[EM] MIT News: Math of elections says voters win with 'winner

[rlsuter at aol.com]

Natapoff's ideas about electoral reform are little more than half-baked 
opinions
dressed up as scholarly wisdom. He calls national popular vote 
legislation like that
passed in Maryland unconstitutional, but anyone who reads the relevant 
parts
of the Constitution will find that a very debatable view -- one that 
many legal
scholars, which Natapoff is not, happen to disagree with. Otherwise, 
you can
be sure the Maryland legislature would never have considered it, much 
less
passed it.

As for the "mathematics of voting power," Natapoff may well have 
"studied" it,
but his analyis is based on an extremely oversimplified view of the 
U.S. presidential
election process and voting behavior.

This is just another case of a mathematician who has little 
understanding of
the enormous complexity of U.S. politics and the effects of electoral 
laws
and regulations of different kinds (state and local as well as federal) 
making
pronouncements that don't deserve to be taken very seriously by anyone,
much less members of Congress.

-Ralph Suter

Chris Backert wrote:

See this story from MIT News that begins: "If we want individuals and 
small
groups to have the democratic power to elect the president fairly, we 
must
score presidential elections by winner-take-all states--not in a single
giant national district too large for small numbers to turn, said Alan
Natapoff, a research scientist at MIT who has studied the mathematics of
voting power and has testified before Congress concerning the Electoral
College."

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/natapoff.html
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