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British parties have pioneered the use of 'one-member, one-vote' ballots to select their leaders. However, the elections of Jeremy Corbyn (Labour) and Liz Truss (Conservative) prompted calls to return leadership selection to parliamentarians. Critics claim that party members are non-centrist and liable to impose unsuitable leaders on MPs. This weakens the cohesion of parliamentary parties, undermining the functioning of Britain's majoritarian democracy. This article assesses the major parties' leader-selection systems. It goes beyond existing research by identifying and applying four evaluative criteria for selection institutions : legitimacy, parliamentary acceptability, leader-eviction and timeliness. It shows that most criticisms of one-member, one-vote are overstated because the latter is heavily mediated by ex-ante and/or ex-post parliamentary controls, for example, nomination thresholds and confidence votes. One-member, one-vote generally produces leaders acceptable to MPs; 'unsuitable' ones typically arise when the parliamentary controls fail. However, key institutional weaknesses are identified: legitimacy in the Conservatives' system and leader-eviction in Labour's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weighted voting involves weighting representatives' votes by the populations that they represent. Such systems have been adopted in legislative bodies as a remedy for malapportionment and are sometimes used to elect candidates for the executive branch of government. But they receive little attention. This article observes the neglected vices of weighted voting systems: they violate intuitive conditions of monotonicity and participation. These vices count significantly against the use of weighted voting, and reflecting on why they arise improves our understanding of axioms in social choice theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Americans have little knowledge about why we elect the president through the Electoral College. This complex system that requires understanding the impact of 51 different elections on the outcome of the presidential election leads many Americans to desire the simple effectiveness of the popular vote method. Previous scholarship highlights a majority of Americans wanting to replace our current system with the popular vote. Political science research lacks a clear understanding of the impact of partisan self-interest on views of changing the presidential election method. In this paper we look at public opinion surveys over the last 45 years and find there was no clear partisan difference in views of changing the system before the electoral inversion of 2000. We argue that partisan self-interest was activated because of this electoral inversion. The inversion of 2016 led to a hardening of opinions on replacing the Electoral College with the popular vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers and advocates focused significant attention towards reforming the Electoral Count Act—an 1887 law that governs the counting of Electoral College votes in Congress. After almost two years, Congress passed reforms to the Act that will make it more difficult for partisan actors to manipulate the outcome of future presidential elections. While this achievement is no doubt critical to prevent another insurrection, partisan attacks on election outcomes remain most likely to occur at the state and local level where the bulk of election administration takes place, long before Congress meets to ratify the Electoral College results. The 2022 election cycle previewed one such attack with alarming frequency: Rogue officials in several states refused to certify election results or attempted to otherwise interfere with certification—the statutory process by which election officials attest to the accuracy and completeness of election results. While efforts to impede certification are not new, never before have they been deployed on such a large and coordinated scale. For this reason, little academic attention has been paid to the mechanics of state certification frameworks.1 This Article fills that gap to demonstrate why, and how, state certification frameworks can combat the ongoing threats against them. It begins by providing a detailed overview of how election certification works and how recent attacks on the process have targeted and disrupted certification using false claims of widespread election fraud. It then delves into the rich but often overlooked history of certification as a non-discretionary duty to demonstrate that those attacks flouted hundreds of years of well-established American legal history; recognizing that discretion created opportunities for crises and election fraud, early courts and legislatures purposefully shaped certification into a mandatory, non-discretionary duty. The Article concludes with a roadmap for election officials, candidates, and advocates to resolve future attacks on the certification process in eight key battleground states likely to play significant roles in the 2024 election cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines electoral bias within US politics, including as it relates to malapportionment in the US Senate and Electoral College. Specifically, with the Republican Party gaining significant support in rural areas and the Democratic Party becoming concentrated in urban areas, there is concern that the US electoral system increases the probability that the Republican Party will win a much higher percent of Senate seats than its public support and repeatedly win the presidency without having won a plurality of votes, as was the case in 2000 and 2016. I explore this concern using a relatively new measure called the Directional Proportionality Index (DPIx). Applying it to the Electoral College since 1872 and the US Senate since 1918, this paper demonstrates that while there does exist a small pro-Republican bias in the Electoral College owing to malapportionment, the pro-Republican malapportionment bias in Senate races is far more substantial. However, as long as the percent vote for Democratic and Republican presidential candidates remains close due to partisan polarization, this small bias in the Electoral College is likely enough to lead to more cases whereby the Republican Party loses the popular vote but still wins control over the White House and the United States Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to document the indirect effects of the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan on professional school degrees awarded and to propose the far reach of the law as an alternative argument in support of race-conscious admissions policies challenged under the strict scrutiny standard. Designed around the two tests of strict scrutiny, this study first highlights the essential need for a diverse constituency of professionals to enable societal advancement as a compelling state interest established by the courts and then provides empirical evidence to support additional narrowly tailored race-conscious admissions policies. Complementary interrupted time series analysis and logistic regression find that current admissions policies fail to improve diversity in professional school degrees awarded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, Java‐based rulers employed economic, political, and military measures to control the myriad islands lying in the eastern reaches of the Indonesian archipelago. Following Indonesia's transformation into a presidential democracy, the country's leaders modified this strategy and sought to maintain regional control by implementing economic and political