Abstract
The 1968, 2000, and (future) 2024 U.S. presidential elections provide settings for deliberately provocative, offbeat scenarios that might have happened or could happen. Throughout, the Electoral College and plurality voting both receive blame. Scenario 1 exposes a quirk previously unnoticed: Under (albeit special) conditions, certain 1968 Humphrey voters could have made Humphrey rather than Nixon the election victor had they voted strategically for Wallace instead of Humphrey. In Scenario 2, overlooked nonidentifiability of undervotes would have plagued the 2000 Florida recount had the U.S. Supreme Court not halted it, thus raising questions about the foresightfulness of almost everyone involved; but, in addition, Gore missed an opportunity that, through use of proper statistical sampling, could have propelled him to victory. In Scenario 3, National Popular Vote Interstate Compact supporters fail to foresee that even one state, by changing its method for presidential voting, can wreck this innovative and widely promoted compact.
Highlights
This paper describes three possible scenarios of United States presidential elections, two past and one future, that serve as vehicles to provoke careful thought about certain aspects of these elections and to emphasize the need to steer clear of simplistic conclusions
Simplistic reforms that are aimed at the Electoral College alone, without recognition of the complexities that are inherent in multicandidate elections, could be limited in the benefit that they provide
The ANPVDB and its allies argue that all four rationales are purely self-serving, that the concept of pseudo plurality votes is ludicrous in the first place, and that the absurdity of the situation calls for annulling the NPVIC
Summary
This paper describes three possible scenarios of United States presidential elections, two past and one future, that serve as vehicles to provoke careful thought about certain aspects of these elections and to emphasize the need to steer clear of simplistic conclusions. The Electoral College is an important disruptive factor in our scenarios, plurality (first-past-the-post) voting systems play a major aggravating role. For coverage of plurality voting and various alternatives Some of those other systems play a role in Scenario 3 below. The grotesque strategic voting that produces this result, attainable through several alternative paths, exploits the weaknesses of the Electoral College and the vagaries of finding a winner in a multicandidate election. Typical claims arise that the entire Florida debacle would have been avoided had there been no Electoral College, because a small number of votes would not have played a critical role. The intent of this paper, is to be provocative: to use various ramifications of the three diverse scenarios as means for challenging conventional thinking and beliefs about different matters concerning presidential elections
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