Presidential elections with proportional allocation

The electoral college is getting a lot of flack lately for being why Trump won the election. It occurred to me that the EC, as it is popularly understood, has two effects. One weights smaller states more than larger ones, which was just a pragmatic political compromise from the 1780s. But the other is winner-take-all, which is a choice the state governments make. They could give their electoral votes literally any way they want, including rolling a D20 and picking people out of the jury pool.

I decided to strip out the winner-take-all and see what would have happened if all the states used proportional allocation while retaining the constitutional weighting process. The results for the last seven elections:

Clinton: 236

Bush: 197

Perot: 105

Clinton: 267

Dole: 224

Perot: 46

Nader: 1 (California)

Bush: 263

Gore: 262

Nader: 13

Bush: 280

Kerry: 258

Obama: 289

McCain: 248

Nader: 1 (California)

Obama: 276

Romney: 261

Johnson: 1 (California)

Trump: 262
Hillary: 260
Johnson: 14
Stein: 1 (California)
McMullin: 1 (Utah)

Interestingly, four of the seven end up without a majority winner, and the others ('04, '08, '12) have very close margins. This shows that the winner-take-all effect is just as important as the constitutionally-mandated weighting effect.

In 2016, Trump still comes out on top due to the weighting, but with proportional allocation it's almost a tie, and nobody has a majority with 270. The numbers are strikingly close to 2000, actually, the last time there was a popular/electoral split.

Normally that would mean the election goes to the House, but I don't think that's what actually happens in these scenarios. The third-party electors, knowing their candidates can't possibly win, would likely throw their votes to either of the leading candidates. This would likely happen after extracting concessions of some kind, like promises of legislative priorities, or even a different VP. We could end up with a Hillary/Johnson administration, or a Kaine/Pence, or literally anything the electors could compromise on. It looks very much like a parliamentary system.

Suddenly third party votes are something besides a not-vote!

At a glance, I rather like the shape of this system. I've got no problem with weighting rural areas more than urban areas. I just have a problem with making votes not matter at all. And that's not the result of electoral college as a concept, it's entirely a state-level choice.

[Also, side note, Maine and Nebraska use some bizarre hybrid system. Two EVs to the state winner, and one to the winner of each congressional district. So you could imagine proportional for the entire state, or just proportional for the at-large votes.

In 2016, Maine went 3:1 Hillary, but goes 2:2 under either proportional plan. Nebraska went 5:0 Trump, but goes 4:1 under proportional at-large, and 3:2 under straight proportional. So the gerrymandering of the districts to favor Republicans in Nebraska keeps having an effect if we still go by congressional districts. Screw gerrymandering.]

In summary, the problems with the electoral college aren't with the electoral college. Your beef is with your state legislature, as it often is.

Preventing primary disasters

Forget who the candidates are for a moment. Everything that can be said about them has been said. (Some things bear repeating, but I'll leave that to others.) I'd like to focus on how we got to where we are, and how we can avoid such messes in the future.

Right now the leading Republican candidate has 48% of the delegates and 37% of the votes. At this point, no matter who wins, the party nominee will be someone that two thirds of Republicans voted against.

This is bad policy from every possible perspective. On the level of principles, it's just undemocratic. On a strategic level, it depresses voter turnout in the general, because most Republican voters will feel robbed. Justifiably so!

This has nothing to do with who the candidates are; we could see the same outcome with an entirely different set of candidates. It has everything to do with the systems the state parties have put in place.

There are two problems that need to be addressed. First, how delegates are allocated.

Ohio and Florida are absolutely crucial in the general election. The Republican party winning the White House is largely contingent on voter turnout in these two states. But both primaries are winner-take-all, and in both, the state was won by someone with less than half the votes. Over half of Republican voters in Ohio and Florida have been stripped of any voice in selecting their nominee. In South Carolina, that number is closer to two thirds.

Pretend you're one of the voters whose vote was thrown out by this system. Are you more likely to show up in November? Or less?

States using semi-proportional systems also contribute to the problem. In Alabama, a candidate with 21% of the vote got 13 delegates; a candidate with 19% of the vote got one delegate. In what universe is this giving each voter anything like equal weight? Winner-take-all is a huge problem, but winner-take-more isn't the solution.

The state parties should all adopt straight proportional allocation of delegates. This would at least minimize the disparity between popular vote and delegate count, and give all Republican voters an equal voice.

But this doesn't solve the more fundamental problem: a candidate with a third of the vote would still be winning. The reason for this comes down to two words every candidacy dreads: vote splitting.

The way we cast votes in this country breaks if there are more than two candidates. We all know how this works: where one candidate running alone might win easily, if there's a similar candidate on the ballot, they split votes between them, and the least popular candidate ends up winning. That's why we have exactly two major parties, both of whom dread a strong third-party run. That's how HW Bush lost to Clinton, and how W Bush won over Gore. And that's why there have been constant calls during this primary season for candidates to drop out early.

If there are more than two candidates, everything goes to hell.

This is directly caused by the way we cast votes. There are two or three or ten candidates on the ballot; you vote for one, and by extension, against all the others. This system is sometimes called plurality voting, or first-past-the-post voting. I like to call it by a more direct name: pick-one voting. Sure, there are other methods of voting. But this is America, and that's just how we do things here, right?

Well, no.

Pick-one voting is nowhere in the US Constitution. It's nowhere in any state constitution or law I've ever seen. None of our founders ever sat down and wrote, "Out of all the possible voting systems, pick-one is best, and here's why." Nobody decided to use pick-one voting. We vote this way because we always have. Because of it, we end up selecting a standard-bearer who commands a solid minority base, but who the majority can not support.

This is no way to run any organization. But the state parties can fix it.

