
The Electoral College and the Knapsack Problem - williamsmj
https://mike.place/2017/ecknapsack/
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timkam
Now, what if Republicans try to react by moving between states themselves to
prevent Democrats from accomplishing their mission? Then, we have a kind of
game-theoretical knapsack problem. I could imagine that generalizing and
formalizing this scenario in detail would actually be a neat scientific
contribution. Any comments that point to relevant publications on this are
much appreciated.

~~~
TheDong
If you do this with perfect knowledge and both sides playing optimally, I
believe that just ends up being the popular vote, so the democrats win.
Whoever has the popular vote simply has more people to shuffle around.

I suppose what you mean instead is that each side gets one round, and the new
goal is for the democrats to create a distribution which the republicans
cannot win by moving people around.

I believe that ends up being identical to the knapsack problem since you now
simply have the democrats wishing to maximize their margin in each state based
on its number of EVs; in fact, I think that's an even more straighforward
knapsack problem than the one in the article since we don't have to take the
complement.

Perhaps you meant something else entirely different, in which case I don't
think you described it clearly enough.

~~~
timkam
Agreed. I wasn't describing the problem clearly at all, it is just a rough
idea. Now, I agree that the problem is only interesting if we keep some
constraints, a) at least as to how people can move and possibly also on b)
what information people have on the strategy of the opposing team, as well as
c) how teams can coordinate among their own members. Another fun constraint
would be to model mixed democrate/republican households of different sizes
that can only move together.

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roenxi
Really cool little project; I'm cheered to see it.

There seem to be one or two people who are taking this as a serious idea.
Stating the obvious; it is faster and cheaper for political parties to change
their policies to things people will vote for. Nobody is an [Party X] because
they were branded at birth.

The reason the margins are so close is because the politicians are
purposefully doing just that, and it is knife-edge which does a better job.
2008 and 2012 represent colossal failures by the Republican party to campaign
effectively/Obama was an election winning machine.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
On the contrary the Republican party does an amazing job campaigning
effectively, gerrymandering, disenfranchising, misinforming and scaring their
voters.

It's amazing the divergence between the policies that the US population
supports and what gets enacted by their government and that's down to a lot of
hard work and low morals on the behalf of the Republican party.

2/3rds of voters who approved of Trump in 2016 think Obama is a Muslim. That's
truly impressive work and should not be dismissed as an accident.

~~~
scarface74
Isn’t the bigger issue that it actually matters whether Obama was a Muslim or
not?

All of the polls show that Republicans and Democrats are not that far apart on
non social issues. Trump went after people who wanted to “protect their
culture”.

~~~
krapp
>Isn’t the bigger issue that it actually matters whether Obama was a Muslim or
not?

Yeah, but the implication in calling Obama a Muslim was that he was also
sympathetic to Islamic extremism (see: the meme that he "founded Al Qaeda",)
and that he was possibly a Manchurian candidate (after all, why would he hide
his Muslim status if he didn't have _nefarious_ motives?,) and _that_ was just
a variation on the theme of "angry, violent black man" scaremongering.

Remember that the Republicans tried to paint Obama as a radical Christian
black separatist at first through guilt by association with Bill Ayers and the
fiery rhetoric of preacher Jeremiah Wright. That didn't stick, so they pivoted
to "secret Muslim" in order to take advantage of post 9/11 xenophobia.

None of it was intended to speak to any part of the populace that didn't
already consider "Muslim" a pejorative by default.

~~~
scarface74
The people who believed that weren’t going to vote for Obama anyway. I
honestly don’t see how Trump won’t win the electoral vote in 2020.

Honestly, I’m as far as you can get from Trump’s base, but all of the
Democrats scare me as being too far left. I would love to see a Democratic
President and a Republican House (the Senate approves judges, etc.). The fewer
laws the government can pass the better.

~~~
krapp
The Democrats are learning the lesson of the last election, which is that
voters want outside the mainstream radicals, not centrists to follow the
status quo. Whether that's the _correct_ lesson to learn remains to be seen.

~~~
scarface74
The lesson the Democrats need to learn is that the swing voters don’t care
about climate change and they care about pocket book issues. They are also
afraid of “big government” that doesn’t focus on them.

