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by daveguy 3396 days ago
Well, we just had an article that facts don't change people's minds. The fact is that, in the presidential race, a black vote is worth 92% of a white vote, an hispanic vote 75% and an asian vote 59%. You can try to hand wave it away, but facts are facts: there is racial disparity in presidential votes due to the electoral college. And yes, that is an uncomfortable fact for non-racists.

Of course it isn't as bad as the raw state to state disparity: 3.6:1 for votes cast in Wyoming vs California. I'm not sure how they got "voter power index" because it seems like Wyoming would obviously have the most voting power.

1 comments

Did you even read the HN comments on the article [1]? They were predominantly critical of it.

Either way, that's not really what the article here shows. It assumes everyone of a particular race votes the same and describes the power of a homogeneous voting bloc (which doesn't exist), not the power of individual votes of people of those races.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764

I'm not sure what your point is.

Edit: thank you for the clarification. I don't see anywhere in the article where they imply these racial groups are voting in blocks. They seem to be breaking down individual voting power by race.

Taking an average doesn't imply voters vote in a block, it is simply quantifying the average disparity.

The unstated assumption about voting power is that all persons of a particular minority group are the same and have the same voting power. That's absolutely false unless you assume all people of that minority group vote the same. A black person in California has different voting power than one in South Dakota. The important indicator of voting power is not race, but location.