decentralization measures on a massive scale. These measures also gave the eastern populations an appreciable influence on presidential elections. However, population projections and recent election data indicate that inhabitants of eastern Indonesia may become electorally marginalized because the region's population growth is being far outpaced by that of Java and Sumatra. Such marginalization could lead to social unrest, separatist movements, and other malevolent behaviors that threaten the country's democracy. To address this scenario, this article suggests that implementing a presidential voting framework based on the US Electoral College could strengthen Indonesia's democracy by significantly empowering voters in the country's eastern provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of female MPs elected by direct vote in Bangladesh's Parliament is abysmally low due to the low level of female candidates in the parliamentary elections. This study addresses the underrepresentation of female candidates in the election following the supply- and demand-side model of Norris and Lovenduski. We focus on the continuing patriarchal social and political culture, dynastic politics, campaign funding, and violence as supply-side factors and political parties and nominations, quotas/reserved seats, and rule compliance as demand-side factors that affect the candidate nomination process in Bangladesh. The article is based on semi-structured interviews with female and male MPs of the Bangladesh Parliament and aspirant female politicians who hold different party positions. The study argues that the patriarchal nature of politics and culture controls the supply and demand-side factors of candidate selection and discriminates against female candidates to vie in the general constituencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the long rule of the BN (Barisan Nasional) coalition prior to 2018, Malaysia’s parliament, the Dewan Rakyat, was largely absent from analyses of political contestation between the ruling government and its opposition. Nevertheless, during this period, opposition MPs were active users of available legislative tools such as parliamentary questions, offering a rich source of data about their priorities and political positioning. This article investigates how MPs from the opposition used parliamentary questions to build their public reputations, and whether those reputations were built around attention to local, subnational, or national issues. It uses an original dataset of over 37,000 oral questions submitted by MPs in Malaysia’s House of Representatives from 2008 to 2018. I find that opposition MPs were more likely to focus on local and subnational reputation-building compared to ruling government MPs. These differences were especially pronounced in East Malaysia, where opposition MPs were heavily oriented towards local infrastructure and issues of state underdevelopment and autonomy. I explain these findings as a result of the opposition’s need to build a constituency reputation in lieu of access to state resources, as well as a greater responsiveness to local- and region-specific grievances. This focus both complements, and differs from, how Malaysia’s MPs used extra-parliamentary strategies to cultivate personal and party reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do macro-economic conditions affect legislators' representative focus? This article examines this novel predictor by analysing an original dataset of parliamentary questions from the Greek parliament. Greece is a very informative case since not only is it one of the countries most severely hit by the Eurozone Crisis but it also offers an institutional setting that provides plenty of incentives to re-election-seeking actors for constituency-focused representative work. The data utilised covers an extended period of six Greek legislatures and over 12,000 parliamentary current questions asked pre, during and post-crisis between 2006 and 2019. The stand-alone effect of macro-economic conditions as well as its interaction with known predictors like the legislators' vulnerability is tested. Findings provide evidence that better national economic performance conditions increase the likelihood that MPs with table current questions about their constituency, although other traditional factors like electoral vulnerability remain important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: : This study investigated the utilization of social media during the 2020 South Korean general election, which took place during the COVID‐19 pandemic, using the equalization versus normalization framework. Methods: : This study estimated the associations between the characteristics of candidates and their respective constituencies and the use of various social media platforms by the candidates. Results: : Dominant political actors were more active social media users, supporting the normalization hypothesis. However, when considering the candidates' chances of winning the election, social media's normalizing effect was weakened. Conclusion: : This study provides new insights into the equalization versus normalization debate by analyzing social media use in a context where offline campaigning was restricted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Especially following the 2000 and the 2016 presidential elections, some authors have denounced the legitimacy of the Electoral College as a presidential selection method. It is alleged that the college is not representative of the electorate as a whole and tends to favor one specific political party. In this article, we compare the popular vote with the composition of the Electoral College for every presidential contest since 1876 (n = 37 elections). We confirm that the college is indeed disproportional as it provides a major bonus to the winning candidate. Although this disproportionality has become slightly stronger during the 1876–2020 period, it does not specifically benefit one political party. Measured at the level of the states, there is no substantial increase in bias with regard to geographic representation. However, to the extent that electoral races become tighter, as was the case in the last quarter of the 19th century, the risk that results fall within a margin of statistical error becomes larger. This suggests that the current controversy finds its source less in the electoral rules and more in the situational and highly competitive balance of party competition. Related Articles: Ardoin, Phillip J., and Bryan M. Parsons. 2007. "Partisan Bias in the Electoral College: Cheap States and Wasted Votes." Politics & Policy 35(2): 342–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00063.x. Crow, Deserai, and Laura Wolton. 2020. "Talking Policy in Congressional Campaigns: Construction of Policy Narratives in Electoral Politics." Politics & Policy 48(4): 658–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12369. McKenzie, Mark. 2009. "Attitudes toward Electoral College Reform: Understanding Opinion Formation on Complicated Public Policy Issues." Politics & Policy 37(2): 265–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2009.00172.x. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on New York City Campaign Finance Board (CFB) and underappreciated functions of the CFB is setting the criteria for participation in official debates for candidates to the three city-wide offices. It mentions rules that have emerged over several election cycles for balancing access and administrability. It also mentions and the challenges CFB has faced in responding to an ever-changing local electoral context and requirements of the Campaign Finance Act.

