The electoral college - a bad idea or so crazy it works?

image courtesy of http://www.lumaxart.com/ via Flickr

After two presidents in the past twenty years were elected without a majority of the popular vote, there have been renewed cries to eliminate the electoral college. That begs the question what is the electoral college, is it working as it should, and should it be doing what it is doing.

What is the electoral college, you ask? As stated in Article II, section I, clause II of the US Constitution, "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector." The electoral college is simply the body of electors that are selected to actually vote for president. How are the electors chosen? That is what the presidential election is for. People vote, state by state, to decide which electors will be chosen or what their instructions will be. The popular vote doesn't matter, although the electoral college and the popular vote should resemble each other. In fact, they typically do, but when the election is tight, the popular vote and the electoral college can be different. The popular vote difference between Bush and Gore in 2000 was only 0.5%, and between Clinton and Trump in 2012, it was 2.1%. In 1876, it was only 3% between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden. Those are not huge differences. In fact, it has only happened five times that a candidate that lost the popular vote won the Presidential election over the course of 57 elections for president. Split elections seem to be outliers. Then why have two of the past elections in twenty years been split? The only times it has happened were 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016.

So is the electoral college working as it should? If a split election is a rare thing, why have two happened in the past twenty years? First, you need to look at the purpose of the electoral college. Many have criticized it as unfair, reducing the voice of the populous states while amplifying the voices of the less populous ones. This criticism is right, but this is a design feature, not a bug. The electoral college was born of an awkward compromise between the thirteen colonies, just as the bicameral legislature with representatives proportioned by population in the House but equally in the Senate was. Both compromises were born of the same fears, that little Rhode Island would have its voice silenced by mighty Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York, or the South would be able to constantly outvote the North. Likewise, there was a fear of "tyranny of the majority," that a slim majority could enforce its will despite the opposition of a significant minority as had happened to England during the Civil War when a Rump Parliament ran roughshod before Cromwell took over. Likewise, rural areas feared domination by cities. So the electoral college was introduced, to spread the vote regionally, so the will of each state is heard. With the number of electors set by the number of congressmen, the voices of the smaller states would still matter. By adjusting the number of congressmen every ten years, the issue of rotten boroughs that was already becoming an issue in England in the 18th century was avoided when the Constitution was drafted. A similar thing is happening, as happened in 1876 and 1888. By a fluke of demographics, certain states are more muffled than usual. Hillary Clinton won by a significant margin in California but needed more votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan to be elected president.

So, if the electoral college is working as it should, ensuring the president has a broad consensus, is it worth keeping? What are the alternatives? One popular alternative is to sideline the electoral college by assigning all electors based on the national vote, not the state one. This would sideline the electoral college and make the election based on the national popular vote. That sounds great, but then only the population centers like New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston would really matter. South Dakota and Alaska could be ignored entirely. What about splitting a states' electors proportionally based on the vote as Nebraska and Maine? As discussed in this Medium article, instead of having the states decide, it would be determined by how faithful the electors are, and faithless electors do happen. The electoral college is a compromise, and like many compromises, it leaves everyone a bit unsatisfied and thinking the deal is unfair.

The Rise of the Conspiracy Theorists

As someone who is a bit of a politics junky, the status of the modern GOP is quite troubling. How did the GOP come to be so divorced from reality? How did Donald Trump, a man who loves to peddle conspiracy theories (see Central Park 6, the Obama birth certificate conspiracy, the recent Trump Tower wire-tapping claim) come to be the President of the United States and head of the GOP? One of the problems as I see it is the rise of the conspiracy theorists as central players in the GOP. Jon Stewart used to refer to it as the rise of Bullshit Mountain. The blatant claiming that the sky is green or that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. However factually wrong the claims are, conspiracy theorists can not be reasoned with and facts that disprove the theory tend to cause conspiracy theorists to cling tighter to the conspiracy theory.

Within the GOP it started very humbly, back in 1996 with the rise of FOX News. FOX News itself, as well as some conservative radio channels, started on a very simple and innocent sounding conspiracy theory "The mainstream media is biased towards liberals. Conservatives are silenced and ignored." This claim ignored the fact that several major newspapers have conservative editorial boards, like the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, the Economist, and others. Likewise, many TV news channels had editorial boards that leaned conservative. FOX News was started on the premise that all of the news channels at the time ignored certain stories because they favored conservatives.

