I don’t understand what you’re pointing us to in that link. The main part of the text tells us that ties are usually broken in swing states by drawing lots (so if you did a full accounting of probabilities and expectation values, you’d include some factors of 1⁄2, which I think all wash out anyway), and that the probability of a tie in a swing state is around 1 in 10^5.
The second half of the post is Randall doing his usual entertaining thing of describing a ridiculously extreme event. (No-one who argues that a marginal vote is valuable for expectation-value reasons thinks that most of the benefit comes from the possibility of ties in nine states.)
Perhaps some of those details are interesting, but it doesn’t look to me like it changes anything of what’s been debated in this thread.
Now I ask you (and everyone reading) to consider this: http://what-if.xkcd.com/19/
I don’t understand what you’re pointing us to in that link. The main part of the text tells us that ties are usually broken in swing states by drawing lots (so if you did a full accounting of probabilities and expectation values, you’d include some factors of 1⁄2, which I think all wash out anyway), and that the probability of a tie in a swing state is around 1 in 10^5.
The second half of the post is Randall doing his usual entertaining thing of describing a ridiculously extreme event. (No-one who argues that a marginal vote is valuable for expectation-value reasons thinks that most of the benefit comes from the possibility of ties in nine states.)
Perhaps some of those details are interesting, but it doesn’t look to me like it changes anything of what’s been debated in this thread.