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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Replying to @arthur_affect @BingoBingoBango
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 @BingoBingoBango
The Electoral College's winner-take-all system intensifies the factors that make our elections two-party but they aren't the cause of it A straight popular vote that was still a first-past-the-post single-choice ballot would still naturally force clustering into two parties
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Kenneth Arrow's famous impossibility theorem was *only* considering the various quirks of different "one-person-one-vote" electoral systems The problem of the Electoral College making the election not even representative was outside the scope of his paper
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