does the thing where it takes a complex issue and makes it seem like there is a "common sense" solution.  In doing so, it hide a lot of biases that the filmmaker has (and in this case may not even know he has).  I want him to explain why the "spoiler effect" is a problem and why two party systems are bad.  I want him to look at places other than the U.S. that use a FPTP system to see if it leads to two party systems (spoiler: it doesn't).  I don't mean to be harsh, but I often think videos like that do more harm than good.  They give just enough information to make the viewer feel informed, but not nearly enough for the viewer to actually be informed.

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Yeah, I wish the video had talked more about the strengths of FPTP (because literally every system is weak in some ways and strong in others). Ease of filling out ballots is huge. I took a mathematics of voting course in college and the professors talked about how more 'sophisticated' or complicated ballots were incorrectly filled out by faculty frequently because people don't want to listen to instructions. There's huge value in letting voters check a box or fill in a bubble.

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Yeah, I wish the video had talked more about the strengths of FPTP (because literally every system is weak in some ways and strong in others). Ease of filling out ballots is huge. I took a mathematics of voting course in college and the professors talked about how more 'sophisticated' or complicated ballots were incorrectly filled out by faculty frequently because people don't want to listen to instructions. There's huge value in letting voters check a box or fill in a bubble.

 

Yeah, I don't think there's any constituency or demographic that's immune to garden-variety ballot confusion. Last year, during the Hugo Awards that were tainted by all the Puppy bullshit, guides were popping up everywhere on how to vote "no award" for categories where there were no legitimate finalists... and more than half of them (some written by longtime voters in the Hugos) simply suggested to place "no award" at the top of the ballot with all the finalists below it, seemingly unaware that "no award" was itself a finalist that could lose the initial vote and be eliminated in the instant runoff system, redistributing protest votes to the very finalists that the voters had intended to protest. George R.R. Martin (of all people) had to write a surprisingly in-depth post explaining how to put "no award" at the top of the ballot with no finalists ranked below it, if a "'no award' or bust" result was actually intended.

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Our system is nothing like the US but all we do is write a number in a circle. It takes like 10 seconds if you have to look the number up on the sheet in front of you and less if you don't. And, like just mentioned, you can have a simple system and fuck up the ballot design. That's a design problem, not a problem in the overall system. Whoever came up with the butterfly ballot is an idiot.

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What this person see as the disadvantage of the FPTP system, others see as the advantage.  The FPTP system is supposed to promote strong coalitions.  Rather than a party becoming just "Gorillas" the parties are supposed to become owl and gorilla coalitions that find common ground and ideally legislative representation.  The effect of this is that it tends to promote the more moderate and common ground policies of either coalition. 

The problem with internal party coalitions and more moderate candidates is that it stifles debate. If a more liberal senate candidate loses in a primary they are not going to be asked by the media to comment on policy frequently. I have serious issues with how parties and the media in the US treat any ideas outside the mainstream party lines like its insane policy only idiot follow. We don't have a major anti-war party in this country, there is no debate about our bloated ineffective national security apparatus in this country. I could go on, but I believe that if we had more parties that were allowed to represent a broader range of views then just the centrist parties we currently have, maybe we could have a more elevated discussion.

I hate that there is really only major debates on party direction every 4 years, once there is a presidential nominee I am supposed to just shut up and fall in line.  

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 I want him to look at places other than the U.S. that use a FPTP system to see if it leads to two party systems (spoiler: it doesn't).

I would point out that all the counter examples are parliamentary systems, I always thought it was FPTP plus presidential system that lead to two parties. 

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I love voting systems and I'm obligated to hop in to any discussion of voting systems to say that instant runoff voting is terrible. There are voting methods that are (probably usually going to be) better than FPTP but IRV is not one. There's a result in political science, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, that essentially lists a bunch of properties you'd like a voting system to have and then proves that it's impossible to satisfy them all at once. (Ewokskick mentioned above that ranking a candidate higher can sometimes hurt them; avoiding that is one of the criteria.) So on one level all voting systems are bad or subject to strategic voting, etc. However, IRV is worse than most of the others. This website has a bunch of really cool graphics demonstrating how different voting systems behave, and consistently IRV has really weird results.

