The United States: the Future — Reconsidering Single-Member Districts and the Electoral College

Abstract

Two things happened in the year 2000 that heightened interest in the way electoral competition is structured in the United States. On 8 November, the presidential election resulted in the ‘wrong winner’, in that the person identified as the winner, George W. Bush, was not the candidate that received the most votes across the country, but rather the candidate that finished second. Democrat AI Gore out-polled Republican Bush 48.4 per cent to 47.8, with the remainder going to minor party candidates or write-ins (people not listed on the ballot). Bush was declared the winner, however, because the majority, 50.5 per cent, of the members elected that same day to serve in the Electoral College, the body designated in the Constitution to elect the president, was pledged to vote for Bush, regardless of the result of the nationwide vote. A five-person majority of the Supreme Court (all Republicans by background and appointment) stopped a recount of the disputed vote in areas of Florida on 12 December, a recount that might have reversed the winner in that state (Bush by 0.5 percentage points) and given the presidency to Gore (see Bush v. Gore, 2000). This permitted that state’s Republican slate of electors, pledged to Bush, to cast the state’s 25 electoral votes. On 18 December all of the electors pledged to Bush cast their Electoral College votes for him, and he was officially declared the winner, with one vote over the necessary majority when those votes were counted in Washington on 3 January.KeywordsElectoral CollegeElectoral VotePopular VoteDirect ElectionCongressional DistrictThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.