Stasis fallacy 3

The stasis fallacy is the assumption that if the rules are changed, the actors will play the game in the same way they did before.

Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight (Jan. 25, 2013) contains the very interesting article Electoral College Changes Would Pose Danger for Democrats by Micah Cohen in which there is discussed a variation of how the Electoral College votes.  Mr. Cohen ends his article with an example of the stasis fallacy by making the logically invalid assertion that with one alternative method Mr. Romney would have won the last election.

When voting in the Electoral College almost all states use the winner take all system: the candidate who gets the MOST popular (people) votes in the state gets ALL of that state’s electoral votes.  Exceptions are Nebraska and Maine which use the “congressional district” method which allows 1 electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district and two for the state at large.  (There was a variation in Virginia which would given the two statewide electors to the candidate who received the most district electors.  For our purposes, this is no different from the congressional district method.)

Mr. Cohen includes a complete compilation of how the votes that were cast in the 2012 election would have determined the electors if they had been selected by an alternative method:  a modified "congressional district" method.

"If the Virginia proposal had been adopted in 2012 and the other 47 states had adopted a system like Maine’s and Nebraska’s (where one electoral vote goes to the winner of each Congressional district and two votes go to the statewide winner), then 103 of Mr. Obama’s blue state electoral votes would have gone to Mr. Romney. Mr. Obama, by contrast, would have gained only 32 electoral votes in red states."

Mr. Cohen then moves from arithmetic to the area of logic as follows:

"And, by an Electoral College count of 277 to 261, Mr. Romney would be president."

This is not a valid conclusion, unless Mr. Cohen means that, after the election was conducted according to law, God came down and declared that the votes would be counted differently. However, the drift of the article is that a CHANGE to this new system would give the Republicans an advantage, which indicates that he means to be assuming that the new system would have been the law BEFORE the election.

Notice that I am not saying that Mr. Romney would not have won.  I am saying that the information at hand does not assure us that he would have won.

The flaw in the thinking in the article is the assumption that is implicit in counting the votes that were cast using method A and assuming that they would be cast in exactly the same way if the election were held by method B.  That in turn implies that the candidates would have campaigned (in election method B) in exactly the same way that they had campaigned in election method A.

This is the error.  Consider Texas.  In method A, Obama ignores Texas because it is hopeless.  In method B, Obama would likely campaign in Houston, Austin, Ft. Worth and perhaps Dallas.

For another example, consider Pennsylvania, 2012.  In method A, Obama, by the way he campaigned, piled up huge majorities in Philly and Pittsburg to overcome the Romney vote in the rural areas.  In this way he carried the whole state of PA.  In method B, those extra votes in the large cities will not be of nearly as much value (although they can still help win the 2 statewide electors).  Therefore, if we used method B, Obama would be moved to revise his campaign plan to be more consistent with the reality of that different method of counting.  

Once you recognize that the method of campaigning would change, then surely it becomes clear that the votes could change.

 Consider a simpler example from a different election. Al Gore obtained more popular votes for president than George Bush did in the presidential election of 2000. But Bush won the electoral vote and the presidency. We heard over and over again: “If the election of 2000 had been decided by popular vote, then Gore would have won.” The response was always some variation of: “But the election was not by popular vote”. For some purposes, that is a sufficient answer. But I think that this is worth a bit more reflection. Put aside your own political perspective and consider the logic of the statement: “If the election of 2000 had been decided by popular vote, then Gore would have won.” Again, suppose one is talking about God coming down after the election is over and decreeing that the voting system has been changed to popular vote. If that is what was meant by the statement, then the statement is obviously true, but also silly. For the statement to be meaningful it has to be about what would have happened if the rules had been changed (to popular vote election) before the election took place. To claim that the vote as actually cast would have been duplicated with those other rules, then one has to assume (among other things) that the candidates would have campaigned in exactly the same way. That is nonsense. In fact, if the rules had been changed, then the candidates would have campaigned very differently. With the existing system, it was totally irrelevant whether Gore won California (or Bush won Texas) by 1 million votes or 3 million votes. Either way he still got all of the electoral votes of that state and nothing else. There was no reason for either candidate to try to win the national popular vote. And they didn’t. If the rules had been changed to national popular vote, then Gore would have spent more time on the coasts and Bush on flyover country getting out their base voters. It is very possible - perhaps even likely - that Gore would have won.  But it is not certain. Also, even if one could know that Gore would have won a hypothetical national popular vote election it would have been because of how the votes had been cast in that completely different kind of election.  It would not have been because of how the votes were actually cast in 2000.