There are many other voting systems out there. A few cities use instant-runoff. Others will extol the virtues of the Condorcet methods, or range voting, and they have valid points. But for real-world elections, the best system by a mile is approval voting, because it's simplest to understand, and trivial to implement. No money need be spent; it requires no new voting machines, because all machines already support it. Votes can be counted exactly as they are now. It's even simpler than pick-one, hard as that may be to imagine!

The only difference with approval voting is that the voter now marks every candidate they approve of. Your vote is now a "yes" or a "no" to every candidate, instead of being forced to vote "no" on all but one. Want to cast a vote for "anybody but him/her"? You can do that! Want to vote for a non-establishment candidate, but you don't care which one? Not a problem! And since every voter gets to vote "yes" or "no" on every candidate, every voter still gets an equal voice.

This primary season has been a disaster for the Republican party. No matter who wins, the party is more divided than at any time in living memory. Think how this primary election would have gone under approval voting. We could have started with the same candidates, but instead of ending up with three that represent three disparate wings of the party, we would have ended up with one who the whole party could support.

I have no idea at all who that would have been. But this I know with all certainty: the Republican party would have come out stronger and more unified.

Open letter to the Tennessee Republican Party

Put aside the details of the candidates for a moment; the primary elections have a serious structural problem that needs to be fixed before 2020. If the Republican convention were held today, the leading candidate would have received only 34% of the votes. Put another way, two thirds of Republican voters would have voted for someone other than the winner. How can this result possibly unite any party?

This comes from a basic flaw in the most common voting system we use: there are three or five or ten candidates, and the voter picks exactly one. Essentially, the voter says “yes” to one candidate, and “no” to every other. This system only works if there are exactly two candidates. Otherwise you get vote splitting and division, exactly like the Republican party is seeing now. This is fundamentally why we have two parties and primaries to start with. But now the primaries themselves are seeing vote splitting.

It would be vastly better for the party to use approval voting: there are three or five or ten candidates, and the voter marks as many as they find acceptable. Put another way, your vote is a “yes” or a “no” on each candidate. It’s easy to understand, all voting machines already support this process, and few if any laws need to be changed. The party could have had a much more unifying and successful primary season with this approach. I hope that by 2020 the Tennessee Republican Party will adopt approval voting.

Calibration elections

I've talked in the past about how trust in elections is critical. Right now the system simply can't be audited, by design. We have hyper-partisans building, installing, and maintaining closed systems with known flaws. There's no possibility of recount, and no way of knowing that your vote was counted correctly. As a recent example of this, in a recent UK election a candidate received no votes, despite claiming that he voted for himself. Regardless of that particular situation's outcome, it does lead to some more thoughts.

One of the biggest potential security holes in the election system is the secret ballot. Let me be clear: the secret ballot is absolutely critical to having a functioning democracy. We've all lived our lives in a world with nothing but, so maybe it's harder to see that. But consider what would happen if you could prove to anyone how you voted: your boss, your family, your religious group could threaten you into voting how they want. The only way you can be confident to cast your individual ballot by your preferences is if you can never prove to anyone how you voted.

The down-side is that you can never prove to yourself how your vote was counted. I've proposed better voting machines, based largely around maintaining secret ballots. But we still have reduced faith in elections as a whole because of this. But suppose that mixed among the actual elections we also had calibration elections. Elections not for real people, but only to make sure the system works.

A simple question would be asked. "What is your favorite pizza topping" for example; something utterly trivial and subjective. Ballots in the calibration election would be marked and counted with the exact hardware being used for the real elections. The only difference would be the ballots themselves, which would be marked with the voter's name. The voter would also receive an identical copy of the ballot to take home. All the results would be posted to the internet, for each individual to check.

You wouldn't be able to prove that your real votes were counted properly. But you would be able to at least prove that the system works. It would still be possible to cheat the system; nothing's perfect. But I, for one, would have far greater confidence in our elections if this was part of them.

Ballot Order

The democratic party has selected their candidate for governor. He has no public policy statements, website, or twitter feed. He has an inactive Facebook group, a picture of himself with some fish, and his own name misspelled. From all appearances, this is the entirety of his campaign. Yet he won by a 2:1 margin.

How? He was first on the ballot. This isn't the first time.

There are two groups that should learn from this.

First, voters. If you don't know who you prefer in an election, don't just pick someone on the spot! All you do is water down the opinions of the informed voters, the ones that should be making the decision. If you don't have an opinion on one office, just don't vote for that office! Your votes for all the other offices will still count!

Casting a vote, any vote, is something you should take very seriously. If you're not prepared to do that, don't vote.

Second, legislators. Ballot order is fixed, by law, in alphabetical order by last name. Ballot order clearly has a significant effect on outcome, giving some candidates advantage over others. Laws should never, ever help particular candidates. That's undemocratic and unamerican.

Each voter should be presented with the candidates in a different, randomly chosen order. The uninformed voters who just pick the first candidate on the list would cancel each other out. If we're doomed to use these stupid electronic voting machines with no paper records, we should at least use them in a way that makes elections work.

And if anyone tells you that these machines can't be made to put candidates in random order, give the machine to me. I'll fix it for you. I won't even charge. This is not a technical problem. It's a legal problem, and it has a legal solution.

August 7 2014 Election: Judicial Retention and Local Offices

So I've covered the legislative races, but there are others. Right now there's a heavily-politicized retention election for judges. A bi-partisan commission says all the judges are doing a good job. I plan to vote for retention on all judges, to avoid politicizing the judiciary.

There are also elections for several local positions, a few of which are even competitive! Frankly, I don't know enough about any of those elections, so I plan to abstain. If you have opinions on any of these races, please share!

