How To Run An Effective Election

By effective, I mean a clean election that produces a winner who can act with the consent of the governed, including those who didn't vote for him. 

You don't have to believe there is cheating in order to support reforms. You only have to accept that a lot of other people believe there is cheating and that this is bad for the country. 

Many kinds of cheating have been alleged. A major kind of cheating involves the actual vetting and counting of the ballots, the kind of cheating Lyndon Johnson did to get into the Senate. In recent elections it takes longer and longer to count the votes, for no apparent reason, which creates suspicions of widespread ballot-count cheating. 

What to do? There's an old trick used in technical organizations when a critical decision depends on a complex calculation. The trick is to have two groups do the calculation and make sure they get close enough to the same answer.

In an election, roughly speaking, you would divide the vote-counters into Team A and Team B. The teams would be sequestered like juries and then would independently gather the ballots, decide which ones are legal to count, and actually count them. 

If the two counts agree within say 10% of the margin of victory, then the winner is declared. If not, then they go back and count again. The teams are not told how big the discrepancy was or in what direction, only that there was a discrepancy. They have to keep trying until agreement is reached.

All of the individual counts would be made public in the end, and there would be a report listing the discrepancies so they could be prevented in the future. (This in itself would greatly increase confidence in elections.)  The teams would be given immunity from prosecution for election fraud, because any discrepancies under this system would be "made honest".

This idea only fixes the counting process itself, but that's the part that is causing the most controversy now. It's just a simple and cheap improvement on the current system. Even if the vote-counters were totally corrupt, splitting them into two teams means each team would have to be independently corrupt in almost the same way. And remember that it's not just the count itself that has to agree; the teams also have to agree on which ballots are legal. 

I feel this is nearly foolproof on paper, but some people are incredibly creative when it comes to cheating. The political parties would probably recruit champion blackjack or roulette players to count votes. But let's try to make it as hard on them as we can.

I'm uncomfortable with any election where the counting takes longer than 24 hours or results in a margin of victory of 1% or less, and I don't think I am alone in this. The two-team method would totally resolve such questions in my mind.

I'm aware that something like this method is used informally in some places, but what I'm suggesting is that it be written into the law. The federal government seems eager these days to tell the states how to run their elections, so if they're going to impose rules they may as well impose good ones. 

This is one option. Another option is to say: raising the question of cheating does more harm than good, many courts agreed that the elections are clean, and so we're going to go on doing it the old way no matter what anyone thinks. It does not take a political scientist to realize the second option invites disputes, riots and recriminations, and I suspect there are people who are fully aware of this and consider it a feature rather than a bug. But that's another post.    

Henson's Quick and Easy Guide to Sizing a Solar Energy System

I recently had occasion to think about sizing a solar energy system. Let me say up front that I do not advocate using solar as a significant part of the energy grid. We have a lot of cheap coal and gas and we should burn it over the next several years, while we convert the grid to nuclear. I am only looking at home solar as a way to avoid power outages and utility price spikes that are occurring precisely because there isn't enough fossil and nuclear power being generated. 

My situation is new construction of an average-sized residence in a place where it can optionally be tied into the grid, so you can offset your electric bill through net-metering. I also assumed gas heating, cooking and clothes drying, but the latter two may not make a big difference. That doesn't cover every situation but it's probably one of the commonest. If this fits you, then read on.

I'm an engineer, and as often happens when I look at fields I'm not an expert in, I did a lot of calculations and ended up arriving at the same conclusions that experts in the field already know.

The first thing I considered was a totally off-grid system. Because this is new construction, I thought if I could avoid the upfront cost of a grid tie-in (something like $15,000) then I could put the savings toward a solar system that would let me be free of the grid forever. 

This did not work out. The simple reason is that the insolation (fancy word I learned meaning the sunlight available to run your solar panels) is cut by about 3/4 when it's cloudy. If you live anywhere except the Desert Southwest, you are going to run into a string of cloudy days a few times a year. Furthermore, the insolation in winter even on a perfectly clear day is about 3/4 less than on a summer day, and that occurs everywhere in the US because in winter the days are shorter and the sun doesn't rise as high. So you could be looking at a 10 to 1 variation in the daily insolation over a year. 