The Electoral College

The time has come to speak of cabbages and kings and the EC (Electoral College.)

Whenever we have an election that looks close the TV babblers start talking about the EC and what happens if the EC vote differs from the popular vote.  During the coverage of the close 2000 election, Tim Russert of NBC said that if they differed then the election “goes to the House of Representatives”.  That is not correct.  (If no one gets a majority in the EC, then the president is chosen by the House of Representatives from among the top three finishers.  Note:  Each state gets one vote in that election.)  

If you don't like the Electoral College you might try to revive the Bayh Celler Amendment (see the Wiki article above) which is a legal way to change it.  A group called National Popular Vote has proposed a back door attempt to change it. That method would be a snake pit of bad possibilities. 

 So what does happen if the EC vote differs from the popular vote?

Nothing, except the TV babblers get a talking point and legions of people commit the stasis fallacy.  The stasis fallacy is the following logical error:  Change the rules of an activity and then expect that the behavior of the participants in that activity will remain the same as it was before the rule change.  So if Romney wins the popular vote and Obama wins the electoral vote, you will hear people saying: If we used popular vote then Romney would have won (or Gore would have won in 2000).  This is of course absurd because IF we were using the popular vote as the determining vote, THEN there wouldn’t be any such thing as a battleground state and the candidates would campaign a whole lot differently and thereby change the popular vote.

Question: What do you call a man who loses the popular vote and wins the electoral college vote?

Answer:  Mr. President

Colors

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There are no red states and blue states.  There are only swing states.
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NPV 7

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National Popular Vote is starting to get some push back.

NPV 6

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With respect to the NPV program to replace the Electoral College with a plurality election by a backdoor "amendment" to the Constitution.

After you consider the program on its merits (which I think are not good) you might want to consider how this would affect presidential elections.”

Here are 2 facts that might be a hint: Eight states and DC have adopted the NPV compact (CA, IL, MA, HI, WA, MD, NJ, DC, VT). In the last five elections every one of those 9 have voted for the same political party.

That is a highly unlikely coincidence. If it were a random choice of (5 times 9) = 45 selections of a binary choice the chances of them coming out the same in all 45 events is less than one in 16 trillion. That is 1 in 16,000,000,000,000.
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electoral college

Another way the Elec. coll helps Rs. Money is more fungible than union hands.

Added after Tom's first comment and moved from 5-29-11 to 6-3-11:
This was a brief reminder to write something.
Taking a traditional theme that the Rs get the support of the money people and the Ds get the support of unions which is the form of money and people to turn out the vote etc.

The money that the Rs get can be moved around from one state to another more easily than the people that the Ds have.

It was kind of a throwaway and perhaps that is what I should have done with it.

national popular vote 5

As advertised (in 8-7-10) here is my other main argument against the NPV Compact. See 8-6-10 for a brief intro and some links. The one line version of this objection to the NPV Compact is that it could put the election method itself into play every time. Leave aside court challenges for a moment and remember that July 20 is the magic day. If the compact states have 270 electoral votes on July 20 then we use NPV. If not, then not. We could easily find ourselves in the spring of an election year without knowing what method was going to be used that year. What if the total electoral votes in states that have adopted the Compact is close (either way, just over or just under) to having the 270 needed to implement the program. Then the parties and candidates are going to be doing a lot more calculating than normal. In addition to the regular things they will be calculating which system would give them the best chance of winning. If A thinks that NPV gives him the best chance, then A might try to get states that support him to join the NPV Compact before July 20. If B thinks that the EC gives him the best chance, then B may try to get NPV Compact member states that support him to leave the compact before July 20. That would be a fine stew.
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NPV 4b Is NPV Compact the best alternative? 2

