Electoral College Rant Spectacular Extravaganza

I've just been enjoying NBC's SNL Presidential Bash 2008, a collection of presidential skits as well as some new messages from the "candidates". I'm so tired of hearing about this stuff, but the lighter side is enjoyable.

I have been pondering our election system a lot lately. Once again, I'm flabbergasted that what remains the most powerful nation in the world still chooses it's leader with an anachronistic system like the electoral college. This was a weak compromise that barely managed to hold together a loose collection of former British colonies over 200 years ago. In the meantime, the central government has grown immensely in power and citizens essentially have real-time access to information. So why do we continue voting by a system that counts people differently based on where they live?

It seems that lots of people don't really know how the Electoral College works. Everybody is aware of the state map on election night that turns red or blue depending on the winner of that state, and the electoral college vote tally reaching for the 270 that means your candidate won. Most people are aware that there is some mysterious way that more people can vote for you, but you still might not get to be president. Al Gore, especially, is painfully aware of this. (It's happened before too, but not since 1888.) The trouble is that, contrary to popular belief, we are not voting in a national election at all. We are voting in 51 separate elections, the winner-take-all results of which are added together disproportionately to determine who gets to be president.

Your state's number of electoral votes is determined, according to the constitution, by the total of the number of senators and representatives it has. For instance, the most populous state, California, has 55 electoral votes, and the least populous, Wyoming, has 3. So California has approximately 18 times as many electoral votes as Wyoming. Fine, you say, California is much bigger, so it has more votes. However, California has almost 70 times as many people as Wyoming. What this means is that an individual voter in Wyoming has almost 4 times as much say in who get to be president as one in California. Oregon is quite a bit smaller than California, so we only get screwed by about 3 to 1. Yay.

The other problem is that the entirety of a states electoral votes are typically given to the overall winner in that state. That means that maybe more than 50% of a states voters--everyone who didn't vote for the winner--do not count at all in the national picture. Over 50% is correct. Thanks to third parties, the winners in many states have less than half the votes, but they still have more than anyone else.

Consider for a moment, California again. Say the winner got 51% of the vote and the loser got 49%. The winner gets all 55 electoral votes, and the loser gets squat. Consider the nearly 18 million people that 49% represents who are essentially not counted in the national totals. Now consider that that number equals more people than the 15 smallest states plus the District of Columbia combined. Fair?

This everything for the winner approach also gives rise to the idea of the swing state. Oregon is going to vote for Obama. Nobody really doubts this, which is the reason neither presidential candidate is bothering to visit us or promise us anything. Likewise, Obama doesn't stand a chance in Oklahoma, which means nobody cares about them either. But if you live in Missouri or Pennsylvania or North Carolina right now, demographic oddities mean you get visits every day or two. Not because you really matter more than I do, but just because the campaigns are playing the electoral math game. A change of 10000 votes in Pennsylvania might mean 21 electoral votes, while 10000 votes in Oregon is a footnote. Rather than trying to appeal to the entire country that they are trying to lead, the candidates spend their time pandering the the special interests of specific regions.

But you know what? There's no way this is ever going away. This system is enshrined in the Constitution, and that means it would take a Constitutional Amendment to change it. To pass an amendment, you need 2/3 of the House and the Senate. States representing about 10% of the population (the ones one the better end of the electoral stick), could stop this from happening. On the off chance this happened, you still need 3/4 of the state legislatures to ratify it. This means that states representing only about 5% of the population could stop it. So..., it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

I have many more problems with politics and politicians, but this is what's mainly on my mind right now. I'm sick of voters in Wyoming and D.C. and the Dakotas mattering more than I do. I'm sick of hearing about swing states or red vs. blue. I'm sick of being treated as if I'm irrelevant because my state leans strongly in one direction. I'm sick of voting based on a system designed by people who thought that a black person should only count as 3/5 of a white person. And I'm sick of news media and political junkies getting all hot and heavy about the electoral game without once questioning whether or not it's a good way to do things.

That said, flawed as I obviously think our system is, I'm incredibly happy that I get to vote, and that for the most part, elections are taken as valid and power is transfered peacefully, regardless of the election mess. I'm also happy that I live in Oregon, and thanks to our 100% vote-by-mail system, I've already voted. This means I don't have to worry about it tomorrow. It also means that, since current outstanding voter lists are available to pollsters and campaign staff, I haven't received a political phone call in days. For the rest of you who have to wait, make sure to get out there tomorrow and vote, especially if you want the right to grumble about it later.

(Sorry to geek out on the numbers, but I got on a roll.  In case you're interested, my numbers are rough calculations based on the numbers I found on Wikipedia.)

