Electoral College System Research Articles

The Electoral College in Modern Democracy

The Electoral College, a voting system established by the Founding Fathers in the United States Constitution, has been a subject of controversy and debate for decades. This paper explores the shortcomings and ethical implications associated with the Electoral College, particularly in the context of modern democracy. The analysis begins with an introduction to the Electoral College system, its historical origins, and its role in balancing the interests of large and small states. It also explores various issues with the Electoral College, including the divergence between the popular vote and the election outcome, the impact on voter turnout, and the presence of faithless electors who deviate from the popular vote. It highlights the instances where the College has undermined the democratic process and emphasizes the dangers of decision-making falling into the hands of a closed group rather than reflecting the voice of the citizens. It addresses the arguments that it protects the interests of small states and acts as a safeguard against uneducated voting, concluding that these concerns are no longer valid in the contemporary political landscape, where power balance is already achieved through representation in Congress and education has improved voter awareness and understanding. While eliminating the Electoral College is naive, the paper suggests that amending the system is necessary to address its flaws and ensure a more equitable representation of the people's will. By enacting reasonable amendments, the United States can uphold the core values of democracy and ensure that the election of the president truly reflects the people.

미국령(U.S. Territory) 주민들의 연방 선거권

The United States is a federal state, which means the Federal Constitution distributes legislative and executive power between the federal government and the state governments. In this regard, the Federal Constitution states that the right of election for the members of the House of Senate and the House of Representative, as well as the President and the Vice President is vested in each states. The electoral college system is a result of the constitutional determination, and its premise is the citizens of the United States are primarily the members of each states. However, this very design has created an alignation of the U.S. territory residents. Guam, Puerto Rico, Virgin Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Samoa, etc, are not states according to the Federal Constitution, therefore their residents are not subject to the right to vote for the federal representatives. Futhermore residents who were originally residents of a state but have moved to a U.S. territory are also deprived of such right, for they are no longer members of any state.
 The denial of the right to vote on federal level for the U.S. territory residents is largely supported by the decisions of the U.S. federal and district courts. The “Insular Cases” set up “Incorporation Doctrine”, which situated the right to vote as artificial or remedial right. Throughout the 20th century, the right to vote has clearly been considered as the fundamental right, yet the territorial residents’ right to vote for the federal representatives has taken as a privilege that can be neglected. Particularly, the issue of violation of equal protection on the matter of territorial residents who originally resided in a state, has consistently been ignored, as the courts overlooked the inherent legislative flaw of UOCAVA.
 The denial of the territorial residents’ right to vote for the federal representatives is problematic on two levels. For one, it contradicts the interpretation of the U.S Supreme Court on the right to vote, thus threatening its legitimacy. On another note, the territorial residents become repudiated as second class citizens, which leads to the negligence of the federal government’s duty to create an environment where all members are equally respected, posing questions on the relevance of the institution.

Covid-19 and the 2020 presidential election

Whether deserved on not, US Presidents often receive the blame or the credit for the nature of the economy and direction of the country. Therefore, the status of the economy and the country in an election year can be a very important factor in election success for an incumbent President (or his party if an incumbent is not running). This is especially true in ‘battleground states’ due to the presence of the Electoral College system where Presidential candidates need only win different combinations of states in order to become President. However, the 2020 Presidential election was vastly different from past election cycles in that an additional variable, COVID-19, was added to the decision calculus of voters. Eventually, the 2020 election came down to the extremely slim margins in three states (Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin) and thin margins in two others (Pennsylvania and Michigan). This paper shows that deaths from COVID-19 at the county level played a small role in demotivating voters to turnout in 2020 to cast their vote for Joe Biden as President. In other words, without Covid-19, President Trump’s losses within these five states would have been even larger.

