The Handbook of Electoral System Choice pp 164-176 | Cite as
The United States: the Future — Reconsidering Single-Member Districts and the Electoral College
Abstract
Two things happened in the year 2000 that heightened interest in the way electoral competition is structured in the United States. On 8 November, the presidential election resulted in the ‘wrong winner’, in that the person identified as the winner, George W. Bush, was not the candidate that received the most votes across the country, but rather the candidate that finished second. Democrat AI Gore out-polled Republican Bush 48.4 per cent to 47.8, with the remainder going to minor party candidates or write-ins (people not listed on the ballot). Bush was declared the winner, however, because the majority, 50.5 per cent, of the members elected that same day to serve in the Electoral College, the body designated in the Constitution to elect the president, was pledged to vote for Bush, regardless of the result of the nationwide vote. A five-person majority of the Supreme Court (all Republicans by background and appointment) stopped a recount of the disputed vote in areas of Florida on 12 December, a recount that might have reversed the winner in that state (Bush by 0.5 percentage points) and given the presidency to Gore (see Bush v. Gore, 2000). This permitted that state’s Republican slate of electors, pledged to Bush, to cast the state’s 25 electoral votes. On 18 December all of the electors pledged to Bush cast their Electoral College votes for him, and he was officially declared the winner, with one vote over the necessary majority when those votes were counted in Washington on 3 January.
Keywords
Electoral College Electoral Vote Popular Vote Direct Election Congressional DistrictPreview
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Further reading
- Amy, Douglas J. (2002) Real Choices/New Voices: How Proportional Representation Elections Could Revitalize American Democracy, 2nd edn. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
- Barber, Kathleen (2000) A Right to Representation: Proportional Election Systems for the Twenty-first Century. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.Google Scholar
- Engstrom, Richard L. and Mark E. Rush (2001) Fair and Effective Representation? Debating Electoral Reform and Minority Rights Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
- Grofman, Bernard (ed.) (1998) Race and Redistricting in the 1990s. New York: Agathon.Google Scholar
- Guinier, Lani (1994) Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
- Hill, Steven (2002) Fixing Elections: The Failure of America’s Winner Take All Politics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
- Longley, Lawrence D. and Neal R. Pierce (1999) The Electoral College Primer 2000. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
- Olson, Eric C. and Steven Hill (2002) ‘Big Wins for Democracy: San Francisco and Vermont Vote for Instant Runoff Voting,’ National Civic Review, 9: 201–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Richie, Robert and Steven Hill (2001) Whose Vote Counts? Boston: Beacon.Google Scholar
- Weaver, Leon (1984) ‘Semi-proportional and Proportional Representation Systems in the United States,’ in Arend Lijphart and Bernard Grofman (eds), Choosing an Electoral System. New York: Praeger, pp. 191–206.Google Scholar
- Weaver, Leon (1986) ‘The Rise, Decline and Resurrection of Proportional Representation in Local Governments in the United States,’ in Bernard Grofman and Arend Lijphart (eds), Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences. New York: Agathon, pp. 139–53.Google Scholar
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