From there, things have gotten steadily worse. Conspiracy theories sell well. People like feeling like they have superior knowledge over their neighbors and are part of an elite clique. Conspiracy theories give those who feel powerless an outside enemy to blame for everything that has gone wrong or any setback. In the GOP, it is an easy way place to blame election losses and policy failures, as well as a way to attack political enemies (see Benghazi, Obama birth certificate, White Water, Monica Lewinsky, Planned Parenthood videos). The problem now is the core leadership of the GOP is a bunch of conspiracy theorists with only a passing relationship with the truth or facts. Policies are based not on what works and how the world is, but how the world should be. That is a recipe for failed policies.

Democracy itself is based on a well-informed electorate. When a significant portion of the population is constantly fed disinformation, how will America stay strong? The biggest problem for the GOP will be the moment that the foundation of lies becomes too much to bear. Conservatives need to start embracing facts again before it is too late and the whole party crumbles, but conspiracy theories are an easy sell with simple buy-in. You just have to believe.

Antibiotics and Ear Infections

Recently, it was discovered that halving the typical 10 day course of antibiotics for ear infections did not work in infants. Now, if you have ever worked with bacteria, this makes some sense. The 5 day course was insufficient to kill all of the bacteria, so patients suffered a relapse, likely helping to create resistant bacteria in the process. However, this was likely an important question to ask. It is now known that medicines are processed differently in children of various ages and adult men process medicine differently than adult women. Are antibiotics processed differently in infants? How long of a course is necessary in infants with ear infections? The standard course is 10 days, but with all the fun side-effects of antibiotics, can a shorter course be used? The answer was no, but the study was well done. As soon as it became clear that the shortened course was ineffective, the study was ended and all patients switched back to the standard course.

Of course, another source of antibiotic resistance is over-prescription of antibiotics. An interesting study would be to compare the effectiveness of a standard antibiotic course vs. a palliative course of painkillers. The current belief is that the majority of ear infections are bacterial, but some are viral. It would be interesting to test how effective antibiotics are. This is not casting aspersions on antibiotics. An important part of science is testing assumptions. If doctors had not researched whether a lumpectomy with adjuvant radiation was as successful a treatment as a radical mastectomy, millions of women would have undergone a brutal and disfiguring surgery that was an overzealous treatment. Asking questions is important in science and medicine, regardless of whether or not old assumptions are proven correct or overturned.

What's in my cup 15 Dec 2016

Today I'm enjoying a cup of white peony tea from Three Rivers Tea. It is a lovely white tea with delicious floral notes. Even accidentally leaving the tea steeping while playing an interesting board game called Circular Reasoning didn't ruin the deliciousness of the tea. It didn't wind up tasting burnt or bitter. This would be a great tea for the grandfather style of tea brewing, since it can stand a long steep and the leaves are fairly large.

The Issue with "Happy Holidays"

Once again, we are in the Christmas season, and once again certain groups are ranting about the "War on Christmas" and attacking phrases like "happy holidays" and "season's greetings" as being anti-Christian. Personally, there is nothing wrong with either of those phrases, even if you are an evangelical Christian, as long as they are being used in an inclusionary instead of an exclusionary manner. The crucial problem is the subtlety of that distinction.

Having watched a lot of PBS kids programming lately (thank you, little monster), it is amazing the lengths certain shows go to avoid saying Christmas or Merry Christmas, when it is clear the episode is supposed to a Christmas episode. For some shows they make it work, when there is no reason the characters should be celebrating Christmas like on Dinosaur Train or Nature Cat, however, for others like Thomas and Friends, the bending-over-backward to avoid saying Christmas gets quite painful and breaks the world. I now understand what the evangelicals complain about, even if I think they exaggerate the problem and apply it to areas where it isn't a problem.

I personally prefer using "happy holidays" or "season's greetings" on my Christmas cards and in general, because I am trying to wish people a Merry Christmas AND a Happy New Year in the same breath. For part of my family, I am also adding Happy Hannukah. There is nothing wrong with the phrase when used in this manner and I wish people would see that instead of issuing a blanket statement that using "happy holidays" is PC BS. It isn't and should be used in an inclusionary manner. At the same time, if what you are doing is a Christmas party or a Christmas episode, just come out and say it, particularly if that is what the characters would be doing. Otherwise it can get quite annoying.

