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And the winner is.....

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 09 2016, @12:10PM   
from the not-the-people dept.

And the winner of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, as reported by the major mainstream media outlets is Donald Trump. It has also been reported that Hillary Clinton called President-elect Donald Trump to concede.

Electoral vote count (so far): 279 for Donald Trump, 218 for Hillary Clinton. 270 electoral votes are needed to win.

Popular vote: 57,227,164 votes (48.0%) for Donald Trump, 56,279,305 votes (47.2%) for Hillary Clinton. Update: Now it is closer to 59,085,795 votes (47.5%) for Donald Trump and 59,236,903 votes (47.6%) for Hillary Clinton.

Yell, scream, gnash teeth... but please keep it civil.

Results at CNN, NYT, FiveThirtyEight, Wikipedia.

takyon: Republicans have retained control of the House and Senate.

Here's some market news:

Dow futures plunge nearly 750 points as investors warily eye electoral map
Asian markets plummet on likelihood of Trump victory
Bitcoin price soars as Trump pulls ahead
Opinion: How to profit from a Donald Trump victory

Ballot measure results will be covered in an upcoming story. Some initial results can be found at Ballotpedia and CNN.

[TMB Note: Stop breaking stuff, cmn32480]

• Re:Democracy seems dead Re:Democracy seems dead (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @02:56PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @02:56PM (#424644)

  Maine passed their Ranked Choice Voting Initiative [ballotpedia.org], which is the beginning of the end for our two-party system, as long as we can make sure the rest of the states adopt it as well.

  Parent

• Re:Democracy seems dead (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @08:54PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @08:54PM (#424844)

  Maine passed their Ranked Choice Voting Initiative [ballotpedia.org], which is the beginning of the end for our two-party system, as long as we can make sure the rest of the states adopt it as well.

  I hadn't even heard that was on the ballot -- it's a very good sign that it passed, in terms of voters being aware of the problems with our current system, and being willing to try something different.

  However, I need to point out several issues with that.

  • First, the names "Ranked Choice Voting", "Ranked Choice Ballots", or similar are commonly used in the US for one system, IRV. This is bad nomenclature; it conflates the form of ballot with the system of vote-counting, and thus implies the IRV system is the only option using ranking ballots. (It's not, and in fact is the worst such system in a lot of ways.) When you use terms like "RCV" to mean a specific voting system, you make it unnecessarily hard to have a clear conversation about the different voting systems possible, and why we might be better off with a different one. Whether this arises through negligence or is a deliberate choice by mainstream politicians to ensure those other, better ranking-ballot systems never get a fair hearing doesn't matter -- we need to reject confusing terminology, and call it IRV.
  • All voting systems using ranking ballots have some inescapable flaws (see: Arrow's impossibility theorem [wikipedia.org]); scored-ballot systems are not subject to that theorem, and do not need to have those same flaws.
  • The IRV system in particular has the same spoiler effect, leading to the same 2-party lock-in, as our current plurality voting system.

  For a thorough, text-heavy criticism of IRV relative to range voting, see here [rangevoting.org]

  For a more graphical set of demonstrations (about IRV and many other systems, you'll need to understand Yee diagrams. Once you understand them, they're one of the clearest ways to see certain failures of voting systems. With carefully selected inputs, they can make almost all voting systems look bad (because most voting systems do have serious faults), but IRV is really bad. I'll offer a brief explanation here, but there's also one in the first link below, so go with whichever is easier for you to follow.
  A Yee diagram depicts results of a family of simulated election results, holding the candidates constant and letting the voting population vary. It is based on a political model with 2 arbitrary axes, simply because 2 dimensions fit well on a computer screen. There are an arbitrary number of candidates, positioned anywhere in both axes. The voting population is modeled as a single normal distribution, centered about a variable point in each axis (which are varied to create the diagram). So it does not model anything like a distinct urban population, centered at one point, and rural population, centered at another point.

  The output, that is the Yee diagram itself, is a simple, square image containing only two sets of features:

  1. Superimposed on top, a set of different-colored dots, one for each candidate, each positioned at that candidate's position on the 2 political axes.
  2. For each pixel, we simulate an election where the voting population is centered at that point, and color it according to which candidate won. (We can simulate honest or "strategic" voting of various sorts, or some fraction of voters doing each.)

  With that in mind, look at these pages:

  • Pro-extremist vs. Pro-centrist [rangevoting.org]
  • Similar to previous, less summarized, and includes a lot more [rangevoting.org]
  • IRV specifically [rangevoting.org]

  Parent