Posted on October 08, 2021
This report reviews an important aspect of the Democratic Presidential nomination process in 2020: the advantages of increasing early access to voting, and the unintended consequence it creates for some early voters losing the chance to cast an effective vote.
This report lifts up the experience of state parties that avoided that problem by offering ranked choice voting (RCV) ballots. Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, and Wyoming successfully introduced RCV ballots for all voters, while Nevada used RCV ballots for early voting. This greatly increased the numbers of votes that counted toward candidates earning delegates. Implemented nationally, ranked choice voting ballots likely would have resulted in over four million more Democratic voters having a direct effect on the contest. The Democatic National Committee has an opportunity to support this innovation and ensure votes count in 2024 and beyond.
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Posted on August 23, 2018
The power and prominence of the office of the President is wholly unique in the American political system. This warrants greater scrutiny to presidential elections. However, no national minimum standard exists for ensuring the integrity of presidential elections. Each state may choose to adopt any post-election verification process or none at all, and no recourse exists for candidates. A minimum national standard is long overdue.
This report proposes to increase order and reliability in presidential recounts with federal legislation that respects state control over elections while establishing procedures for a timely and less contentious recount process.
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Posted on November 08, 2016
After each Presidential cycle, FairVote looks at the Presidential vote returns to determine the partisanship of each state; that is, the amount the Democratic and Republican candidates got relative to the national Two-Party vote share. This turns out to be highly predictive of the odds of that state being a contested battleground in the next election.
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Posted on March 23, 2016
As the field has been reduced to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, Trump’s frontrunner status is seemingly being accepted by more grassroots Republican voters, and he is poised to be the majority nominee for the Republican Party.
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Posted on February 26, 2016
Last night Donald Trump received harder body blows than ever before in a Republican presidential debate, but it may be too late for those seeking to stop his run to the GOP nomination.
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Posted on March 13, 2015
The current Electoral College system -- one that Oklahoma state legislators have the power to help change -- leaves Oklahoma voters at a disadvantage during and between presidential elections. A comparison of voter turnout patterns in Oklahoma and Virginia tells the story, contradicting inaccurate analysis from an Oklahoma think tank.
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Posted on February 23, 2015
Many are making predictions on which states will be battlegrounds in the 2016 presidential elections. Certainly a state's underlying partisanship matters. (The closer the state, the more likely it will draw campaign attention.) But do a candidate's individual qualities shape the states he or she targets, and how much?
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Posted on February 19, 2015
For more than a century, Missouri was called the "bellwether state" for its tendency to swing between Democrats and Republicans. But Missouri's days as a battleground state appear to be over, as the state has become more Republican in every election since 1996. Read what Missouri can expect in the 2016 presidential election.
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Posted on January 28, 2015
States have a constitutional obligation to decide how they will allocate their electoral votes during presidential elections. Almost all states currently use statewide, winner-take-all rules, which gives all of the state's votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote. But some states have considered alternative methods, such as the whole number proportional system and the congressional district system. We look at the effect these systems would have on presidential elections. Neither system promotes majority rule, increases competitiveness nationwide, or ensures voter equality.
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Posted on January 28, 2015
Almost all states use the winner-take-all system to allocate their electoral votes during presidential elections, but fed-up with being ignored during presidential elections, some states are now considering alternatives. Fuzzy Math: Wrong Way Reforms for Allocating Electoral Votes, FairVote's latest report, reveals that not all alternatives are good ones. The best option for states is to adopt the National Popular Vote plan.
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