imported post
Your appeal to authority is irrelevant. How about you explain, rather than assuming nobody will bother to do the reading which demonstrates your position untenable? Oops, I just answered my own question! :shock:
For starters, neither of the "power indices" you've listed show anything of the kind.
Banzhaf shows that a certain kind of weighted voting system is unfair when some participants have few enough votes relative to other voters that their contribution is necessarily irrelevant. This would suggest that the electoral college is not fair to Montana, but it says next to nothing about its fairness to, say, the Libertarian Party.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banzhaf_Power_Index
Shapley-Shubik, similarly, deals with comparative power of
voters in a weighted system, but it says nothing about fairness to a given candidate, beyond unfairness generated by an individual elector having a disproportionate number of votes.
There is nothing mathematical which prevents an alternate party from winning in our current electoral system. The evolution of multiple parties over our country's history should demonstrate that. The current quagmire is purely a result of circumstance: that circumstance being a majority of the people thinking like swillden here.
Furthermore, many advocate reform of the electoral system, which would be a Good Thing. There is no motive for either of the two major parties to see such reform. Thereby, your "working against" the status quo is the one act that ensures its perpetuation.
You're just sad that we don't all vote for your party. Tough. Them's the breaks.
