Politically Viable U.S. Electoral College Reform
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Geoffrey Wise
Abstract
The U.S. Electoral College’s winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes creates a high susceptibility to disputes and errors, but past reform attempts have glossed over their likely disruptions to power balances among states and between the two political parties. This gap is filled by connecting pragmatic models of power shifts and election disputability to a historically informed probabilistic model of future elections. This methodology is then applied to a continuum of reform proposals between the current system and the Lodge-Gossett version of a national popular vote. The results show that a modest smoothing of winner-take-all near the toss-up point delivers a good tradeoff between reducing dispute frequency and distorting power balances, enabling meaningful reform in an era of high polarization. This conclusion holds for extrapolation of the current national landscape into near-future elections, as well as for more arbitrary distributions of partisans among states to represent far-future landscapes. However, as electoral award smoothing diminishes the frequency of disputed elections, it inevitably broadens their scope.
Acknowledgments
Valuable comments from Christopher Devine, Andrew Gelman, Michael Geruso, John Koza, Nicholas Miller, and anonymous reviewers are greatly appreciated.
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Research funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2021-0029).
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Politically Viable U.S. Electoral College Reform
- Voting for Eurosceptic Parties and Societal Polarization in the Aftermath of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis
- Improving the Explanation of Electoral Behavior Through a Combination of Historical and Local Context – The Case of the AfD’s Results at the Federal Election in Germany in 2017
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