Now, there's one thing I will comment on. Frankly, I think this school board has done a terrible job by allowing standards to fall as low as they have. When students can't be given a grade less than 50, we're not teaching any more, we're babysitting. My gut response is to thrown out the entire board and try again. But anyone with even the slightest bit of information should ignore that and act on actual data. And please share that data!

Oh, and Bob Schwartz is running for Republican Executive Committee, Senate District 20. When I met him during the 2010 campaign, he was a reasonable and thoughtful individual, not one of the usual Fox News crowd. I plan to vote for him.

August 7 2014 Elections: State Legislature

TL;DR
Puttbrese, Aljabbary, Mancini, Rawlings are the only candidates in competitive primaries that I can say seem better than their opponents. I'd recommend voting for any of them who appear on your ballot.

Long version
There are only a few competitive races in the state legislature, at least in Davidson county, which is really unfortunate. I hate people running unopposed; it makes the election meaningless. Decisions are made by the people that show up, so if you feel like you could do well holding elected office, I encourage you to consider it. If you're thinking about it, talk to me, and I'll help you think!

I'm going to list links to each of the candidates on the Davidson County sample ballot, and add whatever information I can to each one. There are few details for most of their position statements, and usually the only one that's really specific is whether they would or would not accept all the free money the federal government is trying to hand Tennesseans. But you can probably tell that by the (R) or (D) anyway.

I contacted all of them I could, to ask their position on Wolf PAC and approval voting, and their responses are noted below. Most did not respond at all, which makes then an automatic "no" in my book. If you're not willing to tell people where you stand on the issues, you shouldn't be asking to represent those people.

Also, this isn't necessarily a complete listing of candidates for the general election in November. I fully expect more candidates to show up there. This is just the primaries for the two major parties.

19th Senate District
Sterlina Inez Brady (R)
No information, at all. No webpage, no Facebook page, no Twitter feed, no contact information.

Thelma M. Harper (D)
The incumbent in this district. She did not respond to my requests for positions.

Brandon J. Puttbrese (D)
He responded to my tweet about money in politics. That alone makes me support him.

@swcollings I would push for a constitutional convention to reverse #citizensunited. Big money in politics is a huge problem. #tnsd19
— Brandon Puttbrese (@bjputtbrese) July 14, 2014

So if you're voting in the Republican primary in this district, you may as well not. And if you're voting Democrat, I recommend Puttbrese.

21st Senate District
A race with no incumbent!

Mwafaq Aljabbary (R)
I spoke to Mwafaq on the phone for a long time. He was interested in the issues I asked about, but didn't have a defined position, which is reasonable. Can't expect people to make up their minds immediately. He's very busy, very involved, and has been for years. He works with anyone, regardless of party or religion, and has the history to back that up. Very interested in integrating immigrant communities. Very opposed to corruption and regulatory capture, which is unusual for a Republican. He also has a masters degree in city planning (or something close to that, I didn't get the exact degree written down), so he's very interested in public transportation. Overall, I liked this candidate quite a bit.

Diana Cuellar (R)
She responded to my emails, and said she'd look into the issues. I never heard anything past that.

Quincy McKnight (R) 
I never heard anything from this candidate at all.

Mary Mancini (D)
Another candidate I spoke to on the phone. She was amenable to Wolf PAC. She's been around the political scene for a while, and previously wrote a law requiring Tennessee to use paper ballots! She's still in favor of that, and eliminating gerrymandering is also one of her issues. Another candidate I like.

Jeff Yarbro (D)
Again, no communication, at all.

If you're voting in the Republican primary in this district, I'd strongly recommend Aljabbary. If you're voting Democrat, I recommend Mancini.

50th Representative District
I never heard anything from either of these candidates, and they're both running unopposed in their primaries.

Troy Brewer (R)
Bo Mitchell (D)

51st Representative District
The only one of these candidates I heard from was Rawlings, who is on board with Wolf PAC. I can't even tell the difference among any of the Democrats from their websites.
Brian L. Mason (R)
Joshua Rawlings (R)

Bill Beck (D)
Stephen Fotopulos (D)
Jennifer Buck Wallace (D)

52nd Representative District
I never heard anything from this candidate, who is running unopposed except possibly by an independent/third party.

Mike Stewart (D)

53rd Representative District
I never heard anything from either of these candidates, and they're both running unopposed in their primaries. 

John Wang (R)
Jason Powell (D)

54th Representative District
I never heard anything from this candidate, who is running unopposed except possibly by an independent/third party.
Brenda Gilmore (D)


55th Representative District
I haven't heard anything from either of these candidates. That makes me tend to vote against the incumbent, Odom, though that's pretty shaky ground.
John Ray Clemmons (D)
Gary Odom (D)


56th Representative District
Again, both candidates running unopposed.

Beth Harwell (R)
The incumbent in this district. She did not respond to my requests for positions, despite repeated requests. Very disappointed in my representative.

Chris Moth (D)
This candidate responded to me, and described himself as "deeply concerned about the influence of money in politics". Not a commitment to do anything, but it's something. He's unopposed in the primary, but I hope to have more information about his positions before the general election.


58th Representative District
I never heard anything from this candidate, who is running unopposed except possibly by an independent/third party.
Harold M. Love (D)

59th Representative District
I never heard anything from this candidate, who is running unopposed except possibly by an independent/third party.
Sherry Jones (D)

60th Representative District
I never heard anything from either of these candidates, and they're both running unopposed in their primaries.
Jim Gotto (R)
Darren Jernigan (D)

August 7 2014 Election: US House TN-7 Candidate Impressions

TN-7 has been redistricted out of Davidson County, but enough of greater Nashville is in TN-7 that I want to comment on this race as well.

