(11-05-2020, 08:07 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 05-Nov-2020 World View: It's almost over
As of this moment, it appears that the election counting is almost
over, and Biden will be president, the Republicans will lose one seat
in the Senate but still control it, and the Democrats will lose
several seats in the House, but still control it. The stock markets
are cheering because this means political gridlock.
There are still several states in play, with vote-counting still in
progress, so it's still possible that Trump could win, or that the
Senate could flip, but those are considered unlikely.
Two states, Arizona and Nevada, could be called today, and Biden is
expected to win both, and the presidency. If either one flips to
Trump, then a Biden win is still likely, but less certain, and will
depend on other states, especially Pennsylvania.
It's not expected that the legal battles will change the results.
Absentee and mail-in ballots are just as valid as in-person ballots, and states have considerable leeway on much of their conduct of the elections. Changes in electoral laws, so long as they do not reduce the vote through obvious discrimination can be made before the election. States own and control the electoral devices and have the responsibility for an accurate count. States can allocate electoral votes as winner-take-all or as Maine and Nebraska do. two for the state at large and as the districts vote. That is fine for those two states that have two or three very different districts. For states significantly different such would be more troublesome. State legislatures typically draw Congressional boundaries, and in most states, Congressional districts have no legal meaning except for Congressional representation. If I drive in Indiana or Ohio, I see county lines delineated on roads with signs, but I have no idea when I cross the border of a Congressional District. The road atlas and road map that I use never show those, but they do show county lines.
What the states cannot do is something discriminatory in violation of Constitutional enumeration of voting rights or some blatant distortion of the result (such as the Governor calling the election unilaterally or the state legislature voting on who wins).
I have my own idea on how to divide the electoral votes of a state, but it is a complicated system that begins with two at large, with the rest subdivided in proportion to the state's vote. Let us say that Smith ®, Jones (D), and Williams (I) are running in a state with 22 electoral votes (there is no such states, but that makes the math easy). The state splits 52.1 for Smith ®, 44.5 for Jones (D), and 5.6 for Williams (I) after one has cast off the votes of fourth-party and other nominees who could never win 5% of the vote. Two electoral votes, suggesting the US Senate, go to Smith. Thus
2 Smith, 20 unallocated.
Now we allocate the residue of the other 20. For every full share of the vote that can be represented by a portion of the total vote (5%, but not a partial share) the nominee getting that share gets an electoral vote for each total share that he or she could get. Thus of this residue one gets
1 Williams
8 Jones
10 Smith.
With the two at-large votes one gets
1 Williams
8 Jones
12 Smith.
But what of the other partial vote? That goes to the winner of the plurality. So I have an allocation:
13 Smith, 8 Jones, 1 Williams.
This, I think, would be better than what we now have. There is still a strong incentive to win a state outright, but politicians would not get to fully ignore large minorities in a state as they do in our current system.
Really-small states would have to divide their districts, if at all, based on Congressional districts.
........
Even tiny pluralities in a large tipping-point state that decides the election (Florida in 2000) can be definitive.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
