<p>okay, but i think many people on both parties would agree that george w. bush sucked</p>
<p>but ted cruz and bachmann are still considered good politicans by a lot of educated people. it depends on your party. i mean, so you’re calling the majority of texas stupid, and you don’t think they should have a say? meanwhile people in states like ny are more intelligent?</p>
<p>but how about no parties yay</p>
<p>Holding the country hostage because the president won’t do what you like is stupid.Bachmann is Minnesota ,and yes that’s what I’m saying. Anyone who believes a racist should help run our country might be stupid.
Stupidity is not solely represented by the republican party. These are merely examples. Democrats aren’t really better either.</p>
<p>the govt shut down was because of both parties. so yes, both parties suck. </p>
<p>i was referring to ted cruz with texas. so texas and minnesota should have no say? even in an electoral college sysem, those states get a good number of votes, especially texas. i know that senators are popularly elected, but they were george bush states (i think).</p>
<p>The shutdown was not because of both parties. Haven’t you heard of ted cruz’s filibuster. The shutdown was his plan.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t have a say. I’m trying to say that they should have a limited say, like the rest of the public.</p>
<p>Note how this thread is starting to devolve into current politics. Whether or not you agree with the decision made by people via a procedure has nothing to do with the merits of the procedure. Any mention of who has been elected in the past is a red herring. You think Americans are stupid? This is exactly what is stupid about them: if one doesn’t get his way, he blames the system for allowing “idiots” (read: “people who disagree with him”) to have a say in the outcome.</p>
<p>The right way to compare different decision-making procedures is with logical criteria. You can prove whether a procedure satisfies a criterion, and you can decide unambiguously whether the criterion is desirable. Read up on some basic game theory. It might make you smarter.</p>
<p>For example, it has been stated here that major parties in addition to the top two would have to steal from the top two, splitting the vote and making it difficult to win the most votes. This is called the spoiler effect. It affects plurality, but not a single-winner voting system that is [independent</a> of clones](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clone_independence]independent”>Independence of clones criterion - Wikipedia). The [ranked</a> pairs](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs]ranked”>Ranked pairs - Wikipedia) system I mentioned earlier is independent of clones.</p>
<p>America’s two party system is the result of Duverger’s law, which is in turn an effect of the plurality election. Proportional representation is not the only way to avoid Duverger’s law. A voting system that meets the [Smith</a> criterion](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_criterion]Smith”>Smith criterion - Wikipedia), e.g. ranked pairs, also avoids it.</p>
<p>Repede, note the question: “If you had the power to pass one national law right now, what would it be?” I’m not hopeful that America will adopt a national popular vote / ranked pairs, but I believe it should.</p>
<p>Recounts are only necessary when errors are likely. Errors can be eliminated by eliminating potentially faulty parts of the system (i.e. human readers and instruments that convert optical or tactile readings into information). I think the technology is easily available to digitize the process entirely.</p>
<p>As for ranked pairs’ complexity, people don’t have to understand the algorithm. All they have to know is that they rank any number of candidates on the ballot, from best to worst. They could technically just vote for their favorite candidate, or they might have a top 10.</p>
<p>LCengineerDT, I don’t think you quite understand how the electoral college works. People don’t vote for electors. They vote for candidates. (In some states, a candidate is listed next to the elector(s) who pledge to vote for the candidate.) A state government tallies the ballots cast by its own residents and uses this result to determine which people to send to the electoral college. In 48 states, all electors are told to vote for the state-wide winning candidate. In the other two states, two electors vote for the state-wide winner; for each congressional district, another elector is told to vote for the winner within that district. In the absence of faithless electors (which are discouraged universally and punished in many states), this is deterministic. I don’t know how much you know about basic math, but “deterministic” means the same input always produces the same result. There is no feasible opportunity for a middleman to decide that people voted stupidly and to contradict their collective decision. Therefore, the electoral college offers no benefit over a popular vote.</p>
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My body just shivered…ugh…</p>
<p>
I disagree that anyone, regardless of political affiliation, would call Michelle Bachmann an intelligent choice for president…
She may be a morally upstanding politician (by politician standards anyway), but she is definitely not someone that should lead the free world…considering she runs a “gay-cleansing clinic”</p>
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</p>
<p>Or when you win by one vote in a country of 300 million people. The margin of error is like 3%.</p>
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</p>
<p>Would you rather have to recount all the votes in the entire country or just one state?</p>
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</p>
<p>Even with computers, errors will still occur. There’s no way to eliminate indeterminate error.</p>
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<p>Yea, because people choose their candidates based on their policies. The vast majority of voters just pick blue or red. All the votes after 1 would just be random.</p>
<p>Also, this system is more complicated, so there would be even more error.</p>
<p>Create one standard GPA testing and measure scheme for all schools.</p>
<p>I’m not directly saying Americans are stupid. I understand what you said also. The electoral college was designed to pick the president. In the beginning we did elect electoral college members who elected the president…
It’s not a matter of getting one’s way. Don’t assume what I’m saying is based on opinion alone. Every person deserves a say, NOT absolute (maybe not even patrial) control of the government. Bachmann and cruz are only representatives of Americans who think like them.</p>
<p>Actually, Americans are stupid. Do you realize how many people think the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare are two separate things? </p>
<p>The real problem is that most Americans are followers who hear “___ is wrong” or “___ is bad” and they go along with it and believe it, without educating themselves to make their own opinion. Part of people’s duties include educating themselves on politics and current events to form educated opinions, instead of whatever the popular opinion is.</p>
<p>Bush was better than Obama…</p>
<p>If you think Bush was better than Obama, you should probably go live in a hole somewhere. Maybe you already do?
Bush was one of the WORST presidents EVER. </p>
<p>Let’s not confuse ignorance with stupidity. Our country holds some of the most intelligent people in the world. The problem is that we also hold some dumbest. The more ignorant part of the population follows itself. One idiot creates a stupid idea, and another perpetuates it. That is our failure.</p>
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That’s an opinion. </p>
<p>That’s our other problem, people say stuff like it’s a fact, but it’s really an opinion. We need to learn to differentiate between the two. </p>
<p>This has gotten way too political, so this thread will probably get shut down soon…</p>
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<p>I already do!!! How did you know!!!</p>
<p>That was an opinion.
This thread will be closed. Sorry, it was a great thread.</p>
<p>whoa i never said michelle bachmann for PRESIDENT</p>
<p>You know what proves the stupidity of America?</p>
<p>Having the opportunity to talk about something that engages the mind (e.g. the mathematical merits of different policy proposals) and choosing instead to talk about something that disengages the mind (e.g. Bush vs. Obama).</p>
<p>Repede, a completely digital system is not necessarily error-prone. It’s not hard to design a simple, unambiguous interface or to write reliable code that sends information from a polling station to a national server. I can personally guarantee that the complexity of ranked pairs over plurality does not require much additional code, having written my own short script just this afternoon that implements ranked pairs.</p>
<p>With an entirely digital system, a close election would no longer be a cause of alarm. But even if a recount were necessary, there are two major mitigating factors:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>You could easily divide the ballots into arbitrarily small geographical groups and just order recounts in those groups in which the ballots are very close. </p></li>
<li><p>Rather than manually going through paper ballots and repeating the process, you could just compare a polling station’s local data set to the corresponding subset in the national database and see if they match.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Disengages the mind? Really? All the different responses possible from such an argument are infinite. We could drag experts, statistics, or even common sense into such an argument. This is the perfect stage for such a debate. As long as no one gets offended, it should be find. It definitely won’t disengage your brain either.</p>