The most charitable and still reasonably literal interpretation is to take the probability distribution for each magnitude of change and integrate over
Basically.
which means that you suggest to vote for the candidate whose victory causes higher expected change.
No. It's which vote has the highest expected change. Some of the expected change comes from the candidate winning. Some comes from secondary effects, such as changing the party platform.
Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The American System and Misleading Labels, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.