This means that, to cover cloudy stretches, it takes an off-grid system bigger than what is needed for an average day. Not a few percent bigger, several times bigger. Buying a big battery does not help much, because your panels have to produce a surplus for several days to fill the battery. It takes a lot of panels to be able to do that in the dead of winter - so many panels that there may not be room on your property. The fact that you don't have to run your air conditioning in the winter (AC is a huge energy hog) helps, but doesn't compensate for the lack of sun.

Overall, to go off-grid will cost you something like 50% more over the life of your system than using the grid alone, even accounting for the $15,000 you saved in avoiding the grid tie-in cost. If you're a hardcore survivalist in a cabin far from a grid connection, off-grid is your only choice, and you may be willing to live with some outages in the winter. But for most people, it's not worth it. 

The other option is to connect to the grid to cover those cloudy days, but to build a solar system to offset the cost, through net-metering. With this type of system, the lowest-cost option is the system that exactly meets the average energy usage of your house.  This is probably 20-30 standard 300-watt panels for the average house. And you probably don't need a battery, because you can draw from the grid any time you need, whether it's at night or on an overcast day. I don't recommend buying a battery for the sole purpose of getting through that rare week when the grid is down and you don't have enough sun to meet your usage. It takes a very big, expensive battery to do that. An emergency generator will do that job at lower cost. 

Why is the lowest-cost system the one that exactly meets your average usage? It has to do with how net metering normally works. Net metering lets you accumulate credits when you generate more energy than you use in a month. Then you can use those credits to offset the cost of energy you may have to buy during the winter --- partially, because they only credit you for the supply cost, not the distribution cost or any fixed fees on your bill. It is a little complicated.

The way it works is, in the summer you are producing more than you're consuming, so your electric bill is nearly zero (except for fixed fees) and you build up a bunch of credits. Then in the winter, your solar panels aren't able to meet your usage, so you draw from the grid and spend down your credits to offset the cost. Your electric bill is still low because of the offsets. 

But the thing is, the utility will not give you a cash payment for credits. You can only use them as offsets. Therefore, any credits over and above what you need to cover the winter will just represent energy you gave the utility for free. (This may be why they agreed to net metering in the first place.) So you want to size your system to meet your average usage over the year. Anything more is wasted investment, at least from your own perspective. 

The average-size grid-connected system doesn't get you totally off-grid, but it gives you a lot of independence, costs less in the long run based on current electric rates, and insulates you from future rate hikes. You can buy a modest battery if you want to be independent of the grid during summer nights. Even if you have electrically powered whole-house air conditioning, you will produce a surplus in the summer and always have power even during a thunderstorm grid outage. Weather outages always seem to happen in the summer, at least in the places I've lived. 

Having said all this, I am sure there are weird net metering rules somewhere that lead to a different conclusion, or no net metering at all in your state, so you still have to do a little homework. 

A clever person probably could have figured this out without all the analysis, but I'm not clever, just willing to grind through a pile of numbers with a computer and try to learn from it. 

The Real Problem with Science and Politics

Because of COVID, there has been a lot of discussion over what role science should play in politics.  

Lately, the Red Team says that the science is never settled, which is true in principle but can stop us from taking necessary actions based on strong evidence. The Blue Team says, “believe the science,” but this often means using shaky hypotheses to advance their political goals.  

 

These arguments are often not over science itself, they’re over how science is used. That’s engineering, not science. And everyone knows that engineering has always has a moral dimension – was it good or bad when physics was used to design a nuclear weapon, and so forth. So none of this is really new.

 

But pure science has also had a damaging effect on politics in a way you do not hear much about. Two things happened early in the 1900s in the field of physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. Both demonstrated that many common-sense notions of how the world works are wrong under extreme conditions. Relativity showed that time runs at different rates depending on how fast you are moving.  Quantum mechanics showed that a moving object has no definite position.