AMERICA’S RACIAL STAIN The Taint Argument and the Limits of Constitutional Law and Rhetoric

AMERICA’S RACIAL STAIN The Taint Argument and the Limits of Constitutional Law and Rhetoric

The longer-term electoral effect of carrying a state in U.S. presidential elections

Under the U.S. Electoral College system, battleground states receive a degree of attention from candidates and political parties that is out of proportion to their contribution to the vote total because they can effectively determine the outcome of a presidential election. Although the public and researchers tend to focus on the immediate impact of winning a battleground state on the current contest, the outcome of a following election may also be affected. In this paper, I investigate the effect of winning a state on the outcome of the next election, using a regression discontinuity (RD) design. The results of my RD analyses indicate that winning a state increases the party’s vote share in the next election. I also find evidence of a positive spillover effect of winning a state in a presidential election on later House of Representatives elections.

Democracy at Risk: How the Electoral College Undermines Political Equality and Effective Governance

This study aims to illustrate the political inequality and the lack of representativeness of the U.S. presidential election system by analyzing the flaws of the Electoral College system. Increasingly influenced by political polarization, money, and social media, nowadays the U.S. presidential election has become more susceptible to being manipulated so the winner's governance ability cannot be guaranteed. The U.S. presidential electoral system needs to be reformed to better reflect the will of the people, ensure democratic legitimacy, and achieve effective governance.

Proposed Electoral College Amendment

This paper presents a proposed constitutional amendment reforming the Electoral College. This draft proposal was originally included in an earlier form in my proposed Bipartisan Constitutional Reform Amendments previously posted on SSRN. My sincere hope is that all these proposals may garner broad, consensus, bipartisan support, and help provide a partial path forward in the nation's deeply polarized current political climate. This proposed amendment would reform and modify the Electoral College system of electing the President and Vice President, while preserving its basic constitutional structure. It balances the need to more closely reflect the popular vote (guaranteeing that this would be the basis for selection of electors), while also preserving the slight advantage given to small states in the longstanding constitutional structure. The paper includes an introduction (pp. 1-14), explaining the text of the proposal (pp. 15-19).

Block size dependence of coarse graining in discrete opinion dynamics model: Application to the US presidential elections

The electoral college of voting system for the US presidential election is analogous to a coarse graining procedure commonly used to study phase transitions in physical systems. In a recent paper, opinion dynamics models manifesting a phase transition, were shown to be able to explain the cases when a candidate winning more number of popular votes could still lose the general election on the basis of the electoral college system. We explore the dependence of such possibilities on various factors like the number of states and total population (i.e., system sizes) and get an interesting scaling behavior. In comparison with the real data, it is shown that the probability of the minority win, calculated within the model assumptions, is indeed near the highest possible value. In addition, we also implement a two step coarse graining procedure, relevant for both opinion dynamics and information theory.

Multilayered Democracy in Papua: A Comparison of “Noken” System and Electoral College System in the United States

The elucidation of understanding popular sovereignty through the implementation of democratic principles when applied to a pluralistic Indonesian society requires a comprehensive study. This study is a normative-legal research by using statute, case, and conceptual approaches. This paper provides information on the latest trend in research. The results show that the characteristics of the general election by Noken system are in line with the Electoral College system to presidential elections in the United States, especially in the Noken system as represented by the chieftain (election by the big man). The Noken system is the result of the relations of political culture and the strengthening of local democracy. Hence, the constitutionality of Noken system is a translation of the constitution that pays attention to the social diversity that lives in society. Not only in the context of general elections, but in every aspect of national and State life, as more attention is given to the constitution of social diversity in society (constitutional pluralism).

미국 민주주의의 위기: 트럼프의 등장과 반동의 정치

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected as the president of the United States by those who shared four sociodemographic characteristics: whites, Protestants, high school graduates, and those living in rural areas. Trump’s core supporters, once the majority in the country, become a minority as the demographic changes take place, and their experience of ‘status threat’ leads them to an overt expression of racism and anti-immigrant sentiments in the political arena. The division between Trump’s core supporters and other Americans is the backbone of ideological and affective polarization, and facilitates the rise of populism, a deviant form of democracy characterized by ingroup favoritism and out-group prejudice. The rise of Donald Trump can be attributed to the nature of American political system, which is systematically biased to over-represent the voices of conservative voters. As the equal number of Senators is assigned to each state regardless of its population size, the Electoral College system is tilted toward the interests of the Republican Party. A political reform is necessary to reflect the demographic changes among the American electorate. Otherwise, the American politics will continue to be critically affected by a minority, who wants to “make America great again,” a slogan of the reactionary politics.

