FairVote Blog
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NRCC Targets Foreshadow Power of Partisanship in 2014 Elections
by Devin McCarthy // January 18, 2013 //The power of partisanship in governing outcomes had led Republicans to make their top seven targets the only Democrats representing a district were Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election trailed his national average by more than four percentage points.
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Time to Change an Unpopular Vote
by Andrea Levien // January 18, 2013 //Once again, a Gallup poll has found that a large majority of Americans, both Democrat and Republican, would prefer a popular vote for president. It's time for state legislatures to take notice and pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
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The Best Electoral College Stories of the 2012 Presidential Campaign
by Devin McCarthy // January 15, 2013 //With the campaign season behind us, this post revisits the news stories of the 2012 presidential campaign that best captured the the distortions and unfairness caused by the winner-take-all Electoral College system.
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Democrats' Edge in House Popular Vote Would Have Increased if All Seats Had Been Contested
by Devin McCarthy // January 9, 2013 //A new FairVote analysis suggests that if both parties had run candidates in all 435 districts in the U.S. House elections in 2012, the Democratic margin of victory in the popular vote would have been even greater than its edge in the raw vote - a further indication of the partisan skew existing in current congressional elections.
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Putin Orders Return to Parallel Electoral System for Russian Duma
by Devin McCarthy, Sara Helmi // January 7, 2013 //Do not be fooled by Vladimir Putin's claims that the reintroduction of single-member, winner-take-all seats to the Russian Duma will be a step towards a fairer and freer democracy in Russia. It is instead a step towards the continuation of one-party rule.
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Who Needs to Fix That? We Do.
by Lizz Hudler // January 7, 2013 //When President Barack Obama paused in his victory speech, thanking voters for waiting in long lines to vote but noting 'we have to fix that', one might have assumed that reform would come from the top.
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Everything You Need to Know About Israeli Elections Before Election Day
by Devin McCarthy // January 4, 2013 //Understanding the Israeli electoral process is not easy when coming from an American perspective, because Israeli elections are nothing like American elections. The election that will be held in Israel on January 22 will be different from the 2012 elections in the U.S. in almost every conceivable sense.
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South Korea Elects Its First Female President
by Patricia Hart // December 29, 2012 //Women world leaders enhanced their numbers this month, as Park Geun-Hye of South Korea joined the current 13 female presidents and premiers on Wednesday, Dec. 19. Park was elected directly with 51.66 percent of the vote, while her party, the New Frontier Party (NFP), took 152 of the 299 seats in the National Assembly.
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Statewide Recounts Remain Scarce: Zero in 2012
by Mollie Hailey // December 21, 2012 //There were no recounts out of more than 400 statewide elections in 2012. FairVote's research of all statewide general elections from 2000 to 2012 underscores how rarely such recounts take place and how little they affect victory margins. Post-election audits are a better way to uncover the kind of major fraud or error that might actually change an election outcome.
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When Barack Obama Was a Leader in Seeking Fair Voting Systems
by Drew Spencer, Rob Richie // December 20, 2012 //President Barack Obama has a lot on his mind these days, but the state of our democracy remains critical. Fortunately, judging by Obama's record in the Illinois Senate --where he was the prime sponsor of legislation to advance cumulative voting and instant runoff voting - we haven't had a president as informed about good ideas for taking on electoral reform since James Madison and the founding generation.