[EM] Are voters in larger or smaller states more powerful?

[Richard Moore]

As a side note to this discussion: Several months ago I 
found the article 
http://208.245.156.153/archive/output.cfm?ID=907
which was linked to from the presidentelect.org web site.
The article describes a mathematical theory, which I believe 
is flawed, to the effect that the electoral college 
increases the power of all voters.

I can't find my response, but at that time I sent an e-mail 
to the presidentelect.org site's maintainer to express my 
disagreement with the article.

The essence of my response was that I found the concept of
voting power used in the article (which describes the work
of one Alan Natapoff) to be ill-founded. The article states, 
"In a fair election, he saw, each voter's power boils down 
to this: What is the probability that one person's vote will 
be able to turn a national election? The higher the 
probability, the more power each voter commands." 
Specifically, I wrote that the sum of the voting power of 
the electorate must be a constant, since only one decision 
is being made per election. You cannot increase the voting 
power of everyone in the electorate by increasing the 
probability in question, you can only redistribute that 
power. Any conclusion based on the Natapoff standard would 
have to be suspect.

Another quote: "Natapoff agrees that voters should have
equal power. "The idea," he says, "is to give every voter
the largest equal share of national voting power possible."
Here's a classic example of equal voting power: under a
tyranny, everyone's power is equal to zero. Clearly,
equality alone is not enough. In a democracy, individuals
become less vulnerable to tyranny as their voting power
increases."

Umm, not everyone's power is equal to zero in a tyranny. The 
tyrant certainly has greater than zero power. What's more, 
by the Natapoff standard, it would appear that voter power 
is maximized in dictatorships and in random ballot voting 
methods!

I also commented that I couldn't believe it took twenty
years (as stated in the article) to come up with such a weak 
theory.

Of course, my arguments were completely ignored.

The EC must go.

Richard


Forest Simmons wrote:

  > Excellent website, though individual pivotal probability
within the block
  > is easier to compute using the Normal Approximation to
the Binomial
  > distribution than using Stirling's approximation to the
factorial
  > function.
  >
  > Note that a California voter is more than three times as
likely to be
  > pivotal in determining the president than a Montana voter.
  >
  > So why do Montana voters want to keep the Electoral
College intact?
  >
  > And why do California voters want to discard it?
  >
  > Ignorance about block voting power is still widespread or
else the
  > California voters have more generous feelings towards
Montana voters and
  > vice versa than you would have guessed:-)
  >
  > Forest
  >
  >
  > On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Markus Schulze wrote:
  >
  >
  >>http://www.cs.unc.edu/~livingst/Banzhaf/
  >>
  >>
  >>
  >>
  >
  >