Marsha Blackburn (R)
We all know what I think of Blackburn. She opposes network neutrality, opposes municipal broadband, and spends a huge amount of time trying to repeal the ACA without proposing a viable alternative. Buying insurance across state lines, while it may be a not-terrible idea, doesn't help people with pre-existing conditions, and the cost impact will probably be minimal. It also requires a single set of federal regulations for insurance companies, overriding state regulations. It's really interesting to me that she's all for states being able to trample on municipalities when it comes to broadband, but her idea of healthcare reform is nothing but the federal government trampling on states.

By her measure, all our problems are caused by government. Yet she describes herself as a "staunch supporter of the PATRIOT act," one of the biggest expansions of government power in history. She blames Obama for failing to deport refugee children, but refuses to fund the deportation. Oh yes, and she helped cause the government shutdown last year, and otherwise contributed to this utterly dysfunctional Congress. She's the worst kind of Republican: the kind that says anything it takes to get you angry at Democrats, whether it makes sense or not. She's not a Palin, or a Bachmann. Blackburn's worse; she's informed and smart, she just doesn't work for Tennesseans. She's a hypocrite. Anything that gets her out of office is probably a win.

Jacob Brimm (R)
Brimm's policy statements are somewhat vague, but not the usual anger-fueled talking points that we usually get from Republicans. I don't see anything I can deeply object to. Unlike most candidates, he responded to my request for comment on Wolf PAC! With a thoughtful answer no less! Same for approval voting. Even without those things, though, it would be hard for him to be worse than the alternative. I'd strongly recommend voting for Brimm in this primary.

Credo Amouzouvik (D)
Credo (as he goes by for obvious reasons) has a decent list of policy statements. None are particularly surprising or detailed, but nothing objectionable catches my attention. And he also replied to my questions, saying he wants to take money out of politics, and opposes the NSA spying on citizens without probable cause.

Daniel Cramer (D)
Cramer's position on the Keystone Pipeline: "I don’t see the risks being worth the benefits but I am willing to listen to detailed arguments for or against as they are provided." That says a lot about the man. It says that he's capable of deferring judgement until more information is obtained. It says he's capable of changing his mind. It says he's willing to talk in public about things he doesn't fully understand. I love that in a candidate.

He's one of the few candidates I've seen that makes a point of saying he opposes the NSA's domestic spying abuse! He mentions H1-B visas, which is another issue that's often ignored. And he strongly opposes Citizens United.

Both Democrat candidates in this election hold positions I agree with, on the issues that matter to me. I'd be happy with either one in Congress. Cramer, though, has the advantage that he had public policy statements on those issues before I asked. Domestic spying, corporate money in politics, H1-B visas, those are issues that he thought important enough to put up on his site without prompting. That makes me lean towards him over Credo.

August 7 2014 Elections: Governor Candidate Impressions

The below are my impressions of each candidate in the upcoming August 7 primary elections for Governor of Tennessee. These impressions are not scientific, and are based solely on their websites and any knowledge I happen to have of them. The below should be weighted exactly as much as you weight my opinion on anything. Overall, what I'm trying to do is see which candidates I cannot vote for, and narrow the field. Please, nobody take anything I say as an attack or an indictment. I'm not trying to be mean; I simply have to make observations, some unflattering, to direct my vote correctly.

Republican Candidates
Mark Coonrippy Brown
(Warning: there's an auto-play video at this link. Bad etiquette on the part of the Tennessean, but there's no candidate site.)
Brown appears to be a guy running to make a specific point, not to win. I enjoy the video, actually. He seems to be a normal human being, I don't get the usual anger or superiority complex that you get from a lot of candidates, nor do I get the idea that he's trying to make emotional appeals. But without detailed position statements it's difficult to give him a good description. I'm not really convinced he'd make a good governor. "There are simple solutions for simple problems" is a nice phrase. Unfortunately, in my world, for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong. But it's difficult not to like him, for the two minutes you see of a video.

Bill Haslam
The incumbent is running on his record, which I'm not really going to judge right now. For objective information, I can say that he seems to have reasonable organizational skills, can communicate in English, and that the state hasn't utterly collapsed under his administration. He has, however, completely failed to come up with an alternative Medicaid expansion, which kinda screws a lot of Tennesseans. So there's that.

Basil Marceaux Sr.
I can only let this candidate speak for himself.

Donald Ray McFolin
(Warning: there's an auto-play video at this link. Bad etiquette on the part of the Tennessean, but there's no candidate site.) 
Another candidate running to make a specific point, this one about special needs education. Again, he seems like a normal person trying to make the world better with whatever platform he can get.

Democratic Candidates
Charles V. "Charlie" Brown
No website, no position statements, no comments from the candidate at all. Just a facebook page full of people asking what he stands for, and with the candidate's name misspelled.

Kennedy Spellman Johnson
Another candidate with no website and no detailed position statements. Well, you can go here, but there's nothing to see. I can't say anything about this candidate.

WM. H. "John" McKamey
An actual website! With positions! Only a few, and they're very vague. (Education is good. People making more money is good.) Nothing obviously objectionable, but it's like a bare-minimum campaign, only one step up from not having a site.

Ron Noonan
This candidate doesn't even have a facebook page, just a twitter feed. Another not particularly serious candidate.

TL;DR
Out of the four Republican candidates, Haslam is the only one with a chance of winning. If you don't support Haslam, either because he's Haslam or because you don't like incumbents, I'd probably go for McFolin.

Out of the four Democrat candidates, the only one that looks even remotely serious is McKamey. I don't know why I'd even consider voting for any of the others, and they're not doing anything to convince me I should.

Slim field.

August 7 2014 Election: US House TN-5 Candidate Impressions

Ah, TN-5. The office I ran for back in the day. I learned a lot from that experience, but that's for another post.