 

Besides that, however, it's also got other problems. One nice thing about FPTP (and shared by other systems) is that you can count the votes in a distributed fashion; i.e. if we want to know the winner of a state election, we can tally the votes of a bunch of districts and sum them. With instant runoff voting, what candidate a ballot in district A counts for depends on the entire statewide result, because you have to look at the entire state, see who lost, drop them off every ballot, and then re-compute. FPTP and approval voting don't have this problem. Computers make it not the biggest issue but a lot of people are wary of electronic voting.

 

tl;dr - voting systems are all going to be kind of bad. some are better than FPTP, but instant runoff voting isn't.

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It's true, he hasn't shared his K/D ratio, but he will assure you it's yuuuge. In the interests of balance, here's the Trump video from the same creator:

 

 

Does anyone else feel like they slipped into an alternate reality where nothing makes sense, 'cause that's what this presidential battle feels like. Honestly, I'd consider MLG Hillary vs Yuge Robot Trump as an improvement...

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Is anyone else noticing the war-drums? Seems like the Obama administration is lining up public support for a more obvious prescence of U.S. troops in Syria. I suspect that it is being timed in such a way to make Clinton look hawkish enough for the election. I bet she's the one who will announce the war once she's elected.

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Is anyone else noticing the war-drums? Seems like the Obama administration is lining up public support for a more obvious prescence of U.S. troops in Syria. I suspect that it is being timed in such a way to make Clinton look hawkish enough for the election. I bet she's the one who will announce the war once she's elected.

I really hope not. We lost Syria in 2011 when we failed to support the Free Syrian Army and again when we failed to respond to chemical weapons use. At this point Assad has the only force capable of maybe bringing a form of terrible terrible peace to Syria.

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I was given the impression that the Obama administration negotiated chemical weapons use out of the conflict.

I'll also admit that I don't think the U.S. should have gone in in 2011. I'd consider myself part of the constituency that was disgusted by the possibility of more military involvement in the region at that time.

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I've reached the point where I'm pretty much against us sending troops anywhere. We seem to just make things worse for the most part.

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I was given the impression that the Obama administration negotiated chemical weapons use out of the conflict.

I'll also admit that I don't think the U.S. should have gone in in 2011. I'd consider myself part of the constituency that was disgusted by the possibility of more military involvement in the region at that time.

 

I've reached the point where I'm pretty much against us sending troops anywhere. We seem to just make things worse for the most part.

 

I didn't mean to imply that we should have gone in, just that those were chances to do so. Its possible if we had provided air support for the FSA in 2011 they could have won, but now its too much of a mess. We need to stop training and supplying rebels to fight a lost cause.

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The ramping up in Syria seems more a response to Russia than a political maneuver for an upcoming election, or at least I would hope that is the case.  Obama is a shrewd politician, but I think entangling the US in another foreign conflict for political gain isn't something he would do, but then again I could be wrong.  I don't think HIllary gains anything from being seen as more of a hawk, and that kind of thing could just as easily backfire.  The battle for Syria at the moment lies with Turkey, after the coup attempt and our refusal to extradite Gulen without concrete evidence Russia is making a string play for closer ties with them for a number of reasons.  With Turkey being a NATO member, we basically have to back their play against ISIL, regardless of how brutal it is going to be (just like the situation playing out with Saudi Arabia right now) to rebuff Russia.  Putin has figured out that if he puts pressure on NATO in the right way there is a chance the US will become stretched too thin and NATO's other members won't be able or willing to fill in the gaps

 

In other words, international geopolitics is complicated, and the middle east is fucked for the forseeable future regardless of how the US presidential election goes.

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