Elections Are Arbitrary
Posted on May 30, 2008 by andrew
A new poll in California raises an excellent point in relation to all of the whining about caucus states, Florida and Michigan, and the Democrats’ proportional delegate system.
Even though Sen. Barack Obama lost the California primary to Sen. Hillary Clinton by 18 percentage points, he is now favored among Democratic voters, 51% to 38%, according to the latest Field Poll.
If the California primary were held today, we would likely get a completely different result. By the same token, John Kerry would probably have won the 2004 election had it instead been held in 2005 (ie, after Katrina), and Al Gore would have won in 2000 if the popular vote were the determining result. In an election, the method of voting, the precise windows during which campaigns can campaign and voters can vote, the rules governing which votes must be disqualified, and dozens of other details are all more or less arbitrary.
All of which merely highlights a basic point made by political theory: All voting systems are, to some degree, arbitrary. If you’re unfamiliar with this idea, check out Arrow’s impossibility theorem; we simply can’t devise a perfectly fair voting system. It’s mathematically impossible.
Yes, the Democratic primary system is silly in many ways. But any system the party could conceivably devise would have its own flaws. The reason we hold the rules to such a high degree of importance in elections is because the rules, arbitrary though they may be, at least guarantee all participants a level playing field insofar as they have a clear set of rules they know will determine the winner.
And that is why Hillary Clinton and her supporters may be 100% correct in deriding a specific rule but still would not be justified in demanding that rules be changed in the midst of an election. Changing the rules during an election only magnifies the arbitrary nature of the results and eliminates what degree of fairness we are able to create.
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C’mon. This is a stretch to say the very least. The reason the numberws have switched are entirely dependant on snowballing effects and the other results, which directly controlled both parties’ actions. That alone is the MAIN problem of the way the pprimary system is setup. To claim that all systems are arbitrary and would have their own problems is both true AND meaningless. There are levels of problems and levels of arbitrariness. The current system is at the high (bad) ends of both, even down to the very rules that are being (and I agree with you here in saying rightfully) enforced. Two huge states are being disenfranchised for something a devious campaign manager did 36 years ago. Awesome.
A national primary day has problems, but most of them are the bullshitty problems that people complain about with no real backing. “We need poorer candidates to have a chance to win a tiny insignificant state and thus, get more money to compete in the ones that matter!” “How will people know for whom to vote if the candidates can’t come to a small town diner the day before the election, because they are tied up in big cities?” These are dumb reservations, and to the simplest scheme imaginable. There are probably better versions of it as well.
Having clearly set out rules is great and commendable, but the mere existence of those rules doesn’t guarantee equality of opportunity, especially when some of those rules are SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO FAVOR ONE GROUP OVER ANOTHER.
I’m not supporting changing the rules mid-game, if only because I like the current retardofest and can only wait to see what “solution” morons will come up with to smooth the process. However, to explain that the election was good and fair because (a) all other systems are also arbitrary and/or (b) rules were set and are being followed is akin to (insert non-Nazi analogy about totalitarian governments writing terrifying constitutions and pointing out how all systems of government have problems).