How Likely is it that Courts Will Select the Us President? The Probability of Narrow, Reversible Election Results in the Electoral College Versus a National Popular Vote

Extremely narrow election outcomes—such as could be reversed by rejecting a few thousand ballots—are likely to trigger dispute over the results. Narrow vote tallies may generate recounts and litigation; they may be resolved by courts or elections administrators (e.g., Secretaries of State disqualifying ballots) rather than by voters; and they may reduce the peacefulness, perceived legitimacy, or predictability of the transfer of political power. In this paper we evaluate the probability of such disputable US presidential elections under a hypothetical National Popular Vote versus the current Electoral College system. Starting from probabilistic simulations of likely presidential election outcomes that are similar to the output from election forecasting models, we calculate the likelihood of disputable, narrow outcomes under the Electoral College. The probability that the Electoral College is decided by 20,000 ballots or fewer in a single, pivotal state is greater than 1-in-10. Although it is possible in principle for either system to generate more risk of a disputable election outcome, in practice the Electoral College today is about 40 times as likely as a National Popular Vote to generate scenarios in which a small number of ballots in a pivotal voting unit determines the Presidency. This disputed-election risk is asymmetric across political parties. It is about twice as likely that a Democrat's (rather than Republican's) Electoral College victory in a close election could be overturned by a judicial decision affecting less than 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000 ballots in a single, pivotal state.

A Quiet Coup: Balkanizing the U.S. by Eliminating the Electoral College

There are calls for US presidential elections to be changed. The existing Electoral College system, a method that has been in effect in every presidential election since the 1804 approval of the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution, is seen by those seeking change as an unjust way for selecting US presidents. Many Democrats remain enraged by the fact that Hillary Clinton received more votes than Donald Trump in 2016 but was not elected president due to the Electoral College’s state-by-state electoral system. A movement is taking place in some state legislatures to adopt a system called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact [the Compact]. This is a key part of a strategy drafted in 2006 and not yet operative but gaining state signatories. At this point in May 2019 all the current 15 state signatories to the Compact represent states with Democratic-controlled legislatures. The District of Columbia has also voted to join the Compact, bringing the total count to 16. The Investors Business Daily published an analysis of the worst run and best run states from a fiscal perspective. The worst run states included Illinois, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Mexico, New York, and Rhode Island. Each of these states is a signatory to the national popular vote Compact. The best run states included South Dakota, Tennessee, Nebraska, Florida, Utah, Alaska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, New Hampshire, and Montana. With the exception of New Hampshire they are all “Red” states. None is a signatory to the Compact. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an attempt at a “quiet coup” seeking permanent voting control of the office of the US Presidency. As such it offers a perfect recipe for the balkanization of America, contradicting the wisdom of those such as James Madison, one of our Founding Fathers who played a critical role in the formation of our Constitution. Madison recognized the inevitable factionalism of competing interests and diverse cultures in America. The Compact seeks to effectively amend the US Constitution de facto while pretending otherwise. The advocates launched a strategy through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact knowing they could not gain the required approval of three-fourths of US states to create a national vote simple majority or plurality amendment to the US Constitution in place of the Twelfth Amendment’s Electoral College system.

Selecting the labour leader

The article aims at assessing the functioning and characteristics of the most recent systems employed by the British Labour Party for selecting its leader. To this end I compared five leadership races: the huge success of Tony Blair in 1994 in the newly reformed electoral college system; the undisputed election of Gordon Brown in 2007; the narrow and disputed victory of Ed Miliband in 2010, still held under the electoral college system; the large but controversial successes of Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 and 2016 closed primaries. The article first traces the evolution of the Labour leadership election systems in recent decades. Secondly, the five leadership races are analyzed and compared, taking into account two main variables: inclusiveness and divisiveness. These have been addressed looking at indicators such as selectorate and candidacy inclusiveness, campaign negativity, race competitiveness and elite attitude, which transversally affects all the other dimensions. The findings suggest that intra-party democracy may be dangerous for party unity and electability but the political context remains much more important than the intrinsic characteristics of the system of leadership selection used.

