cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22680392

Thinking of red states vs blue states is busted. Plenty of good visualizations of this over the years, but this election in particular feels really important to point out “We” did not chose this.

When I say we I mean registered US voters, but even less so citizens, and even less so again residents.

Even of the voters who did vote for the GOP candidate, who can say how many really wanted him or his policies vs they just didn’t want more of the status quo Dems.

The popular vote tallies in this graphic are out of date too, He definitely didn’t win in a landslide the way it can appear with red and blue maps. His win in the popular vote was also pretty small now that more votes have been counted. https://www.thenation.com/…/donald-trump-vote-margin…/

So, what if Biden used broad immunity SCOTUS granted to declare a crisis of democracy - That between massive disinformation campaigns by enemies both foreign and domestic, voter suppression, as well as many other factors, the will of the people can’t be discerned from our recent presidential election. That it would be a dereliction of duty both to the people and to his oath to defend the constitution to hand over power to someone whose clear and declared intent is abuse the power of the office to fundamentally reshape or demolish our republic based on this highly suspect and incomplete result (remember, most people didn’t even vote)

Here is my off the cuff proposal for what to do after that

A new election, everyone must vote. Trump and Harris on the ballot, but each major party must offer 2 candidates, and we’re using Ranked Choice Voting. 1st place gets presidency, 2nd place gets VP.

Biden almost certainly won’t do anything like this. He is clearly a coward with a stupid sense of optimism - a “things will be just fine, no need for any drastic measures” ever, mentality, and despite some rhetoric has shown no signs that he thinks there is anything to actually be concerned about from the party which has veered hard towards fascism. But, hey, a guy can dream.

  • stupidcasey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    6 hours ago

    Statistically it doesn’t matter The central limit theorem, would allow for a sample size as small as 500 people randomly distributed to be an accurate representation of a group of trillions, it is a bit more complicated than that since the us is not random but carefully crafted districts, but as long as 50-100 people voted is each district or even the majority of districts then adding more people is just redundant.

    • darthelmet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      6 hours ago

      I like how you briefly acknowledge that this isn’t a random sample, but then hand wave it away and act like the same conclusions can be drawn from it as though it were a random sample.

      I bring you a bag of red and blue balls to sample from, but before this I let a guy who really likes blue balls take some balls out of the bag. After taking a sampling from the bag, you conclude that there are many more red balls than blue balls. Is this a valid representation of the population?

      • stupidcasey@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 hours ago

        Oh no, that’s not what I’m saying at all, it is %100 biased but changing the total number of voters will not change which direction is biased to.

    • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
      2·
      5 hours ago

      This isn’t a uniformly selected sample. People who are more aligned with Trump are probably also more likely to vote, which makes them overly represented.