This week I looked at three different ways to learn about the US presidential elections.
Propositions
The CommonCraft video explains the US presidential election mechanism about as clearly as I have ever seen… and I still find it hard to guess at its effects.
Simulation
The Political Machine 2008 simulates an election. In a recent Wired article Clive Thomas learns something about the fairness/ethics/mechanics of this complex real-world system by playing the game, and writes:
The software of American democracy was designed to run on hardware — a particular population distribution — that no longer exists. If American democracy actually were a game, like Halo, players would call it unbalanced — and cry out for a solution. Or to put it another way: The software of U.S. democracy needs a patch. It needs some tweaks that force politicians to consider the whole map…
I see there is free demo for the curious.
Narrative
Isaac Asimov foreshadowed a possible outcome of improving electoral simulations in his short story, Franchise (1955), perversely reinterpreting the egalitarian phrase, “One man, one vote”. Revealing.
References
- LeFever, L. and LeFever, S. 2008. Video: Electing a US President in Plain English. CommonCraft. Available at: http://www.commoncraft.com/election
- Stardock Corporation 2008. The Political Machine 2008. Available at: https://store.stardock.com/product.aspx?productid=ESD-TGN-W288
- Stardock Corporation 2008. The Political Machine Express. Available at: http://www.politicalmachine.com/express/
- Wikipedia 2008. Franchise (Short Story). Wikipedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)