 

These breakthroughs are unknown or irrelevant to most people in the conduct their lives, but they damaged the common sense of many highly educated people – the kind of people who run things. The highly educated all learned about relativity and quantum mechanics in college, and these were often served up with a dollop of “wooo, look how strange the world really is, anything’s possible, man.” 

 

Once you learn about relativity and quantum mechanics, it becomes just a little harder to accept any common-sense truths. There’s always that voice saying, “Well, what about quantum mechanics? It showed that common sense is wrong sometimes.” Things that are 99% likely to be true now can't penetrate the 80% barrier. You may not consciously attach numbers like this, but subconsciously there is doubt, which, unmoderated by constant contact with the everyday world, can blow up into postmodernism where we only believe what we want to. Pretty soon walls don’t stop people from crossing a border, women can have penises, and being obese is healthy. You don't need science to evaluate these claims; you only need common sense.

 

Common sense isn’t always right, but, in its proper sphere, it almost always is. We can come to different conclusions about the political implications of these facts, but it’s not necessary to believe women can have penises in order to encourage tolerance and understanding towards the transgendered. 

 

The science problem is related to a bigger problem with the highly educated which is that they have a greater ability to rationalize selfish or short-sighted behavior. Don’t ask me how I gained this particular insight. You see this in some people who aren’t that intellectual (we call them egotists or narcissists) but among the highly educated it’s nearly universal, and they're better able to hide it. And they use this ability!

 

I recently read a biography of Stewart Brand, who I like a lot because of his old Whole Earth Catalog (the internet in paperback form -- a fascinating snapshot of the rebirth of the self-determined American -- check it out.) Brand was associated with the 60s counterculture, and I couldn’t help but notice how much of that counterculture was just hedonists inventing political cover for their lifestyles. “We’re not selling dangerous drugs because it’s fun and profitable, we’re selling them to expand the consciousness of humanity,” this kind of crap. It takes a highly educated person to make and accept arguments like that. Most people can see right through it. 

 

 

 

The Present Day is Like the Protestant Reformation

My family is half Catholic and half Protestant, and I noticed certain differences between the two religions right away. 

The Catholic diocese provides an approved parish priest. The priest wears special clothes and stands in a raised and decorated place in the church while he conducts a standardized Mass. For most of history, Mass and the Bible were in Latin and unavailable in language the worshippers could understand.

Protestant churches vary but the minister is usually chosen by the church members as a sort of teacher, not a "holy man." If he does something the members don't like, they get a different minister. The minister usually stands in front of the congregation raised just enough so he can be seen. 

The basic problem people had with the Catholic church was that over the centuries it had set itself up as sort of an official intermediary between people and God. They usually didn't come right out and say it, but the conventional wisdom was that you couldn't reach God as an individual. You had to go through the church. Instead of confessing your sins directly to God, you confessed to a priest. This special intermediate position was ripe for abuse, and many Catholic officials did indeed abuse it, so the Reformation happened. 

Protestant ministers are much less special than Catholic priests. Some Protestant sects, like the Amish, go so far as to have no minister or church building at all. They meet in each other's houses and take turns leading the service. 

Attitudes toward the Bible are telling. It seems to me that the Catholic church must not have trusted the masses to come to their own understanding of the Bible's message, because they made it impossible or very inconvenient for people to read it in their own language. There was an official catechism through which the church explained the Bible to people. 

When the Protestants broke away, they said the Bible took authority over any church establishment. They translated the Bible so everyone could read it and put the responsibility on everyone to study it directly themselves. If you're Protestant, there was probably a significant span of time when the only book in your ancestors' house was the Bible.  Sometimes this is taken so far that the Bible is considered literally true in every detail, which could be considered worshipping the Bible instead of God. 

There is a parallel with what's going on now and I probably only have to set up the correspondences for you to understand exactly what I mean.

