benjyhirsch

Possible rules for sane primary elections

Assumed benefits of the current system

While a single nation-wide primary would essentially require pre-existing universal name recognition, and an enormous amount of money for nation-wide media buys right away, staggered primaries allow candidates to build national recognition via the cheaper (and generally assumed to be more virtuous) art of small-scale, in-person "retail campaigning".

Major problems with the current system

• The same, highly non-representative places, always get an undue influence on the process
• Caucuses that are insanely inaccessible, require several hours of your time, and are basically impossible to participate in for many (most?) people
• Violates one person one vote
• Convoluted delegate math makes for very complicated strategic decisionmaking

benjyhirsch

I was playing around with functional and reactive programming in Javascript, and the UI framework Cycle.js. In order to better understand how that framework works, I pared down the core functionality to a single concept: given a function that takes in an input stream and returns an output stream, resolve the circular dependency of feeding its output back into itself as input. I also built a naive re-implementation of the core Cycle.run command on top of that.