Thoughts on Primary Elections | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on Primary Elections

4 pointsaneesh10 comments

I know the YC community frowns on general political content ... but there's a mathematical twist here.

Observing the primaries, it makes little sense to me why all delegates count equally. I want to propose a better algorithm for determining the winner of a primary (better than simply, "who has the most delegates?"). I'm going to assume that a party wishes to maximize the probability it will win the general election in November - no other considerations.

Here's the problem - take the Democratic primary for example. It shouldn't really matter which candidate wins Oklahoma (the Dems are going to lose it in November anyway), or DC (the Dems are going to win it in November anyway). Performance in swing states like Pennsylvania & Ohio should count for a lot, because winning there is crucial to winning the general election.

Currently, the power of a state is proportional (approximately) to its population. I propose a system where a state's power (ie delegates) is proportional to its population AND inversely proportional to its average spread (absolute difference between Rep. & Dem. percentages) in the past 3 presidential elections.

So,

Delegates = k* (Population / Avg. Spread),

with k selected appropriately, and the rounding done appropriately.

What do you think?

It might make sense to award delegates based on the percentage of all registered voters who vote for you, rather than percentage of those who actually vote. IOW, the number of delegates from a state isn't set in advance; it depends on voter turnout. That way candidates' ability to energize their base is rewarded.

I agree with the general idea that delegates from swing states should count for more.

The problem is your function doesn't really maximize the win probability either. I am not an expert here, but there may be a way to more accurately characterize the probability. Also, your function blows up when "average spread" tends to 0. An appropriate sigmoid transform should fix that.

Agreed - I don't think it maximizes the win probability per se. I just think it's better than the current system.

Point taken about the "exploding near zero". I could do something like Population / (.2 + 5^(x/3-1) ), where x is average spread, ... but that just gets ugly. I wanted to communicate a general concept, not propose a specific formula.

The primary is not a sampling to determine the most popular candidate for a general election. It is a method for a party to determine its chosen representative. Also, the rules differ from state to state about which kind of voters can vote in the primary -- in some, you have to be a "registered" member, in others not. So your method would never apply generally.

I find the American system baffling because consults the public so early in the process. In parliamentary systems, the party chooses a leader, and then this leader becomes the face of the party in the next election. In other words, there is only "superdelegates". That seems way more rational to me, although it sets a higher bar for insurgent candidates.

If the party bases have no influence, then their constituents voices won't be heard intra-party, and the party risks alienating their base.

Although it may seem a more efficient way to decide the outcome, it is a self-defeating prophecy to believe that party bases will never change. Consider how the North and South "flipped" from Democrat to Republican, but someone without a history textbook would never guess that it had been the Democrats who seceded.

If you are truly proposing an electoral system based on mathematics, then either "Performance in swing states like Pennsylvania & Ohio should count for a lot, because winning there is crucial to winning the general election." is irrelevant, or horribly conflicting to your entire premise.

Why is that conflicting? I'm only proposing to identify such states statistically, and give them higher weight.

All of the "a buncha states don't matter so focus on the ones that do" logic should jump up and scream that the system is broken. Oh you live ix X state so why bother campaigning to you because your vote doesn't matter?!

With the 2 party quagmire and "electoral college" nonsense that imho has basically stalled the US govt in an endless corporatocracy, worrying about the primaries is like worrying that the lines aren't painted straight on the Tacoma Narrows bridge.

1) Yes, this doesn't belong on YC

2) Superdelegates are supposed to make the kind of calculations you are suggesting. They have a big advantage in that they vote last so they know the most up-to-date breakdowns of the individual states. Superdelegates are immune to the cross-party registration (Rep voting in Dem primary) and are more likely to listen to actuarial opinion - you could provide the same info to the voting public but it wouldn't change votes much. That's the theory of Superdelegates anyway.

A) inappropriate for a site called "Hacker News".

B) You don't understand the problem, so you can't ask the right questions. There are just over 4000 Democratic primary delegates, total. There are just under 2400 Republican primary delegates, total. Thus the Democrats have about 1 and 2/3 delegates per Republican delegate. HOWEVER. Mississippi, which just voted, has a total of 40 Democratic delegates and 39 Republican delegates. What? Why don't the Democrats have 1 and 2/3 times the number of Republican delegates?

The answer is that the states are ALREADY weighted. They are weighted so that reliable states have more weight, and unreliable states have less. So the Republicans want more (proportionally) delegates from Mississippi than the Democrats do, because Mississippi is a red state whose votes they will need in the Presidential election. If we take Massachusetts, the Republicans have 40 delegates total, and the Democrats have 121 - because it's a blue state. If we take Ohio, a swing state, it's 181 to 88, which is 1.8 to 1, pretty close to the "proper" delegate ratio.

That is: the states ARE weighted, they are weighted exactly opposite to the manner that you propose, and you have absolutely no power or influence to change that weighting unless you start your own political party.

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