This appeared originally on Sept. 25.
The last comment on this thread was by Wayne at 9:30 Pm Sept23 as follows:
Each and every one of those elections mentioned in toto’s 9-23-6:15 note as well as all of the other 48 presidential elections that we have held have one thing in common. Winning of the popular vote was not the candidates’ primary objective. Whether we like the structure or not the name of the game was electoral votes. In each and every case the winning candidate won a majority of the votes that determined the election. (That includes the 1800 and 1824 in the House of Representatives.) The popular vote data begins with 1824, because until then they didn’t even record the popular vote. Popular vote is a wonderful thing. But when looking at elections which did not use that system it is strange to talk about those elections as if they did use that system. So perhaps Americans do not view the absence of runoffs as a problem in the present system because the present system always gives a winner who has a majority of the determining votes.

But NPV would change what the determinative votes are. In their system it is popular votes that count. OK but isn’t NPV then obligated to provide a method for dealing with a situation in which the votes are scattered among several candidates? The Bayh-Cellar amendment gave a way to do that. It required that the plurality winner have at least 40% of the vote or hold a runoff. A system doesn’t have give us a majority winner but please spare us from a 27% president (see 8-7-10 post).

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Bush v Gore - 10 years after

So many lovely memories.

The stories about how the "Republican" Supreme Court stopped the vote count and foiled the will of the people.

Not so many stories about how the overwhelmingly "Democratic" State Supreme Court had come up against the fact that the State law provided certain time lines for "contesting" or "challenging" the election. Gore had chosen badly and wanted a redo but there wasn't time. Solution: The court just shredded the statute and rewrote the rules on the spot AFTER the election was over.

NBC's best, Tim Russert, provided top quality political analysis: "If one side wins the electoral vote and the other wins the popular vote, then it goes to the House of Representatives."

Early in the evening of election night it looked like Gore was going to win the electoral vote and lose the popular vote. A Bush supporter asked "What do you call someone who wins the electoral vote and loses the popular vote?" He sadly answered his own question: "Mr. President".

When the result went the other way the Democrats did not take it so well.

Of course, all of those "intended" votes. Gore's people argued that it was not what the voter did that counted, but rather what they had intended to do. This led me, in the spring, to play a round of "democratic golf". I would hit the ball and go down to where the ball was. But then, instead of hitting it from there, I would pick it up and take it over to where I had "intended" for it to go. I then hit it from there. My score improved dramatically.
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NPV 4b is NPV Compact the best alternative? 1

The last comment on this thread was by Wayne at 9:30 Pm Sept23 as follows:
Each and every one of those elections mentioned in toto’s 9-23-6:15 note as well as all of the other 48 presidential elections that we have held have one thing in common. Winning of the popular vote was not the candidates’ primary objective. Whether we like the structure or not the name of the game was electoral votes. In each and every case the winning candidate won a majority of the votes that determined the election. (That includes the 1800 and 1824 in the House of Representatives.) The popular vote data begins with 1824, because until then they didn’t even record the popular vote. Popular vote is a wonderful thing. But when looking at elections which did not use that system it is strange to talk about those elections as if they did use that system. So perhaps Americans do not view the absence of runoffs as a problem in the present system because the present system always gives a winner who has a majority of the determining votes.

But NPV would change what the determinative votes are. In their system it is popular votes that count. OK but isn’t NPV then obligated to provide a method for dealing with a situation in which the votes are scattered among several candidates? The Bayh-Cellar amendment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#The_Bayh-Celler_Amendment gave a way to do that. It required that the plurality winner have at least 40% of the vote or hold a runoff. A system doesn’t have give a majority winner but please spare us a 27% president (see 8-7-10 post).

NPV 4a - keep or drop the electoral college

This is one of the continuations of the comments on the 9-22-10 post National Popular Vote 4. This one concerns whether we should keep the electoral college. The other continuation deals with whether, if we change, the NPV Compact is the best way to go.