The Serendipity of Research

Often when writing grants or giving presentations, a lot of emphasis is made on research being translational, i.e. being able to take the discovery and turn it into medicine or find some other way to make it useful. This is distinguished from basic research, i.e. research for the sake of expanding knowledge. Part of the problem of emphasizing translational research is that research is blind. If you could sit down and predict perfectly the results of every experiment, it's not research, it's blindly following recipes. The most exciting words in scientific research are not "wow" or "eureka" but "huh, that's weird." That's when an experiment doesn't give the expected result. Most of those get filtered out by repeated experiments and troubleshooting, but not all do. Those are the fun results.

One of the classic "huh, that's weird" moments is of course the discovery of penicillin. Alexander Fleming went away on a summer holiday leaving a messy lab bench covered with staphylcoccus petri dishes and came back to find his plates contaminated with mold. Most researchers would just pitch a contaminated plate, but not Fleming. He had discovered lysozyme back in 1922, by investigating what a lot of doctors ignored. Fleming discovered that mucus contains an enzyme that can kill bacteria, which he named lysozyme. Fleming was also primed to believe that microbes secrete substances to kill other microbes. During World War I, Fleming noticed soldiers with deep wounds treated with antiseptics developed sepsis more often than soldiers not treated with antiseptics. Fleming discovered that while antiseptics were great for treating surface wounds, they could not reach the dangerous microbes in deep wounds and killed the helpful microbes near the surface. Fleming those knew that microbes were useful tools when fighting disease. Thus Fleming examined the plates, noticed the ring of dead bacteria surrounding the mold, and thus penicillin was discovered. Of course, Fleming said "that's funny," not "huh, that's weird" but the sentiment is the same. While it could be argued that Fleming wanted to find anti-microbial substances, he was not looking for one when it landed in his lap.

Another of my favorite "huh, that's weird" moments was the discovery of the atomic nucleus. The existence of atoms had been proposed by John Dalton in papers that he published in 1805. Then 7 years after discovering the electron in 1897, J. J. Thomson proposed a model of atomic structured dubbed the "plum pudding model" which proposed a diffuse cloud of positive charge with electrons scattered randomly throughout. As is the nature of science, different scientists started trying to disprove Thomson's theory of atomic structure. One of the laboratories that took up this task was Ernest Rutherford's at the University of Manchester. Under Rutherford's direction, Ernest Marsden and Hans Geiger set up an apparatus to fire alpha particles at a sheet of gold foil. If Thomson was correct, the alpha particles would pass straight through. Instead, some of the alpha particles seemed to ricochet, as if they had hit something. From these results Rutherford proposed a model of a small central core of positive charge with electrons orbiting around.

It is also impossible to know what discoveries will become important. Who would have thought that studying jellyfish bio-luminescence would lead to Green Fluorescent Protein, better known as GFP, an important tool in cellular biology used to tag cells and track gene expression. GFP was discovered in 1962 but wasn't used as a research tool until 1992. In 2008, the researchers responsible for its discovery and development as a research tool received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Taq polymerase is a similar example. No one would have guessed that studying how thermophilic bacteria can survive in high temperatures would lead to the crucial component for DNA polymerase chain reactions (PCR), the common way to amplify a small piece of DNA, used for everything from gene sequencing to detecting a murderer.

Science is not predictable. No one knows what the next great discovery will be or how it will be discovered. All science is important. Even research that earns an Ig Nobel or gets laughed at by Congress may prove vital to all of mankind. Science is important to fund and defend.





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysozyme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger%E2%80%93Marsden_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_pudding_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#First_evidence-based_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Shimomura
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polymerase_chain_reaction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction

What's in my cup 6 December 2016 part 2

This afternoon I'm having Berkshire Afternoon from Gryphon's tea. It is a lovely upper 30s low 40s rainy day. I already had to be out once to take the little man to the doctor and treated myself to some afternoon tea to warm back up. This tea is deliciously malty with chocolate undertones and no astringency.