Father; husband; mechanical engineer. Posting from my self-hosted Lemmy instance here in beautiful New Jersey. I also post from my Pixelfed instance.

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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • I’m not saying that in the US system, at the presidential level, the loss of one of the two main parties doesn’t ensure the victory of the other. I’m saying that that doesn’t matter to a regular individual who is eligible to vote. That person only gets one ballot and their choices are what is printed on the ballot as well as leaving some or all of it blank.

    This one or the other correlative is actually the purview of the campaigns. They have the power to sway enough votes to matter by adjusting their messaging, strategy, and, for the incumbents, actual policy. Instead of looking at what they were up against and eschewing the status quo, the Democrats decided to make the following threat to voters: give us permission to keep exterminating Palestinians or the other guy might take away your various rights here at home. The continued massacre of Palestinians wasn’t their only demand, but I’m just trying to stay on-topic. It’s darkly humorous that the voters who made the choice to acquiesce to that threat ended up morally compromising on genocide for a candidate that apparently was going to lose anyway.









  • I have to figure out the math on it, but I doubt that 2:1 is a good deal.

    Follow-up edit:

    • In New Jersey, as an example of a safe state for Harris, Fivethirtyeight has Harris winning in 993 out of 1000 simulated elections. Assuming the same turnout as 2020 of 4,549,457 votes, there’s a 0.500546 chance, on average, that a NJ voter will vote for Harris. I figured that out using the BINOM.DIST.RANGE function and the Goal Seek tool in Excel.
    • In Michigan, with a turnout of 5,539,302 voters in 2020, Harris wins in only 605 out of 1000 simulations. Using the same tools above, if you randomly picked any Michigan voter, there’s a 0.500059 chance that he or she is voting for Harris.
    • Using the BINOMDIST function with the assumed turnouts and the chances we determined that voters in each of the above states would go for Harris, there’s a 3.25986e-4 chance that Michigan is decided by a single vote. Likewise, there’s a 2.47681e-5 chance for the same in NJ. Based on the probability that it could shift electoral college votes, a Michigan ballot is distinctly more powerful than an NJ one.
    • If you could could reliably convince one more person to vote like you in NJ, your chances of affecting the NJ outcome only increase to 2.48222e-5.
    • For an NJ voter to match their chances of affecting the Michigan outcome, they would have to command about 1,925 votes besides their own. In other words, there’s an almost equal chance of a single vote Harris victory in MI as a 1,926 vote victory in NJ.
    • Therefore, if a Michigan voter values their power, they should not trade their vote for anything less than 1,926 New Jersey votes. The rate should actually be greater to account for welching and Michigan having one more electoral vote than NJ.