The below are my impressions of each candidate in the upcoming August 7 primary elections for US House of Representatives, Tennessee fifth district. These impressions are not scientific, and are based solely on their websites and any knowledge I happen to have of them. The below should be weighted exactly as much as you weight my opinion on anything. Overall, what I'm trying to do is see which candidates I cannot vote for, and narrow the field. Please, nobody take anything I say as an attack or an indictment. I'm not trying to be mean; I simply have to make observations, some unflattering, to direct my vote correctly.

Our incumbent Jim Cooper is running unopposed in the Democratic primary this year. There are four Republican candidates, a much smaller field than 2010. I'm sure there will be several "independent" (including third-party) candidates in the general election come November, but those don't show up on the August 7 ballot.

Chris Carter
Great quote: "Never before in my lifetime have I witnessed such a frightening distortion of Americanism and assault on personal liberty as I have witnessed in the creation and implementation of ObamaCare." Apparently the last two Presidents shredding the fourth amendment, and holding and executing Americans without trial, are absolutely nothing compared to the ACA.

Carter blames the ACA for all the evils of the healthcare world, but doesn't propose any workable solutions. Blames the deficit on Obama's "socialist programs" and waste. (For the record, the deficit reached its current absurd proportions under Bush, and has gone down every year under Obama. Don't believe me? Look up the raw numbers.) He favors a flat tax, even though that would make the deficit vastly worse and hurt the poor tremendously. And worst of all, he uses quotes to indicate emphasis!

Unfortunately this is the typical Republican candidate these days: utterly uninformed, and just repeating the Fox line whether it makes sense or not. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Ronnie Holden
I have zero information about this candidate. All he seems to have is a Facebook page, and on that page all he does is share the latest Fox meme. From that I think we could reasonably expect that he'd be another generic Republican candidate, possibly minus the communication skills.

"Big John" Smith
An interesting candidate. He's clearly very religious, but unlike much of the religious right, I don't get the usual overwhelming impression of self-righteousness from this man. My impression from his words is that he is truly humble. I don't see any specific indication that he wants to consciously impose his religious beliefs on others by declaring Christianity to have special legal status, though he clearly can't separate his policy statements from his religion.

He's also the only Republican candidate I've seen so far for any office that specifically opposes the influence of money in politics, and he seems to understand that the only way out of our deficit mess is to grow the economy. And hey, he references The Twilight Zone, which is big points in my book.

Now, it's still all Obama's fault, even though the economy collapsed two years before he became President. He totally misrepresents the Occupy movement's goals, and doesn't display much compassion for those on welfare. (No outright contempt, though, which is better than most Republican candidates.) He thinks God gave Israel all the relevant land, and opposes the existence of a Palestinian state on those grounds. And at one point he equates all of liberalism, socialism, communism, and the antichrist.

But you can't ask too much, I suppose.

Bob Ries
I'm not analyzing Bob Ries's website this time. See, I met Bob Ries in 2010, when we were both running for US House TN-5. (He lost the primary to David Hall, so we weren't directly opposed.) We spoke for some time about one thing and another, and I came to the definite conclusion that he was not someone I would want in Congress. I won't go into more details; it was four years ago, and there's just no need to pick on the man. But I can't recommend voting for Bob Ries.

Jim Cooper
If you're voting in the Democratic primary, it really doesn't matter what I say here, because you've only got one candidate! But for completeness, his website is above.

He's got a good list of issue statements, including intellectual property, wonder of wonders. (I'm not 100% convinced he's got a good policy, but at least he's aware of the issue, and claims to strive for balance.) And I appreciate the fact that he has links scattered throughout his text; a familiar style! Cooper has a 65% match rating with me on POPVOX, which is twice what either of our Senators get. If Cooper wins, I won't be terribly disappointed.

August 7 2014 Election: Senate Candidate Impressions

The below are my impressions of each candidate in the upcoming August 7 primary elections for US Senator from Tennessee. These impressions are not scientific, and are based solely on their websites and any knowledge I happen to have of them. The below should be weighted exactly as much as you weight my opinion on anything. Overall, what I'm trying to do is see which candidates I cannot vote for, and narrow the field. Please, nobody take anything I say as an attack or an indictment. I'm not trying to be mean; I simply have to make observations, some unflattering, to direct my vote correctly.

US Senate, Republican Primary
Christian Agnew
This candidate apparently believes that English should be the official language of the United States, but doesn't have very high standards about its use. Putting aside my revulsion at poor use of language, I like that he actually tries to explain that Common Core is a voluntary state-led program, not a federal mandate. Other than that, his positions are generic Republican: blame our problems on the ACA, illegal immigrants, welfare abuse, foreign aid, and deficit spending. Also, don't take his guns. Nothing particularly interesting here.

Lamar Alexander
Our incumbent has the usual disease of incumbents: they often don't state their ideas or positions, they just run on their record and how much money they've raised.. The specifics of Alexander's record he chooses to point out are wholly unremarkable: balance the budget (how?), repeal the ACA (and replace it with what?), and oppose Obama at every possible turn regardless of what he's actually doing.

Joe Carr
Again, a generic Republican candidate. He'll defend our rights to own guns, number one issue. Makes me feel better, I can't go a week without someone trying to take my guns away. Number two issue, government waste, specifically like ACA and TARP. Reasonable people can differ over whether spending $180 billion a year to provide insurance to the poor is wasteful, but TARP was a loan that was 97% paid back and certainly saved thousands of jobs, so calling it wasteful is just misinformed.

And apparently we need to both lower taxes (specifically on the rich, since he supports a flat tax) and balance the budget. Where does he plan to cut over a trillion a year out of spending? No clue, but you can not do that without gutting at least one of the military, social security, or medicare. There isn't enough spending elsewhere to do it. Carr gives the usual Republican buzzwords, with the usual complete lack of thoughtfulness or detail.