Current events :: God and the Bible

The corporate media :: The Catholic church

The independent media and random dudes with phone cameras:: Protestant reformers

The corporate, or mainstream, or legacy media, whichever term you choose, may claim to be mere reporters of facts, but their main function is to decide which events we need to know about and to instruct us in the proper way to react to them. "All the News that's Fit to Print," says the New York Times. They'll be deciding what is fit and what isn't. This explains why the strongest opposition to independent media comes not from the people being reported on, but by the corporate media themselves. The independent media aren't just competitors, they're an existential threat. It's a red alert! The New York Times is now basically Pope Leo X versus Martin Luther. They would burn heretics at the stake, but it's still illegal. 

My favorite author, Tom Wolfe, noticed this years ago. In The Right Stuff,

It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a central nervous system. In the late 1950's (as in the late 1970's) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses, among public officials; here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space. In either case, the animal's fundamental concern remained the same: the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings! One might regard this animal as the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent. Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one's private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances. (And this grave gent lives on in excellent health.)

In the early 2020s, the grave gent is no longer in such fine fettle.  At the recent school shooting, a bystander filmed the pathetic police response with his phone. The video got out, like it always does now, and this caused terrible problems for the corporate media because they couldn't figure out how to tell viewers the proper reaction. I watched Judy Woodruff visibly struggle on PBS Newshour. Should the police have had more latitude to intervene? Did the town have too many guns, or too few? Twenty years ago, you never would have seen this video, because it would only have been taken by professional reporters, who would have to get it past their editors, and that just wouldn't have happened, because it doesn't easily support any narrative. 

I like to make predictions, but please do not use this analogy to try to predict what's going to happen with the media. Analogies are just aids to understanding.

Election Prediction 2020

In 2016 I used a model to make the following prediction:

Trump odds of winning: 71%, with an expected electoral vote total of 301. He won with 304 EV and the rest is history. Nobody else came anywhere close to being this accurate, not even High Nate Silver. 

The model worked like this: I took the latest available poll averages for each state from FiveThirtyEight.com, then did a series of trials where I added between 0 and 5 percentage points to Trump's poll results to determine who won each state's electoral votes. In the case of a close call (within a percentage point) I split the EV equally between the two. That reduced the impact of random factors like the weather on very tight races. 

The 0-5 point boost for Trump was based on documented differences between phone and online polls, also known as the "shy Trump voter" effect. The FiveThirtyEight polls were primarily phone polls. 

Now that we're less than a month away from the election, what does the model say? Using the exact same methodology as in 2016, the prediction is this:

Biden odds of winning: 65% with expected EV total of 291.  [[POSTSCRIPT: He got 306. Close enough?]]

The poll data are mostly from the last week of September, shortly after the debate. So, the prediction can be viewed as the likely outcome had the election been on say October 1. I might update this later on or I might not. It's a lot of work transferring the poll data into my spreadsheet.

A lot can happen in a month (from what I recollect, last time the model was showing a modest Clinton advantage until almost the final update.) But this year is different. Really different. I expect that a candidate will need at least 320 EV to avoid a disputed result that, if we are lucky, will go like it did in 1876, and if we are not lucky, well, I don't even want to think about it. The model shows a 77% likelihood that neither candidate will reach this threshold. 

I earlier predicted a 60% chance that we don't know who the president is on 1/20/21. I'm sticking with that, assuming that 77 times out of 100 (I am a frequentist on Tuesdays) we get a dispute but that only 60 times out of 100 that dispute is unresolved by Inauguration Day.

Here I'll repeat my recommendation not to vote. Your vote isn't going to be decisive. I don't want to hear about how some dogcatcher in Kalamazoo lost by one vote because he forgot to vote for himself - your vote is not going to make a difference. Given that it isn't going to be decisive, the only effect of voting will be to mentally invest you in one of the candidates and degrade your ability to act in your own interest after the election. 

How I Predicted The Election

Preface: I take no position on which candidate is best, or who deserved to win. This is purely objective.

Last Sunday I gave Trump a 71% chance of winning, with an expected electoral vote total of 301. He of course did win and if the current counts hold up, he'll get 304 electoral votes.

