[EM] World Series and EC

[Richard Moore]

Alexander Small wrote:

> I had this argument by e-mail with Alan Natapoff, who has argued that the
> EC gives more power per voter than popular elections.  The main difference
> is that elections pick leaders, while baseball is serious business ;)
> Voters are people with rights while homeruns are points scored in games, so
> winning more voters but not many states is not the same as winning more
> runs but not many games.


Natapoff is a man who spent twenty years to come up with a theorem that,
if "voting power" is defined a certain way, then "voting power" is increased
when the electoral college is used. Trouble is, he defined "voting power"
in a way that is not meaningful. By Natapoff's own definition, "voting
power" is maximized in a dictatorship! See my earlier comments on this in
the archives:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/election-methods-list/message/7737

I would amend my comments slightly. I said that the total voting power
of the electorate is constant; however, it could be reduced by the
introduction of random elements. For instance, if I took a jigsaw and
cut a map of the country into 51 arbitrary regions, and converted all the
votes in each region to a much smaller, but proportional, number of votes
for the plurality winner of that region, and then added two more votes
for that region's plurality winner, then I would have transferred some
of the voting power from the voters to that arbitrary process.

It doesn't take 20 years to see that the EC cannot increase voting power,
if voting power is defined meaningfully.

     -- Richard