~~~
krapp
I'm sorry but that seems an awful lot like "the lesson Democrats need to learn
is how to be more like Republicans."

Caring about climate change and a belief in regulation and social welfare is
the Democrats' entire purpose, it's what they're selling. UBI _is_ a
"pocketbook" issue, as is socialized healthcare and loan forgiveness.

I agree the Democrats fail utterly at communicating this to mainstream and
rural voters, though.

~~~
scarface74
Well, if they want to get elected, they need to do what it takes. All of the
high minded stances will keep them from doing anything.

You can believe in social welfare without burdening business with social
policies -- i.e. don't increase minimum wage but increase access to the Earned
Income Tax Credit and make it easier to get. The same with healthcare, don't
force businesses to provide it, the government should provide it. If it takes
higher taxes to do it -- I'm okay with that.

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sfblah
I’ve wondered before why billionaires don’t just pay people to move to help
their party win. I bet it wouldn’t even cost that much.

~~~
harryh
A couple of reasons come to mind:

\- it would probably cost more than you think per person to get someone to
pick up their life and move to a state of your choosing

\- it's not clear ahead of time how many people you need to get to move

\- it's not even really clear ahead of time which places you want them to move
to. How many people would have guessed that moving Democrats to Wisconsin
ahead of 2016 would be the most efficient path?

~~~
meddlepal
Some other issues:

1\. How would you verify a moved person voted a particular way?

2\. It cuts both ways... there are are billionaires on all points of the
political spectrum.

3\. If you're a billionaire, why would you even care that much? Politics has
an effect on your bottom line perhaps, but there's simply nothing that's
inaccessible to a billionaire. To that point, the politics common people are
really not that important except when it can impact business.

~~~
tbyehl
> 3\. If you're a billionaire, why would you even care that much?

The Koch Brothers' political network supposedly budgeted $889M for 2016
campaigns [0]. Clearly, some billionaires care quite a bit. Whether they're
zealots or expected a positive ROI for their businesses, who knows.

Clinton + Super PACs spent $1,184,100,000 on the 2016 campaign [1]. Divided by
77,747 = $15,230.16 per person. All other problems aside, it seems within the
realm of possibility that a PAC of Billionaires could raise enough money to
move enough people to sway an election.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/us/politics/kochs-plan-
to...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/us/politics/kochs-plan-to-
spend-900-million-on-2016-campaign.html)

[1]
[https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...](https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidential-
campaign-fundraising/)

~~~
rtpg
$15k to move to a different state (especially given job prospects are not
great in places where that can go far) are not so great.

Inversely that could pay for a couple of months of a staffer on the ground
going around and trying to convince locals to change their vote. That feels
like it could go a bit further than the 1 vote the $15k buys.

~~~
tbyehl
Plenty of struggling people out there might be pretty happy to go struggle
somewhere else with $15K in their pocket.

And if a group of Mega Billionaires expecting a positive ROI believed they
could lock up an election by convincing ~77,747 sympathetic voters to move,
how much more money do you imagine they'd be willing to deploy?

A better exercise would be to look at this map [0] and figure out how many
people need to be moved to traditional swing states to assure a win for either
side.

[0] [https://www.270towin.com/maps/same-
since-2000](https://www.270towin.com/maps/same-since-2000)

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PaulAJ
Could this provide a way to measure the fairness of redistricting vs
gerrymandering? I'd expect a good set of electoral subdivisions would be
insensitive to people moving, but gerrymandered districts would be much more
sensitive.

~~~
williamsmj
Interesting idea!

I haven't thought this through completely, but I think I'd expect the
opposite. Gerrymandering works by designing districts in which your opponent
wins by huge margins (among other things). Close races can happen for lots of
reasons, but they don't generally happen in an situations we recognize as
gerrymandered.

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tunesmith
What is the easiest and fastest way to "move", in order to vote legally, and
move back afterward? Asking academically, of course. Can you create pop-up
towns?

~~~
gonzo41
I think you'd find that if enough people were able to swing a vote by this
method whatever limit that is in place right now would get a lot longer.