The last comment on this aspect of the thread was by toto on 9-24 at 4:27 PM as follows:

In FairVote's study of 7,645 statewide elections in the 26-year period from 1980 through 2006, the average change in the margin of victory as a result of a recount was a mere 274 votes. The original outcome remained unchanged in over 90% of the recounts.

A recount is not an unimaginable horror or logistical impossibility. A recount is a recognized contingency that is occasionally required (about once in 332 elections). All states routinely make arrangements for a recount in advance of every election. The personnel and resources necessary to conduct a recount are indigenous to each state. A state's ability to conduct a recount inside its own borders is unrelated to whether or not a recount may be occurring in another state.

If anyone is genuinely concerned about the possibility of recounts, then a single national pool of votes is the way to drastically reduce the likelihood of recounts and eliminate the artificial crises produced by the current system.

The U.S. Constitution requires the Electoral College to meet on the same day throughout the U.S. (mid-December). This sets a final deadline for vote counts from all states. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court has interpreted the federal "safe harbor" statute to mean that the deadline for the state to finalize their vote count is 6 days before the meeting of the Electoral College.

National popular vote 4

In the post number 3 on this topic (8-7-10)I promised another argument against NPV. This is not it. This is a response to one of the main arguments in favor of NPV. That argument goes like this: Most states know which candidate is going to win the electoral votes of their state because each state runs a plurality winner take all system. That is, Texas will vote Republican and California will vote Democratic. So the election will come down to a few close battlground states like Florida and Ohio which are tossups. Everybody else is "left out".
The problem with this argument is that it is not the electoral college that causes a state to be taken for granted. It is the way the state chooses to assign its electoral votes. Most states use a "winner take all" method which assigns the electoral votes of the state to whoever gets the most popular votes - regardless of how close the outcome is. To become battleground states all Texas and California have to do is allot their electoral votes proportionately based on the split of the vote. That is, if you get 43% of the popular vote then you get 43% of the electoral vote. That will eliminate their being taken for granted. If they want to they can choose to become a battleground state.

National popular vote 3

I do not think that the NPV proposal (see 8-6-10) is a reasonable method. There are two major problems that I see with it and both involve assuming that, even though you have changed the rules, the whole process will continue along just like it has before (see Stasis Fallacy 5-27-10). They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. It is also pretty crazy to think that if you change what you are doing, then you are going to get the same result.
The first problem is that this is a pure plurality system election. There is no runoff, no matter how few votes he gets the candidate with the largest vote wins. If both parties nominate centrist candidates you could have the wingnuts on each side throw in two more candidates and then the election can be won by someone whose vote is in the high twenties. This could easily draw in a couple more candidates and suddenly you could have a vote tally of: 23%, 21%, 20%, 18%, 14%, 4%. A president who only got 23 % of the vote! The electoral college has never produced that kind of minority president. Contemplate the idea of how a president could govern if 77% of the voters had voted against him.
Why didn’t they provide for a runoff? Because they can’t. There is no way to include a runoff in their program because you’re options are limited when you are trying to amend the constitution through a back door maneuver. Their response is that the scenario above won’t happen. It has never happened before. They don’t mention that in all of the “befores” we were using that other system … .

National popular vote 2

The proposal is a compact among several states that centers around the adoption of an 888 word law by each of them separately. The law commits the state to cast all of its electoral votes in favor of the candidate who wins the national popular vote. (note: wins the national popular vote means a plurality winner – more than anyone else – it does not mean get a majority of the popular vote) As soon as the states that have adopted it have a total of 270 electoral votes among them, then the pact takes effect. The 270 comes from the fact that that is the number of electoral votes that is required to obtain a majority in the electoral college and that is what will win the election. Go to http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ to find out all about the NPV (= national popular vote) movement.
The first thing to note is that this would not mean that the states that are not party to the pact will be left out of the election. Each person’s vote would count the same whether their state was among those that had adopted the pact or not.
Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States) for a full discussion of the pros and cons of the Electoral College.
There have been many attempts to abolish the EC (= Electoral College). These attempts have usually been directed toward replacing the EC with some sort of popular vote. These attempts have usually been dashed by the stringent requirements for amending the constitution. If we go this way my preference among those that I have seen would award the election to the plurality winner of the popular vote provided that plurality was greater than 40%. If no one obtains more than 40%, then hold a runoff between the top two. That is a reasonable method which came close to success in the late sixties (the Bayh-Celler Amendment ).