Science With Franny

This is Franny's idea. Most times, Franny finds science and how-things-work of only passable interest, at least when I talk about them. However, once in a while, and usually laying in bed almost asleep, I'll hear something like, "Do rocks have cells?" Actually, that was a question that she apparently asked a friend during biology class in high school, but it's a good example of the kind of stuff that comes up. Anyway, I dare say I have a more extensive science education (and interest) than she does (although in her defense, she does know a lot more than she lets on), and since I'm am also a known nerd, I am obliged to come up with answers or explanations for these sometimes ridiculous issues. Occasionally, these conversations even end up making me think about things in new ways and make connections I hadn't considered before. For me the topic is usually done by the time I fall asleep, but Franny usually at least pretends my explanations were interesting and has several times said that I should blog about them in case someone else is wondering about the rock/cells debate. So here goes. This is science related stuff that was interesting to Franny at least once. (This particular batch of stuff all came up last night.)

Recently, Franny spilled some oil from an oil lamp onto a bathmat. She blotted up most of it and then threw it into the wash. She showed it to me at this point and the spot where the oil had been had melted/dissolved/deformed and looked like a 4 inch wide brain poking out of the bottom of the mat. Anyway I mentioned to her that washing oil soaked things is discouraged and drying them is a big no-no. As the warning on our machine says, drying "anything that has ever had any type of oil on it (even cooking oils)" can cause "death, explosion, or fire." The mat never made it into the dryer thank goodness, and by the time she had blotted up the stain, it probably didn't have much left on it anyway, but I'm glad we didn't test the theory. The problem is that oil becomes much more volatile at higher temperature and presents a fire or explosion hazard due to all the motors and relays and such that can make sparks. It's even worse if you have a gas dryer, for obvious reasons. When Franny and I were moving to Portland, we stopped in Worland, Wyoming, which is exactly in the middle of nowhere and is where my mother spent some years growing up. Anyway, we specifically stopped to do some laundry and I was amused by the signs saying "No Roughnecks". You might think that's a redneck joke, but roughnecks are the guys that work on the oil rigs. Since they are often drenched in oil, this is exactly the issue the signs were about. Most things are not designed for use in environments where explosive conditions exist, and most electrical items have some potential for making tiny sparks during use. Some things are designed as explosion-proof, including some of the scales that I work on, since they sometimes need to be used in places with flammable gases or powders. (I do work in some hazardous environments occasionally, but the only time I've ever had to worry about this type of thing was in a flour mill of all places. I had to get some guys to stop welding because a pipe had developed a leak and was spewing a cloud of flour through the room. They understood just fine, but I still got flour all over everything, included my up-until-then precision weights. What fun to clean.)

We also got to talking about a gift card to Ritz Camera that we have and what she might buy with it. I mentioned a wide-angle attachment for her camera, and I was surprised to find out that despite here excellent photography background, she didn't know what I was talking about. The focal length of a lens determines how much of your field of vision appears on the imaging surface of the camera (either the film or digital chip). Most of you have probably seen this when adjusting the zoom on your camera. You may not have known it, but you were adjusting the focal length of the camera and thus changing how much of what was in front of you would make up the picture. Most people have used a zoom to get more detail about a portion of a scene, but most cameras can only shorten the focal length to a certain point. A wide angle lens or attachment shortens the effective focal length further and allows more of the scene to be in the picture. This isn't much good if you want more detail, but it helps if you are trying to photograph something relatively big and getting further away from it is impractical.

I can't remember what prompted it, but Franny mentioned that she didn't really understand radio waves. I noted that they were basically the same as lots of other things: microwaves, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, x-rays, gamma rays, and I believe cosmic rays too. She said that those didn't make much sense either. We got into a discussion about photons and what they were. A photon is sort of a wave in that it acts like a wave when interacting with other light waves and in the way it can be manipulated, and sort of a particle in that it does not require anything else to propagate it and it comes in discreet, although very tiny amounts. It's not really a particle though in that it has no mass and is moving, ironically, at the speed of light, which particles can't do without infinite energy. It's not really a wave either, in that it has momentum and in large enough quantity, can push things. It can be affected by gravity, as in bending around star or getting stuck in black holes. One thing I couldn't remember last night was whether you could affect any of this with magnetism. I feel like you can, but I couldn't come up with an example. It was late, so the discussion didn't get into much more detail than that.

If you didn't know I was a nerd before, I've certainly confirmed it now. Much of my science is remembered from college chemistry and physics, so it may be remembered incorrectly or just plain wrong. Please leave a comment if you'd like to make any additions or corrections. I assume I got something wrong, or at least incomplete anyway. And Franny, if I mischaracterized anything you said, hey, it was late.