it's hard to cheat on paid advertising as it has to be visible
"it is not worth it for a candidate to spend money even if they can buy 10% of the vote for $1 (which is absurdly unrealistically high)."
So what is a realistic price / 'exchange rate' for this example, in your opinion?
I provided a coefficient of '1' spelled out in the line below that, it could be '10' or '100', etc.
"Sure, and my proposal of Votes / (10X + Y) would imply that the first candidate wins."
Which invariant(s) would you construe this as maintaining? Why not just add a constant coefficient? This is more efficient to compute, and the average price is already too high, that's 'half the point'.
"No way is the relationship between money and outcome linear"
What do you claim is the relationship?
"Well, 201 > 200, right? If you think voters have free will, and are competent to vote, and each vote is equal in strength, then clearly candidate 2 has the support of the majority."
By this logic, payola makes music sound good, which we know is not true. Is it possible that the additional spending is what affected the result, rather than the truth about people's preferences. If not, why would the right have become obsessed with freedom of speech to preserve citizen's united?
"Is the will of the people expressed in voting, or is it not?"
False binary, this... (read more)
"votes-per-dollar" IS a formula -- aka v/d -- 'per' means division -- spelling out the coefficient we have:
1*v/d where 'undefined' is ranked last and infinity is not a return value
OR
1*v/(1+d) where 1/0 approached from the right is +inf
(there are no negative votes -- if dollars are negative eg a campaign turns a profit we could take abs(1+d) or abs(d) as the denominator)
v = total votes for the candidate
d = total dollars spent by the candidate
But here's a basic unit test, riddle me this:
If one candidate gets 200 votes and spends 200 dollars, and candidate 2 gets 201 votes and spends two MILLION dollars, who has the strongest mandate, in the sense that the representative actually represents the will of the people when wealth differences are ignored?
This counterproposal has a data dependency where we need to know averages from the past, and also will still present a spending barrier for dirt-poor candidates if the average happens to be large (it is).
What I meant in response to your original comment is that whether it's 'worth it' depends on the current 'effective exchange rate' between votes and dollars, which is represented by a coefficient of '1' in this first approximation. There should presumably be an update rule for 'learning' the 'correct' coefficient....
These are all problems with the existing system as well so they are irrelevant for A-B testing the two options.
It's no more impossible to enforce than existing campaign spending limits.
what coefficient in the numerator would change your conclusion?
What would it take to change legal systems so that general elections operate on a votes-per-dollar basis, where the election is not final until budgets are submitted, and vote totals are divided by campaign budgets so that the rich can't really buy votes very easily?
It seems to me that anything less would be, here in Canada, ultimately vulnerable to a charter challenge on the grounds that classism violates human rights.
I am writing to express my concerns about current voting systems used in general elections. Specifically, I believe that simply counting total votes violates human rights due to the classism inherent in those votes being easy to purchase, and that a more equitable and... (read 246 more words →)
Then you're against the electoral college?