The Risk of Narrow, Disputable Results in the U.S. Electoral College: 1836-2020 / Michael Geruso, Dean Spears.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Geruso, Michael.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Spears, Dean.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w27993.

NBER working paper series no. w27993

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

Close elections are important for many reasons, including that consequent election disputes can weaken democratic legitimacy and risk political violence. We show that, in theoretical principle, either a popular vote or a two-stage electoral system, such as the US Electoral College (EC), could generate closer outcomes in expectation. We then quantify the probability of close outcomes in US presidential races with novel applications of empirical election models spanning all of US voting history. We show that razor-thin margins are, in fact, very likely under the EC. We then establish that the EC causes this closeness: It would not occur under any plausibly comparable popular vote system. The tendency of the EC to generate close elections is true today, throughout US presidential voting history, and for most likely configurations of future US politics.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2020.