Producer Control in the New Zealand Meat Industry in the 1940s/1950s

The New Zealand Meat Producers’ Export Control Board, set up in the 1920s, implemented a policy of producer control of meat processing facilities to maximise producers’ income by restricting foreign investment in New Zealand. Meat Board members were not chosen directly by producers but indirectly through an electoral college system. Previous authors have suggested that that system isolated Board members from producer interests. This paper concludes that in the period after World War II the Board, led by an intransigent chairman, had indeed become detached from producers and its policy of producer control operated against producer interests.

Critical noise can make the minority candidate win: The U.S. presidential election cases.

A national voting population, when segmented into groups such as, for example, different states, can yield a counterintuitive scenario in which the winner may not necessarily get the highest number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016 presidential election in the United States. We model the situation by using interacting opinion dynamics models, and we look at the effect of coarse graining near the critical points where the spatial fluctuations are high. We establish that the sole effect of coarse graining, which mimics the "winner take all" electoral college system in the United States, can give rise to finite probabilities of events in which a minority candidate wins even in the large size limit near the critical point. The overall probabilities of victory of the minority candidate can be predicted from the models, which indicate that one may expect more instances of minority candidate winning in the future.

The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic. By Akhil Reed Amar. New York: Basic Books, 2015. 357 pp. $29.99 hardcover.

The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic. By Akhil Reed Amar. New York: Basic Books, 2015. 357 pp. $29.99 hardcover.Constitutional law scholar Akhil Amar's latest book analyzes federalism under the constitution through the creative means of road tour-an examination of critical interpreters, cases, and constitutional provisions on the ground in 12 different states encompassing every region of the continental United States. The book, however, is not an analysis of the importance of regional constitutional politics on constitutional development, but rather series of observations designed to illustrate how American constitutionalism manifests itself in variety of ways inflected by its situation in the states. The seeds planted by the constitution's framework develop into the same American species of plants, but their local soil, water, and sunlight conditions have made them flower differently.Substantive issues that Amar addresses on the interpretive front in the book's first section include the problems of crafting multiracial union (Illinois), the modest populism of the constitution embraced by Alabama's Hugo Black, the practical reasoning of former politician and New Yorker Robert Jackson, and Justice Kennedy's gradual evolution toward Californian ideal of equality. The second section of the book uses landmark cases as both interpretive and geographic lenses. He explores the meaning of segregation as form of American apartheid outside the south in chapter on Brown, considers the central democratic importance of political dissent in discussion of Iowa's Tinker v. Des Moines, and explores the relationship between state and federal constitutional law through Florida's litigation culminating in Bush v. Gore. The final section addresses particularly vexed constitutional provisions in geographic situ: Ohio's and Texas's engagement with presidents and the problem of mandates and succession, Wyoming and the gendered and racialized implications of the Second Amendment, Massachusetts and the lost history of the warrant requirement, and finally New Jersey and the possibility of state enforcement of federal constitutional rights.The general theme of the book is that attending to this context enables us to understand a larger and distinctly American mosaic of federalism-a mosaic reflecting subtle constitutional variation from state to state and across broader geographic regions (Preface, xii). This point was well taken when the book was published in 2015, but it resonates more strongly in the wake of the election of 2016, as do several of Amar's individual chapters.When the book came out, readers likely encountered his discussion of the problem of presidential mandates and the technicalities of how the Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows the vice president to assume presidential powers as interesting thought experiments. Now, however, questions of what constitutes mandate in presidential election, how to understand voters' intentions in casting ballot for ticket with two ideologically disparate candidates, and how to think about potentially conflicted relationship between president and vice president are potentially concrete and serious. Amar criticizes the electoral college system as problematic primarily because it allows for lengthy lag between the election of the president and the president's assumption of office, but notes only briefly the potential legitimacy concerns with disjuncture between electoral and popular vote winners. …

The Electoral College and the Problem of Interdependence Cost

The paper uses Constitutional Economics to criticize the U.S. Constitution; more specifically, the Electoral College. The paper makes the case that interdependence costs would be lower if the United States replaced the existing Electoral College system with national run-off elections.