George Shea Flinn
Few stated positions, and seems to focus most of his attention on the ACA, with a little to spare for border security. To his credit, he proposes a semi-detailed alternative to the ACA, and seems to have some clue what he's talking about, unlike most Republican candidates. He does repeat some of the more bizarre talking points, though. (Where in the ACA does it give Washington control of my medical decisions, again?) I find his lack of position statements on other issues unfortunate. One of the few is a statement on Iraq and Israel which, frankly, shows very little knowledge of the history or the situation. Dr. Flinn is clearly capable of some degree of independent thought, which is better than most candidates do, but he's still pretty isolated from broader reality.

John D King
Once again, the usual three or four Republican position statements, though in this case clearly typed by the candidate himself. Quite a bit of misinformation, and there are zero details as to how he would improve the lives of Americans. Except the rich, who of course pay too much in taxes. Entitlement programs (first among which are Social Security and Medicare) are "ridiculous", and clearly to be eliminated, presumably to afford those tax cuts for the rich.

One of his more amusing claims is that a "huge portion" of our deficit spending goes to foreign aid. Try $50 billion out of a $900 billion deficit. Also, he says that much of this money goes to places where "the majority of their population would like nothing more than to destroy us and our way of life". I'd love to know where those places are; most people just want to be left alone, no matter where they are. And $3b of that aid goes to Israel every year. Does he want to cut that? Unclear, but I doubt it.

Brenda S Lenard
Lots of position statements. (The first is on the Constitution, and the text is amusingly copied straight from whitehouse.gov. Not sure what the significance of that is.) She's all about how horrible the economy is, but doesn't propose any particularly novel or useful ideas: lower taxes, reduced regulation, cut spending. (I'm totally unclear how that last one is supposed to create jobs, but it's a talking point, it doesn't have to make sense.) Her education platform says that schools must operate in transparency, but there's no indication of what that means on a practical level, or how it would help anything. On every issue, there are nice little essays, and relatively little misinformation compared to other candidates. But there are no details, and it's all based around the usual Republican talking points. No apparent original thoughts.

This is getting boring.

Erin Kent Magee
Now this guy has original thoughts! He wants to "win the war on terrorism" by "dispatching the National Guard to control crowds of dissidents", and by "designating Radical Islam as a cult (not a religion entitled to protection under the 1st Amendment)". He's all about the second amendment, but the first? Gut it. I suppose the message of this candidacy is that, yes, Republican candidates could be worse.

So there we have it, a wholly unremarkable field of candidates. I don't expect any one of them would act particularly different than any other. Out of them, I'd probably pick Lenard or Flinn. They at least have repeated fewer of the usual lies.

US Senate, Democrat Primary
Terry Adams
Well-written policy statements on a decent number of issues. Many are typical Democrat talking points. But they're real Democrat talking points, not the caricatures Republicans set up. If your only picture of what Democrats stand for is "bigger government, more taxes", look at this guy's site. It's a good example of reality. He's also got some original ideas which, on the surface, make some sense. He supports an amendment to get money out of politics, which none of the Republican candidates mentioned. I'm not jumping up and down saying he's the next Jed Bartlet, but best guess is that I'd feel good with Terry Adams as Senator from Tennessee.

Gordon Ball
This candidate also has well-written policy statements on a wide range of issues. His includes a brief and reasonable statement in favor of the Second Amendment, which is unusual for a Democrat. He both praises and criticizes the ACA, meaning he's capable of nuanced thought. This is another candidate I'd feel good about winning.

Larry Crim
Mr. Crim seems to have a lot of ideas, but his website is almost incomprehensible. I'm not going to lie to you and say I read it all. I don't see anything I strongly object to, but just the fact that his campaign website is that badly organized doesn't speak well to his organizational skills or support.

Gary Gene Davis
Again, this website is very difficult to read, and I don't see much that resembles policy statements or ideas.

The Tennessean provided a decent summary of the Democratic candidates a couple weeks ago.


TL;DR
The Republican candidates are mostly interchangeable, and often frighteningly ignorant. Which candidate you should vote for depends, of course, entirely on your priorities. Unfortunately, our broken voting system doesn't let you express honest opinions due to strategic concerns. If you want to vote for the Republican candidate who I'd be most likely to like, I'd go for probably George Flinn or Brenda Lenard. If you want to defeat the incumbent at all costs, Crim appears to be the frontrunner. And if you're afraid of Crim because he's Tea Party (not an unreasonable position), clearly you should vote for Alexander. For me, I'd probably vote Alexander in this primary.

For Democracts, it's a toss-up between Adams and Ball. I can't tell enough difference between them from their websites to decide between them. If this is your dilemma, I'm afraid you'll need to gather more data. Either seems like they would do a fine job.

I'm disappointed that there is little or no mention by anyone about the abuses of the NSA. One Republican candidate may have mentioned it briefly, but only just. Clearly both parties are completely on board with the destruction of our privacy rights.

Moving Borders

Much of modern geopolitics is based on the idea of territorial integrity. A state has these borders, and they are not to be changed. When we invaded Iraq, our stated goal was to ensure a unified country was left behind. When countries try to change the borders of other countries, the international community freaks out, and often lots of people die.

Territorial integrity, like most political concepts, is a nice fiction. There are still border changes. There always have been, and always will be. We're naive to think that the arbitrary lines we've drawn on the map this century will last the rest of time, as if they're different from the arbitrary lines of the past.

Let's look at Iraq for an example. Why is Iraq falling apart right now? Because fundamentally, Iraq has no reason to exist as a single country. There are three major groups, all with their own interests and territory, and none of whom really have a desire to be unified with each other. (Overly broad general statements, obviously.) Iraq came into existence because foreign powers drew the borders, and it's stayed in existence by brute force of the central government. With that force gone, there's nothing holding that country together. The same phenomenon is pulling Syria apart.

