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U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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The result will likely reflect the will of the people only in the most tenuous sense.

This conclusion seems to require two very specific assumptions to hold:

  • Election outcomes reflecting the will of 49% of the voters rather than 51% of the voters is a "most tenuous sense" of "reflecting the will".

  • For each voter coming in to vote, the option they intended to vote for reflects their will 100%, and the other option reflects their will 0%.

The first one is an assertion about the meaning of elections, and the second one is an assertion about the alignment between candidates and voter intent. Both of them seem sketchy to me, though I think that my objection to the second one will be the more compelling one.

For the first one, I think the underlying assumption that the majority winner, however narrow, gets the moral label of representing the will of the people and can do whatever they want is already flawed, and treating the 50% mark as magical has similar vibes to me as that often-mocked idea that by lusting after a 17-years-and-364-days-old you are a filthy pedophile, but the 18-years-and-0-days-old one? You go, boy. Democratic elections aren't some game you play where the winner gets to rule in whatever way they want up to and including "execute everyone who voted for the loser" and sportsmanship demands that the loser go along with it, but primarily a common knowledge machine for support, coupled with a power assignment mechanism that is meant to give the ones that are most likely to benefit from the common knowledge a shot at governing. This is why many systems give election losers a chance to form a government if the winners failed to get an absolute majority coalition, and why big political vibe shifts are often secured by votes of confidence or technically-unrelated polls/plebiscites that are advertised as such. ("Let it be known that a vote for Prop 1234 is a signal of continued support for me!")

The primary function of having 51% of people vote for you is that every individual knows that if they tried to start an uprising against you, about 51% of people would tend to oppose it, and everyone know that everyone knows, etc.; coupled with common-sense understanding of status quo bias even among those who did not vote for the ruler, the hope is that prospective revolutionaries know that it's not worth to try and start an abortive attempt (that would be negative-sum for the polity). The ruler, on the other hand, knows that with a 51% result their options are limited, because if they do things that might really piss off the other 49% while leaving their 51% supporters at most lukewarm, the common knowledge that a revolution is doomed will disappear.

None of these considerations change by a lot if the 49% and the 51% figure are swapped, since the genuine 51% winner already has to govern in a way that keeps the 49% somewhat happy (and thus reflect their will) under all but the most extreme assumptions of voters being emotionless optimiser-bots for completely disparate value functions and equal combat stats, so 49% don't revolt because they would lose and 51% do whatever they want because they would win. In reality, 51% motivated vs. 49% unmotivated win by about as much as 49% motivated vs. 51% unmotivated.

For the second one, why do you think it comes to pass that election after election in the US two-party system is this close? Is there some mystery biological mechanism that makes about 50% of Americans 100%-Democrat-0%-Republican and the other half 0%-Democrat-100%-Republican, like about 50% are female? Clearly the more sensible theory is that the parties are the ones that, for whatever reason, shift every election season so that about 50% of voters vote for them. You could postulate all sorts of mechanisms for why this would be the case, but the details don't particularly matter for this argument. All that matters is that parties must have the liberty to shift the margin of their votership quite freely, and this implies that the marginal, for example, Democrat voter can't plausibly be one whose will is actually 0% represented by the Republican option, because otherwise how could the Republican party slightly tweak their platform/message and turn that voter into a Republican voter? Instead, there must evidently be a band of voters along the middle who, in a given election, are just slightly more in favour of one party than the other, and considering the stability of the approx. 50-50 split, this band is surely wider than 1%. For these voters, if the other party wins, their overall political will is maybe reflected by 49%; but also, if the party they voted for won, their will would only be reflected by 51% or so, because they were equally marginal pickings for their own party as it shifted its platform to "ride the margin"!

In short, for a number of people well in excess of 1%, the election outcome being flipped by 1% worth of noise is not the cataclysmic event of "their will being reflected in the most tenuous sense", but the fairly mundane event of their will being reflected a tiny bit less than otherwise. The only ones for whom this event is cataclysmic are those deeply aligned with one or the other party, the actual near-100% D/Rs (who I'm sure are overrepresented here), but why are they specifically entitled to have their will reflected to any significant degree?

On top of everything, if the wrong votes bother you, why aren't you bothered by the non-voters? What percentage of those actually reflect a will to not vote, as opposed to people who fully intended to vote for one party or another but couldn't, be it because their car broke down on the day, their employer didn't give them a day off, they overslept, their postal vote got lost or whatever? What percentage of people who did vote did so because they were idle on the day and found themselves near a polling station and thought "hell, why not" without having any opinion on the election? (Happened to me once!)