national popular vote 1

The passage by the Mass. Legislature of the National Popular Vote compact and the expectation that Gov. Patrick will sign it has brought this project to major public attention.
This is an intro to a topic about which more will come later. The EC (= Electoral College) is the constitutionally specified method we use to elect the president of the United States. The essence of it is that each state is given a number of "electors" = electoral votes that is equal to the number of members of congress that that state is entitled to. Each state (and later the DC) then elects its set of "electors" who actually vote for president. In the beginning the people did not even cast votes for president but for electors who would cast the votes of their state (technically it is still that way). Originally it was intended that those electors would exercise their own discretion about who to vote for. The motivation for creating this structure varied from straight forward to subtle. I think that the main reason was the power of the presidency. They were concerned about a “man on horseback” – a man hugely popular with the “mob” - who would, like Julius Caesar in ancient Rome, sweep away the Republic and establish a dictatorship. Many attempts have been made to replace the electoral college with some variation of direct popular vote.
But the actual wording of the Constitution is very interesting and provides the opportunity for some very high stakes shenanigans. Article I section 10 “ … No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, … enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, … . Article II, section 1. “… Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress …”.
In combination the two appear to open the door to an agreement among the states which would effectively do away with the Electoral College without a constitutional amendment. Mass. is about to join such a movement.  To find out more about it go to http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ .  For a critique stay tuned.

Stasis fallacy 2

It was suggested to me that the stasis fallacy (May 27, 2010) was simply the law of unintended consequences (= LUC). I agree that they are related. But one may have an unintended consequence that could not have been predicted and therefore does not involve fallacious reasoning. Consider Columbus’s discovery of America.
On the other hand if one makes a change without properly thinking it through and obtains an unexpected consequence, then the issue of fallacious thinking is independent of one’s intentions. (I am assuming a good faith effort. Treachery is another matter.) Consider the example that led me to consider this in the first place. Al Gore obtained more popular votes for president than George Bush did in the presidential election of 2000. But Bush won the electoral vote and the presidency. We heard over and over again: “If the election of 2000 had been decided by popular vote, then Gore would have won.” The response was always some variation of: “But the election was not by popular vote”. For some purposes that is a sufficient answer. But I think that this is worth a bit more reflection. Put aside your own political perspective and consider the logic of the statement: “If the election of 2000 had been decided by popular vote, then Gore would have won.” This is certainly true if one is talking about God coming down after the election is over and decreeing that the voting system has been changed to popular vote. If that is what was meant by the statement, then the statement is obviously true but also silly. For the statement to be meaningful it has to be about what would have happened if the rules had been changed (to popular vote election) before the election took place. To claim that the vote as actually cast would have been duplicated with those other rules, then one has to assume (among other things) that the candidates would have campaigned in exactly the same way. That is nonsense. In fact, if the rules had been changed, then the candidates would have campaigned very differently. With the existing system it was totally irrelevant whether Gore won California (or Bush won Texas) by 1 million votes or 3 million votes. Either way he still got all of the electoral votes of that state. There was no reason for either candidate to try to win the national popular vote. And they didn’t. If the rules had been changed to national popular vote, then Gore would have spent more time on the coasts and Bush on flyover country getting out their base voters. It is very possible - perhaps even likely - that Gore would have won. But if so it would not have been because of how the votes were actually cast in 2000 but because of how they would have been cast in a completely different kind of election.

I believe that most people’s thinking about this topic involved a straight forward error in analysis. However, one has to note that many of the folks who made this argument would have preferred a different outcome to the election. It is hard to believe that, for them, their error led them to unintended consequences.