Most border changes come about due to war. And war, we would all agree, is an expensive and risky proposition, best avoided. There may be circumstances where war is the best available option, but when it comes to the kinds of wars that lead to border changes, that's not generally the case. We should try to find a better general solution.

(I should say at this point that I am not, with this writing, advocating any particular instance of border change. I am interested in systems that work, and in keeping people alive, not in achieving any particular political end. This should not be interpreted as commentary on any particular revolution, war, or secession movement, past or present. If I choose to comment on those things, I will do so in an unmistakeable manner.)

There's a correlation between war and border change, but which causes which? Does the war cause the border change? Does the desire for border change cause the war? Or is there some third factor that causes both? Clearly, war is a consequence, not the root cause. In many cases, people resort to violence when all peaceful means of achieving their desires have been cut off. (This is one of the reasons why democracy is more stable than totalitarianism; you can't deny people what they want forever.) To avoid violence, therefore, we need some means for people to have what they want. It must be possible for the will of the people to be recognized and executed, even if that means redrawing the map.

Now, redrawing national borders shouldn't be taken on lightly. We can't be talking about a unilateral, simple majority, one-time vote. If secession is too easy, the world becomes unstable instantly. But the barrier also can't be insurmountable, or the pressure buildup leads to the same instability. Wherever we draw the line, it needs to be fixed, so people on both sides know what to expect, and can't complain about the rules being rigged.

Since self-determination is the principle people are typically fighting over, obviously we need to hold a poll. Suppose a part of a state wants to secede. We poll everyone inside the region in question, to find out what they want. But they're not the only interested party; we should also poll the rest of the country. (For multi-sided issues like Iraq, or areas that want to leave one country and join another, we'd need to expand this. Things can get exponentially complex. Right now we'll just address the simplest case.) We have to be sure that the poll is valid, that votes are counted accurately and cast without coercion. Uninvolved international observers are required. There would also have to be some agreement on who gets to vote, age limits, sex, citizenship, that sort of thing. There's going to have to be some serious negotiation going on before the actual vote is held.

But what are the people actually voting on? Obviously if we're talking about redrawing national borders there are an infinitude of possible outcomes, and while only some finite set of them are of interest, it could still be a very long list. There's going to have to be a lot of discussion beforehand about what possibilities are of interest, and the list will have to include the status quo ante.

That means plurality voting won't work; it's fundamentally broken for more than two ballot options. We need either some sort of ranked-choice system, or approval voting. I prefer approval voting for American elections, but in a case like this a Condorcet system might be more appropriate. However, approval voting has one significant advantage over ranked systems: approval can clearly show when no option is acceptable to a majority of the voters. That's useful information in a situation like this.

So we can hold a vote, and gather the opinions of all relevant people in a detailed and accurate fashion. What now? Obviously you can't just treat them as one big vote; the whole point of this is to give the majority in a region a way to win out over the rest of their country without violence. So we need a system for combining the two sets of preferences into a single outcome, in such a way that the votes in the seceding region are equal to the votes outside that region.

The simplest idea is to weight the regions by population. If the main body of the country has ten times the population of the area that wants to secede, give the area that wants to secede ten times the weight. Then combine all the votes into a single count. Unfortunately, the simple idea leads to some absurdities. By this standard, if a region of one person wanted to secede, it would take a unanimous vote of the rest of the country to stop them! Clearly that's not stable. So we reduce the weight by some negotiable factor. This way the people doing the leaving get more weight, but the people being left still count for something. It tends to force people to find an acceptable middle ground.

(This gets more complicated still if the area that wants to secede isn't clearly defined, and that's one of the issues being voted on! Presumably you'd have to evaluate each choice of borders with different weights, depending on who would be on which side of the line. To fully develop this set of rules for every possible circumstance is clearly impossible.)

And this is all theory. It's nice to have a mechanism that could be implemented. Making people accept it, that's a whole different problem. You can hold all the polls you want, but some people don't really care about the outcome of polls. But not everywhere is like that! If such a system were in place, how many secession movements would we see try it in more peaceful areas? How much better would it be for the central governments in those countries? After all, a successful and popular movement that's suppressed by the government makes that government less legitimate. And an unpopular movement that's clearly identified as just being a few troublemakers also helps. There's no downside.

Unless, of course, you're just particularly attached to keeping the map from changing for the rest of time. I, for one, am not.

The Perfect Voting Machine

Ballots must be physical. The ballot should exist as a physical medium, allowing for recount by multiple independent parties.

Ballots must be machine-readable. The ballot must be marked in such a way that it can be counted by machine, for speed, efficiency, and repeatability.

Ballots must be human-readable. The ballot should be marked in such a way that an average human can read it, in case the counting machines are called into question or unavailable.

Ballots should be marked by machine. This prevents human error in ballot-marking in such a way that the ballot becomes invalid.

Ballots should be confirmed by the voter before final casting. Before the ballot is counted and stored, it must be read by the same machines that would count the votes in a recount. This ensures that the ballot is readable, and reduces the possibility of both mechanical and human error marking the ballot.

Each ballot should have the choices printed in a random order. It's been shown that earlier placement on the ballot conveys an advantage in winning the election. This means that whoever writes the laws defining ballot order can give themselves an electoral advantage, which is a clear conflict of interest. Each ballot should randomize the order of the candidates.

No machine, document, or person besides the voter should possess both the voter's identifying information and ballot contents. The ballot must not be marked with any potentially identifying information such as the user's name or a timestamp with precision finer than one hour. No person should see the marked ballot after it is marked besides the voter. Neither the printing nor reading machines should have any knowledge of the voter.