"The triumphant vindication of bold theories - are these not the pride and justification of our life's work?" - Sherlock Holmes

None of the famous pollsters or pundits predicted this. On the very weekend I made my prediction, the New York Times gave Trump a 15% chance of winning and the Huffington Post gave him a mere 2% chance. Nate Silver, who knows something about uncertainty, was giving him a 35% chance, and he got excoriated for it. The Huffington Post said Silver was "putting his thumb on the scales" by adjusting the raw poll numbers (Silver doesn't do polls himself; he aggregates other polls) and "making a mockery of the very forecasting industry he popularized."

The Huffington Post has a naive idea of how forecasts are done. They seem to think you just call a thousand people at random, record their answers, and publish the number. But that would lead to very bad predictions. You have to correct your sample to match population characteristics such as likelihood of voting, geography, party affiliation, and a bunch of other stuff. Then, you have to account for the fact that you can only do the poll ahead of the election, and things are always changing. If your poll showed 25%, 35%, 45% in the three weeks preceding an election, you'd be kind of stupid to just run with the 45%.  Finally, there are individual decisions as to whether to accept or reject a data point - did the person answer all the questions that were asked, did he sound like he was giving obviously misleading answers, did he tell the truth about his age, party, and so on?

All of those corrections get influenced by human nature. People have a personally desired outcome, and also they get cold feet if their numbers come out too far from the other polls. It's a form of groupthink.

So what did I do? I took Nate Silver's "polls plus" predictions of the margin of victory in each state (accounting for DC and the weird split votes in Nebraska and Maine). Then I did 24 separate projections, for all possible integer combinations of a 0-7 point adjustment factor (call it "x") in Trump's favor and an 0-2 point "tossup margin". The states that were within the tossup margin I split evenly between Trump and Clinton. 301 electoral votes is Trump's average over those 24 projections. 

I didn't just invent the "x factor". There was talk of a "shy Trump" effect, which I thought had credibility. People didn't want to admit to a stranger over the phone that they were voting for Trump, because the media made it sound like voting for Trump was worse than armed robbery. They pounded on it all summer and into the fall. Further, they made it seem like Trump's chances were much worse than they really were. They were constantly saying Trump would quit, that his campaign was imploding, that there would be a credible spoiler candidate and so on. None of this would have stood up to the least bit of journalistic investigation, so do yourself a favor and ignore those people from now on.

There were other clues as well. Trump drew more primary voters than any Republican candidate in history, and his rallies were (sorry) HUGE. But those were only clues, not hard numbers.

I wanted something to back up the "x factor." My prior guess was 3 points, but I found two analyses to see whether Trump did better in anonymous online polls than in phone polls. One was from Nate Silver who aggregated a bunch of polls from the primary (that's his thing, aggregating stuff) and came up with a negligible difference. That, I ignored, because it was from the primary (whole different set of voters) and comparing aggregated numbers is a poor way to determine bias. The other was a very recent one by Politico. This one was useful and demonstrated everything that went wrong with pollsters.

First, the Politico headline was "Shy Trump Voters Are A Mirage" when the actual results said the opposite, so right away you can see some wishful thinking. (To be fair, the pollster probably didn't write the headline.) They compared a single phone poll to a single online poll and showed a 2% "x factor." That was dismissed as not statistically significant; in science, you would do a further study but this pollster didn't. But then things get interesting. They revealed that among voters with a household income of more than $50,000 a year, the "x factor" was 10%! About half of all voters fit into that category, so even if there was zero "shy Trump" effect for the other half of voters, there would be about a 5% "x factor."  - more than enough to flip the election. I suppose there could've been a negative "x factor" for voters with incomes less than $50,000 to cancel it out, but that seems really farfetched and they no doubt would have reported it.

A similar thing happened when they broke out the data for people with a B.S. degree or higher. So something obviously went wrong in the analysis. Somehow they adjusted away the "x factor" that was staring them in the face.

Now I admit my own bias. I got cold feet, too. I thought that even the conservative estimate of 5% from the Politico poll was too big, and I didn't have a lot of insight into what this Politico poll had actually done. So I set my "x factor" range to an average of only 3.5%. I figured if I got the basic election call right, nobody would care about the exact numbers, and 3.5% was enough to flip it. So my near-exact prediction of electoral votes owes something to luck.