I hate the board game with the winner-take-all states so much Every four years some nerd on CNN showing how the numbers swing wildly back and forth if a few thousand votes go one way or another in one state as opposed to just counting all the votes
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The more exciting a system is to board game nerds looking for exploits and loopholes and edge cases the more terrible an idea that system is in the real world and the US electoral system is the best example by far
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Replying to @BoardGameLawyer @arthur_affect
The outcomes are bad, but the EC is just a variant of the classic area control mechanic--in this caser, bare majority gets the VP, losers get nothing--used by lots of very successful games, e.g. El Grande. The swinginess is a feature in a game, but an awful bug in an election.
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Replying to @BingoBingoBango
Right, it's the whole "The enemy's gate is down" thing game designers and players tend to be attracted to -- one clearly defined prize and everything else is just details on the way to getting it Like chess being scored only by checkmating the king and not on "points"
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Yeah. Allowing someone to win via more skillful deployment of their outnumbered pieces is cool game design and a failure of democracy.
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Replying to @BingoBingoBango
Nate Silver even said a really cringey and obnoxious thing about this, that the WTA system of EVs for states makes his job as a pollster both more interesting and easier to resolve And that a pure popular vote system would be both more boring and more work
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BingoBingoBango
I.e. it's a game that would be decided a lot earlier -- total popular vote margins in a national election are rarely all that close -- but to be able to give accurate betting odds you'd have to keep track of everything everywhere on a much more granular level
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Like a board game where every single thing a player does either nets points or loses points, and the number of such actions is very high, which makes it a much bigger pain in the ass to score and makes it much easier to call a definitive winner early on (so a "bad, boring" game)
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Replying to @BoardGameLawyer @arthur_affect
I don't think it's possible to extract a single coherent goal from the framers; if they were trying to create a representative democracy that would reflect the will of the people, they failed before they began. But winner take all swings are often compelling game design.
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