Voting and Democracy

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While, the essence of the below analysis strikes me as thoughtful and right, the author does occasionally drift off into polemics that I do not endorse. 

In different contexts, too, I keep pointing out that there is no such thing as a direct democracy, and there never has been, not even in classical Greece. The expectation of a direct democracy seems to be a derivative of the immature reduction of democracy to majoritarian vote—for more see my The Political Logic of Freedom. Democracy involves far more than the ultimate act of counting votes, a process that in itself will always be characterised by indirectness and special conditions and provisos.

Clinton now leads popular vote by over 2,000,000. Electoral college hinged on 55,000 voters in 3 states. Curious flavor of democracy.

— Brian Greene (@bgreene) November 23, 2016

Well, that's a painful tweet, Brian, one that shows how sick political positions are considered normal in the Western universities.

I have tried to explain to him that "democracy" generally means "the participation of the most general public at power" but the detailed implementation of this general concept requires additional laws and the U.S. implementation involves the electoral votes. There's nothing non-democratic about this recipe: the "demos" still rules by picking a sensible number of electoral votes etc. During the presidential elections, the U.S. democracy is defined by the rules involving the electoral votes. The rules involving the electoral votes aren't a "curious" flavor of democracy but the "U.S." flavor of democracy, perhaps the world's most celebrated flavor of democracy.

Leftists are used to bending and twisting the rules whenever they can (also changing the rules during the game) – e.g. when they are selectively hiring women or people of color or other privileged groups at the U.S. universities or when they harass conservatives in the Academia – and they seem to be shocked that the same dirty tricks can't be easily done after the presidential elections.

At any rate, Brian Greene and many others point out that Hillary Clinton ultimately won the popular vote by nearly 2 million votes. They implicitly claim that Hillary would have become the president if the popular vote were the quantity that mattered.

Except that this conclusion is unjustifiable. What mattered were the electoral votes and Trump won 306-to-232, a very solid victory (not surprising given his dominance in 30-against-20 of the U.S. states). I pointed out that Donald Trump's tweet about the same issue

If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2016

was far more intelligent than Brian's tweet. You know, Donald Trump not only realizes that the outcome of the election depended on the rules. But he even knows what he would have done if the rules had been different. If the popular vote mattered, he wouldn't worry about getting swing states which would be irrelevant. Instead, he would organize rallies at places with lots of people and a great potential to make a difference in the popular vote. He quotes New York, Florida, and California as the three relevant states. Trump would still lose New York and California but it wouldn't matter and he would get many more votes from them.

In a sense, Donald Trump's political intelligence seems to be not one but two categories above Brian's. He not only realizes that the rules matter for the ideal campaigning and the result. He has also thought about the way how the campaigning should be adjusted assuming different rules to achieve the desired outcome.

You know, I can't be any certain that Trump would have won the elections if the popular vote were decisive. But I am certain that the assumption that Hillary would have won it – because she "won" it in the system where the popular vote isn't important – is simply logically invalid. It's equally justifiable or unjustifiable as the statement that the winner would probably be the same under any rules.

This is a physics blog and I can't resist to share an analogy. You may see that the measurement of "Trump's popular vote" and "Trump's electoral votes" interfere with each other. If Trump focuses on the former, he may get a different result than if he focused on the latter, and vice versa. This seems very analogous to the measurement of the position and momentum in quantum mechanics. If you measure the position, you unavoidably influence or change the particle's momentum, and vice versa. So you can't accurately measure the position and the momentum at the same time.

The source.