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

[Forest Simmons]

It reminds me of one of the campaign promises of a candidate for student
body president: if elected he would insure that everybody had front row
seats at all of the basketball games.

On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Richard Moore wrote:

> 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/
>   >>
>   >>
>   >>
>   >>
>   >
>   >
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>