Ballots must be impossible to counterfeit. Exactly as many valid countable ballots should exist as votes are cast. Voters must be prevented from walking in with a pocket full of blank ballots; similarly, false ballots should be impossible to insert after the election ends. Practically, this means all ballots must be marked on-site with unique information that can be confirmed valid, but which is different on every ballot. As a first-guess suggestion, perform a one-way encryption on a timestamp. Then perform a two-way encryption on that, plus GPS coordinates, using an encryption key that is known only to a few high-level election officials. This ensures every valid ballot is unique, and allows each ballot to be tracked to the polling location it was marked, while maintaining timestamp (and thus voter) anonymity.

Ballots should only be issued to registered voters. It should be impossible to issue a ballot without also marking the name of a single registered voter off the roll. Similarly, it should be impossible to mark a name off a roll without issuing a ballot. Each registered voter should be issued a voting card before arriving at the polling location, containing cryptographically unique information to that voter. Only with the presence of that card will a ballot be issued.

Only one ballot should be issued to each voter. After a voter is issued a ballot, their name is marked on the roll. If that voter determines that their ballot was mismarked, they must turn it back in to receive a replacement. No replacement ballots can be issued without the original being returned.

The design and firmware of all machines involved must be open and inspectable. Maintaining voter trust in the system is paramount. Open-source and open-hardware systems ensure that no back doors or remote access is possible, and allow review for flaws by many thousands of coders and engineers.

It should be impossible to lose ballots. The to-the-minute vote count shall be constantly shared via network with the central election office. This creates a check against large numbers of ballots suddenly "disappearing" before being counted.

So here's the process.

1) I receive my voter card in the mail. The card is marked with a crypto-hash of my personal information, making it effectively impossible to fake.

2) I arrive at the polling location and present my card. My card is scanned, marking me from the roll as having voted. (Optionally, some biometric identification may be performed here, to prevent people from voting with others' voting cards.) A ballot is printed with spaces for all races in my district, plus a unique code identifying the ballot as legitimate and from this polling location.

3) I take that ballot to the marking machine. I insert my ballot, manipulate a touchscreen, and the machine marks my ballot for each race as I indicate

4) I take my marked ballot to the reading machine. I insert my ballot, and it tells me who it thinks I voted for. This machine also confirms that my ballot is properly marked with a valid crypto-stamp indicating a legitimate ballot.
4a) I confirm that my ballot is printed correctly, both visually and by machine. The machine keeps my ballot and counts my vote. I get a sticker and leave.
4b) I find an error in my ballot marking. I return to the poll worker, who inserts my ballot into the ballot-printing machine. The machine confirms that my ballot was valid, marks it with information which renders it invalid (including a human-readable timestamp), and issues a new one with new markings. Return to step 3.

What attacks are possible against this architecture? Obviously we have a problem with running out of ink. Perhaps we mark everything with high-power lasers?

Voter Fraud vs. Voter Suppression

There's a lot of talk lately about voter ID laws. Like many things, this issue has devolved into two sides. One side says that these laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud. The other side says these laws disenfranchise legitimate voters.

I'm not going to get into each side accusing the other of having negative motives. That's just not productive.

Let's instead start with basic premises of democracy, and identify our common ground. In a perfect system, no legitimate voter would be prevented from voting, and no illegitimate voter would be allowed to vote. This applies regardless of political persuasion, race, religion, location, age, anything. The goal is to have a good election, even if it results in your side losing.

(If you don't agree with that, I suggest you go live in Iran, which you might find more to your liking.)

Now that we've identified the ideal, we have to acknowledge that we don't live in a perfect world. Some number of fraudulent votes will be cast, and and some number of legitimate voters will be turned away. We wish to minimize both these numbers. But what if we have to decide between them?

That's what these voter ID laws ask us to do. So instead of arguing about hypothetical models, let's talk about what can be quantified.

These laws will prevent some number of fraudulent votes (and before someone accuses me of taking sides, zero is a number). These laws will also suppress some number of legitimate votes. We can measure both those things and see what effect the laws have.

But before we do that, let's define a standard. Having a standard, then comparing evidence against our standard, gives us a path to admit we were wrong, and thus become right. Again, let's try to find common ground.

Say we wanted to avoid even a single case of voter suppression, but as a consequence we had to accept ten billion fraudulent votes. This is a bad trade, because the ten billion fraudulent votes now dictate the course of the election. The one vote we "saved" didn't matter at all.

Now the other side. Say we wanted to prevent one fraudulent vote, and to do so we had to suppress every other vote in the country. I think we'd all agree that was a bad trade. Sure, there are no fraudulent votes, but there's also no election.

These absurd extremes demonstrate that we all live somewhere in the middle, and that we can (at least in principle) put a number on this problem. The only real difference any of us have is exactly where between these extremes we draw our line. So ask yourself: how many fraudulent votes have to be prevented to be worth suppressing one legitimate vote? The one suppressed voter loses his voice entirely; the one or five or fifty fraudulent voters reduces the value of everyone's vote. Where's the balance point?

I'm pretty confident that if you have to suppress more than one vote to prevent one fraudulent vote, we're definitely in the wrong territory. One fraudulent vote does less damage to the election than one suppressed vote does.

I'm also pretty confident that if you allow more fraudulent votes than the margin of error in the election, you're ruining the integrity of the election for all involved. So that puts a hard upper bound on the number of fraudulent votes that should be allowed in the entire election.

In between those numbers, things get a little fuzzy. I could see easy arguments for any ratio between 1:1 and 1:10, and I'd like to hear arguments for numbers outside that. So we have our standard. Now we ask, how do the numbers work out? Because if more votes are being suppressed than frauds are being prevented, we've created more problems than we've solved.

Let the data gathering commence!