The Selective Enforcement of Government Regulation: Battleground States and the EPA

This paper examines whether government regulation is selectively enforced. In the United States, the Electoral College system determines the outcome of presidential elections. This system creates incentives for politicians to direct policy favors to those states that represent the median voter in the Electoral College (so-called or swing states). In this paper, we examine whether regulators treat battleground states more favorably than non-battleground states. Specifically, we examine the probability that the EPA will find a facility in violation of the Clean Water Act if it is located in a battleground state relative to those located in non-battleground states. We find that violation rates for facilities located in battleground states are significantly lower than those in non-battleground states. Identification is obtained by the analysis of the violation rates of similar facilities located across the border between battleground and non-battleground states using a number of analytical frameworks, including difference-in-difference estimates for facilities located in states that change battleground status.

Stochastic asymmetric Blotto games: Some new results

Stochastic Asymmetric Blotto Games: Some New Results John Duffy ∗ Abstract. Blotto games. Alexander Matros † We develop some new theoretical results for stochastic asymmetric Keywords: Colonel Blotto game, Contests, Resource Allocation, Lotteries. JEL Classification Nos. C72, C73, D72, D74. 1. Introduction The Colonel Blotto game (Borel 1921), is a two-player non-cooperative game in which players decide how to allocate their given resources across  battlefields. In Borel’s original version of this game, the player who allocates the most resources to any given battlefield wins that battlefield with certainty. The players’ objective function is either to maximize the sum of the value of the battlefields won, or to win a majority value of the  battlefields. In this paper we study stochastic asymmetric versions of the Blotto game under both of these objective functions. In an “asymmetric Blotto” game, the values of the  battlefields may differ from one another though these different values are common to all players. In the “stochastic asymmetric” version of the Blotto game, the deterministic rule for determining which player wins each battlefield is replaced by a lottery contest success function where the chances of winning a given battlefield are increasing with the amount of resources devoted to that battlefield. This stochastic lottery specification makes the payoff function continuous; as a result, if a Nash equilibrium exists, it is unique and in pure strategies, as opposed to the multiplicity of (typically mixed strategy) equilibria that arise in deterministic versions of the Blotto game. There are two main theoretical papers about stochastic asymmetric Blotto games. 1 The first one, Friedman (1958), considers two players who seek to maximize their expected total payoff. We show that Friedman’s result can be extended to any number of players. The second paper, Lake (1979), was the first to study the stochastic asymmetric “majority rule” Blotto game. 2 This version of the game is particularly relevant to understanding electoral competitions in two party systems, e.g., the electoral college system for electing the U.S. president. Lake studied only the case of equal budget constraints. We show that if players’ budgets are the same (as in Lake) or if they are sufficiently similar and the number of items (battlefields) is not too large, then resource allocation under the majority rule version of the stochastic, asymmetric Blotto game is proportional to the Banzhaf power index for each item, while more generally, resource allocation for a particular item will not be proportional to each item’s Banzhaf power index. Our findings thus generalize those of Lake (1979). Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine. Email: duffy@uci.edu. Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina and Lancaster University Management School. Email: alexander.matros@gmail.com See Kovenock and Roberson (2012) for a broader survey of the Blotto game literature. We discovered Lake’s (1979) paper only after we had completed our analysis. His proofs are different from ours, but his main result coincides with our prediction for the case of equal budgets. We thank Steve Brams for providing this reference.

A simple approach to projecting the electoral college

The following research note examines the utility of a simpler method of projecting the winners of the various states within the United States Electoral College system. While more advanced models may be able to center on state-level presidential winners earlier in an election year, those models, among others, continue to be confounded by states where the lead is small and/or not clear. This research will demonstrate that over the course of the elections from 2000 to 2012, a simple weighted average identifies state winners as well as the more complex models.