• silliewous@feddit.nl
    7·
    7 months ago

    Situation A you vote for 3rd party

    • candidate T gets t votes
    • candidate B gets b-1 votes
    • candidate 3 gets 1 vote

    candidate 3 loses for sure winner is biggest of ‘t’ and ‘b-1’. Which we can rewrite as biggest of ‘t+1’ and ‘b’

    Where is my money?!

      • Zuberi 👀@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
        12·
        7 months ago

        The insane fact that you genuinely thought his math worked out correctly.

        Although, the US is generically the worst “first” world country in maths so I guess this is to be expected…

        • Tartas1995@discuss.tchncs.de
          1·
          7 months ago

          The argument is quite simple while it carries an assumption.

          If you have 3 options, and depending on how you want to frame it, one is outlandish or the other 2 are simplify more similar. You have following issue.

          In this example A and B are similar and C is the outlandish one.

          Let’s say: A has 15 votes, B has 3 and C has 17 votes.

          Then C wins while it would be reasonable to assume that B voters would have chosen A over C, as A is more similar to B than C. So now the A and B voters get together and talk about the situation. A voters argue that A had historically far better results than B and B voters should have expected A to get more votes than B, and as B voters prefer A over C, B voters risk that C wins as A is missing the votes from B voters. So while not voting for C, B voters voted in a way that is unlikely to result in B winning, while hurting A winning chances as they didn’t vote for A, which results in C requiring less votes to win and could help C in winning

          So in other words, if not C, is a shared interest of A and B, voting B is expected to reduce the amount of required votes for C.

          If C needs 18 votes and a “not C” voter votes B, A cann’t reach 18 anymore, ofc B can reach 18 but historically B never got close, so effectively C requires 1 less additional vote to win, just like when someone would have voted c.

          • Zuberi 👀@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
            03·
            7 months ago

            You seem to not understand that assumptions are not how math proofs work mate.

            Again, where is his total +1 exactly?

            • Tartas1995@discuss.tchncs.de
              3·
              7 months ago

              Math works with assumptions all the time. Math itself is based on assumptions. Logic is based on assumptions.

              And I have explained that going from 10/20 to 11/20 or 10/19 is functionally the same as in both cases, the person only needs 9 more. If you don’t understand that, I can’t help you

                • Tartas1995@discuss.tchncs.de
                  2·
                  7 months ago

                  In percentage/fractions, yes. As you asked about absolute numbers, it is a difference of 9 missing votes for both. I am sorry that you don’t understand that. No one taught you that, I guess.

                  But let’s say that your ridiculous goal post move is a fair critic, then let’s talk about details in the American election system. It is not a popular vote, as the electoral college decides who will be the president and the vote of the elector in the electoral college doesn’t have to follow the popular vote held in the state, while some states require them to. How many electors each state has, is based on a system that is a bit too complicated to explain here but you can Google Huntington hill method. But the result of that system is that 1 elector in Wyoming is 193.000 votes but over 700.000 in Texas and California. Which means that a single Wyoming vote is 3 times as valuable as a Texas vote. So in other words, the whole percentage thing is more complicated than just a popular vote. But you didn’t actually want to have a conversation about how valuable a vote is (assuming that the elector doesn’t ignore your popular vote which they might can) otherwise you would have pointed that out in my response.

                  And you would have known all of this, if you would actually care about the question and the elections. Like I am not even American, but even I know that little.

                  Edit: why are you dming me? You asked a public question. Why move into private one now?

                  Also in case, someone doesn’t know how he doesn’t understand how voting work and how the whole .05, .02 is moving the goal post, basically if people always case whole votes, so in a normal popular vote, if you need 9 votes, you need 9 votes. There is no practical difference between 0.5 and 0.02 in this case. People cast whole votes. Now in my response, I make clear that Wyoming are more valuable but that is only the case if you treat the system as if it was a popular vote as commonly done, both in these comments and the general public discussion. If you look on the election on a state level which is a totally reasonable thing to do as generally speaking, the statement that he asked you to prove, could have been state between to people from the same state. If you do so, then my point about the value of the vote is irrelevant but then we can talk about votes are a static value and then a vote is always a whole vote and my point about people cast whole votes apply, then we have to realize that if we save he needs 20 votes to win, that technically he doesn’t need 20 votes to win but only 19.0000000000001 votes to win but as people cast whole votes, you “can’t” get e.g. 19.32 votes. So we say 20. By reducing the required votes to win, we morph the value of a singular vote. Because A and B still needs the 20 votes to win but C only needs 19. So 1/20 is .05 but 1/19 is .052… So now we can take the .052 can create a fraction for it, that would be 1.04/20. Oh look, trump can win with 19.04 now. The difference between 0.05 and .052 is irrelevant for this situation.

  • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 months ago

    So this doesn’t work as a simple math equation because you have to understand a lot of key concepts first. This has basically nothing to do with the electoral college system so we will put that aside and start with the “first past the post” system of determining elections.

    On it’s face the First Past the Post (FPP) seems fair. Highest percentage of votes for a candidate wins. But imagine a system where we have a lot of parties. Say there are five- The red, blue, yellow, green and purple parties. So you have an election and maybe the spread looks like this :

    • RED 20%
    • PURPLE 25%
    • BLUE 15%
    • YELLOW 10%
    • GREEN 30%

    So Green takes the election… However this doesn’t actually represent the will of a majority as only 30% actually voted for green. So in our little Rainbow country, as generally happens the encumbant party makes mistakes or compromises and becomes less popular. So next time the election comes around you get some party consolidation. Blue maybe has enough ideological cross over with purple to merge into a new party. Yellow is say kind of an extreme outlier and Red and Green are close on the political spectrum but they really believe they got this. Let’s say maybe some of the compromises in the new Blue/Purple merger turns off some of their base and Red snags some of their vote share this time.

    The new spread looks like this

    • RED 25%
    • BLUE/PURPLE 32%
    • YELLOW 15%
    • GREEN 28%

    So the problem remains. Only around 1/3 of voters actually chose the “majority” who takes all.

    So next election let’s say Green, seeking to snag votes does the same thing Blue and Purple did. They change their platform to be more like Red to court the votes of Red party people. The problem being is they are too similar. The next election happens and they end up tying with red because the two parties split the votes but that razor thin line of preference between the parties splits the share. This is called a spoiler. If RED and GREEN are decently acceptable policy wise to the voting pools of both voters then you have a group of 52% that represents what a majority desires policy wise…but that 32% Purple/Blue party is still in control.

    So over time Red and Green merge. They win an election. Blue/Purple changes their policies and the two start trading back and forth. Yellow eventually dissolves from never winning and you end up with a two party system. Almost all FFP systems devolve into two party systems through histories that look like this.

    Now say we end up in the situation we are in now. The two parties over time sort of naturally drift further and further apart as a branding initiative deepens.

    Now imagine one has sown incredible brand loyalty. They are marketing experts, they have been hammering everyone’s fear buttons for so long that they could run the literal devil and the party would still vote for them because to do otherwise is heresy.

    On the other side you have what could be best described as the lesser of two evils. They don’t have to be paragons, their entire strategy has been to be good enough while maintaining a status quo that benefits people like them but they treading water. They aren’t fixing anything just adding time to the clock. Not great but probably also not going to sink the ship.

    The two go head to head.

    Under normal circumstances the voting share between them is pretty evenly split. But it will be a frozen day in hell before those carefully indoctrinated into the marketing strategy of the Right wing will vote differently. If they did they would have to admit they were wrong and well… Everything that’s been piped to them for years has painted the other side as decadent, subhumans who are “UnAmerican”.

    The lesser evil has basically just run on being the lesser evil. Nobody was excited about voting them in last time…

    So the votes happen.

    • 38% Democrat
    • 40 % Republican And the remaining 22% split between a series of independants.

    If 3% of that 22% those people thought Trump was the greater evil but didn’t vote for the lesser evil then their abstention to participate in voting for a lesser evil , or even just not voting at all basically enables the Republican win. It’s not a vote for vote pledge to support Trump, it’s a more complicated series of value judgements. A FFP system over times demands gaming of the system. That’s why many places have ditched FFP and has these more complicated multiple voting systems to make governance more representive of the actual will of the people to stop this from happening.

    America is stuck until that kind of reform happens.

  • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 months ago

    It’s less a vote for Trump and more a lack of a vote for the party that can realistically defeat him. I wish 3rd parties were a viable federal election option. But they aren’t yet to a point where they can realistically win in the US.

    So the sentiment that not voting, or voting for a guaranteed loss is a vote for the worse of the two parties with a chance to win isn’t entirely without merit, it’s just poorly phrased. It means that if you fail to vote for the person that can win over the worse candidate, you have given the worse candidate a better opportunity to win.

  • Vinny_93@lemmy.world
    01·
    7 months ago

    So what you’re saying is America sucks at democracy.

    Signed, a European whose government is still forming after elections because 27 parties