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Hmm... ^
Note the raised eyebrow. We've had one American presidential election
decided by fewer than half a million votes in more than a century
(Kennedy's win over Nixon by more than 100,000 votes), during which
time we've had numerous presidential races where a change of a very
small number of votes would have swung the presidency. With 51
potentially decisive results under the Electoral College system,
every relatively close national election can come down to how a few
thousand votes might shift in a state or two, creating great
incentives for fraud and disenfranchisement in those states -- and
"unpopular" winners who lose the national popular vote.
2000 was obviously chaotic and highly unsatisfactory from
international standards of transparency and fairness (despite the
"clean" final outcome at the Supreme Court), but that's far from
unusual in our elections. Bush's 3.5 million vote win nationally in
2004 would have been trumped by a shift of 60,000 votes in Ohio --
and a shift of fewer than 21,000 votes in three smaller states would
have led to an Electoral College tie, where our system incredibly
results in the president being chosen by the House of Representatives
with each state casting one vote regardless of size.
Internationally, there are 28 democracies that elect their president,
have two million or more people land are given a high human rights
rating from Freedom House. The United States is the only of these
nations not to use a national popular vote and yes, they've made it work.
For more on disturbing trends in how the Electoral College is
violating basic definitions of political equality more than ever, I'd
urge those interested in the topic to read our 2006 report
"Presidential Election Inequality" which is available on-line at:
http://fairvote.org/?page=1729
- Rob Richie, FairVote
At 03:25 PM 7/13/2006, Lowenstein, Daniel wrote:
John Brewer, an attorney at Fried Frank in New York,
posted the following to another listserv. With his permission, I
am posting it here.
Best,
Daniel Lowenstein
UCLA Law School
405 Hilgard
Los Angeles, California 90095-1476
310-825-5148
________________________________
From: Brewer, John W.
Sent: Thu 7/13/2006 10:00 AM
To:
Subject:Mexico and the Electoral College
Michael Barone linked to state-by-state results in the Mexican
presidential race, which are here:
http://www.elecciones2006.unam.mx/PREP2006/PRESIDENTE/nacional_Pre.html
You can see a map showing the strong regional tendencies in the
results
here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3A2006_Mexican_election_per_state.png.
Unfortunately the map isn't shaded to indicate strength of support /
margin of victory, because the interesting point from the numbers is
that although the race was very close nationally it was generally
not at all close locally. Some states were blowout victories for
Calderon; others for AMLO; indeed although the PRI candidate (3d
place nationally) did not win any states, he was a strong second in
a number of places, meaning that in those places one of the two
leading candidates finished third. Even where the victor did not
win in a blowout the margin of victory is generally such as to be
beyond the influence of fortuitous logistical mishaps or fraud of a
level sufficiently discreet as to be easily concealable. Only one
or two states (Campeche and perhaps Veracruz) seem at first glance
close enough to think the outcome might be within the plausible
margin of error of an inherently imperfect process. So if the
Mexicans used something analogous to our Electoral College, w!
ith winner-take-all credit for state-by-state victories, they
might have gotten a much cleaner outcome. It's possible (you'd
have to assign plausible weights to the different states after
getting population numbers) that one or the other candidate might
have won a clean victory even disregarding the handful of states
with narrow margins, because his votes were more widely distributed
geographically. Or in the alternative it's possible that you'd
have a Florida-like situation where at least you could focus your
energies on fighting about alleged irregularities in the handful of
outcome-determinative localities rather than worrying about every
precinct nationwide.
[John asked me to excise his concluding comments,
part of which were specifically directed to the other listserv. He
speculates that if there was in fact significant fraud in the
Mexican election (on which he expresses no opinion), it is
plausible to suppose it was concentrated in the most one-party
regions, in which case the fraud would have been reduced in
significance in an electoral college setup. Finally, he suggests
that all these points argue against the desirability of adopting a
nationwide popular vote in the United States. Since I am
paraphrasing, probably this paragraph should be attributed to me
more than to John.]
JWB
_______________________
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Rob Richie
Executive Director
F a i r V o t e
The Center for Voting and Democracy
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