The Electoral College Won't Keep Bloomberg Down - A FairVote Analysis
All you need to do is look at the example of Ross Perot in 1992. The albatross often hung around his neck is that he clearly had no chance to win because he didn"t earn a single electoral vote. His problem, however, was that he won 19% of the popular vote- -- a strong run, but not strong enough to win under any system.
So what does that mean for Bloomberg? Let"s assume Perot was able to win just under 35%, less than twice his real total. If we also assume that his rate of growth is the same in every state, and he draws evenly from Bush and Clinton (as reflected by exit polls), Perot overwhelmingly wins in the Electoral College, even as Clinton wins the popular vote.
The point is that in a scenario with a truly strong third party candidacy, the Electoral College does not prevent an independent candidate from winning. In the above example, Perot could even have afforded to lose California and still have cruised to victory.
There are lots of other ways the 1992 election could have gone. Shave a few percentage points off of Perot"s total in the above scenario, and no one wins an electoral vote majority, and the fate of the presidency and vice-presidency are thrown into the chaos of votes in Congress.
Click over to FairVote"s "Perot Simulator" to check the numbers in all of these hypotheticals, and you"ll see that while there may be a lot of factors that could hinder a Bloomberg White House victory, the Electoral College is not necessarily one of them.
Final Point: Action in states could have a big impact on conventional calculations around a potentially strong third party run. States are starting to sign onto a plan that could establish a national popular vote for president as early as 2008. (See www.nationalpopularvote.com). Other states are seriously debating instant runoff voting, an extremely popular voting method in cities that protects majority rule while accommodating voter choice. (See www.instantrunoff.com). Stay tuned.
Comment on The Electoral College Won't Keep Bloomberg Down - A FairVote Analysis
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Posted by Greg, 07/16/2007 (3 years ago)
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As a slight aside, approval voting has an interesting (and not very successful) history in American presidential elections. The AV system "crashed" in 1800 when Jefferson and Burr tied in the Electoral College. Jack Nagel has an fun paper out on the Burr dilemma, which you can get to from the just linked Wikipedia piece.
Posted by Jack, 07/12/2007 (3 years ago) -
Greg: 1. NPV and IRV are not related. The author mentioned them together as examples of two voting reforms that could affect presidential elections. NPV is designed to work within the current voting system. States use winner-take-all plurality voting to select their electors. NPV is designed to create a single, national winner-take-all plurality presidential election. The intent is to undermine the Electoral College by making it totally useless. IRV is designed to ensure majority outcomes for single-office elections. Unlike NPV, IRV represents a change in the voting system. 2. NPV and IRV can be compatible. If a state were to use an IRV election to decide its electors, states within the compact could just use voters' first choices when calculating the national popular vote. Then the election can proceed with winner-take-all plurality voting. Approval voting, however, is not compatabile with NPV. Because voters do not rank, yet they can select more than one candidate for president, approval voting within one state could not be tallied with the rest of the national popular vote. NPV, however, is banking off the hope that none of the states will adopt approval voting.
Posted by Barto, 07/12/2007 (3 years ago) -
I find it interesting that you mention both an inter-state compact based national popular vote and IRV for presidential elections in the same breath. These two ideas seem to be incompatable. Perhaps you can explain how an inter-state compact can impose demands on how ther staes THAT ARE NOT IN THE COMPACT conduct their presidential vote? If a state that is not in the compact decides how to allocate their votes for president via a non-plurality method such as IRV or (very much better in my opinion) approval voting then that state may simply NOT HAVE OR BE ABLE TO PROVIDE *PLURALITY-STYLE* VOTE TALLY NUMBERS that would be needed for states in the compact to decide how to allocate their electorial college votes. How is this addressed?
Posted by Greg, 07/09/2007 (3 years ago) -
test. Comments were broken earlier.
Posted by Greg, 07/09/2007 (3 years ago)
Barto said: >NPV, however, is banking off the hope that none of >the states will adopt approval voting. Similar issues exist with other single winner voting systems. NPV fundamentally depends on a mandate that other states behave in a particular way. Unless those states are already mandated by federal law to do so (and perhaps they are; I have not researched the issue) the NPV scheme is unworkable and probably could not stand up in court.