The belief that White people are targeted victims of dispossession, displacement, and genocide has spread with shocking intensity since Donald Trump's 2016 electoral college victory. Although this Great Replacement myth may seem absurd and irrational, its destructive real-world consequences force the question: what explains its efficacy and appeal? Drawing on White nationalists Greg Johnson and Tucker Carlson, I argue that the Great Replacement myth functions as an explanation for the real socioeconomic decline that has culminated in deaths of despair. I then explore this decline's sociohistorical context to argue that deaths of despair are consequences of political-economic domination reinforced by White supremacy. Put otherwise, these deaths result from socioeconomic violence that White people have inflicted on each other. I conclude that the real problem "the White race" faces today is not a Great Replacement but a Slow White Suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explains how the 14th Amendment should protect against faithless electors. Topics discussed are unconstitutionality and inherent inequality of faithless electors, right to vote as a fundamental right, equal protection as applied in other voting rights situations, state faithless elector laws, history of faithful voting, anti-electoral college and pro-popular vote sentiment, and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

When a party or candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election, do voters view the winner as legitimate? This scenario, known as an electoral inversion, describes the winners of two of the last six presidential elections in the United States. We report results from two experiments testing the effect of inversions on democratic legitimacy in the US context. Our results indicate that inversions significantly decrease the perceived legitimacy of winning candidates. Strikingly, this effect does not vary with the margin by which the winner loses the popular vote, nor by whether the candidate benefiting from the inversion is a co-partisan. The effect is driven by Democrats, who punish inversions regardless of candidate partisanship; few effects are observed among Republicans. These results suggest that the experience of inversions increases sensitivity to such outcomes among supporters of the losing party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Electoral College and the protection it provides for citizens against a cabal of corrupt individuals can usurp the will of the people. Topics include historical foundation of the Electoral College, the perceived impact of Chiafalo on faithless elector laws; and the potential threat the citizens of the Republic face from attempts to undermine the Electoral College, such as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Using a folded seats‐votes curve, we examine partisan bias in the 2020 presidential election and compare it to partisan bias in the five other presidential elections in the twenty‐first century. 2020 and 2016 are extreme outliers with respect to the absolute magnitude of partisan bias in the Electoral College. In 2016, 2020, and 2000 bias runs in a pro‐Republican direction; in the other three elections in this century, the opposite is true. But partisan bias can vary with where on the seats‐vote curve we look to find bias, and we identify the lowest vote share at which there is no partisan bias (if such exists). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tbis Article suggests several important practical reforms in bow we choose our President and Vice President. It first identifies problems with tbe Electoral College system, and proposes solutions tbat would not require a constitutional amendment. Tbe Article also discusses bow tbe long-forgotten provisions of Section 2 of tbe Fourteenth Amendment authorize reduction in tbe electoral votes from states whose legislatures deprive or abridge tbe right of tbe people to vote for their presidential electors. By exploring tbe history and language of Section 2, tbis Article demonstrates tbat it was ratifed witb the specific purpose of preventing state legislatures fyom usurping tbe popular vote in their states for tbe Electoral College. Tbe Article maintains tbat Congress bas tbe authority to enact several important presidential election reforms, and that it is our duty to ensure tbat tbepeople's voice is not taken away in the presidential election process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates how presidents who lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College establish legitimacy. Using 5 cases (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016), I show how presidents in different eras tried to establish themselves as legitimate despite elements of electoral insecurity. Using historical newspapers and primary documents, I find that construction of legitimacy has evolved over time and depends on both the circumstances of the election and the president's ability to acknowledge and confront their own insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the 2020 general election, some commentators suggested that President Donald Trump and his allies would attempt to undermine the election's result by inducing Republican-controlled state legislatures to directly appoint pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College. As predicted, after losing his re-election bid to President Joe Biden, President Trump pressured some leaders in Republican-dominated state legislatures to ignore the election's result and to appoint electors who would vote for him in the Electoral College. Although these efforts were unsuccessful, the volatility of the current political landscape suggests that this issue might emerge again in a future election. In discussing possible safeguards against such an attempt, many commentators have focused on the Electoral Count Act and other legal measures. Most, however, have not addressed the possibility of a constitutional safeguard. This Note uses the 2020 presidential election as a case study and argues that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides a constitutional safeguard that can restrain states from overturning election results through direct appointment of presidential electors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use 19 billion likes on the posts of top 2000 U.S. fan pages on Facebook from 2015 to 2016 to measure the dynamic ideological positions for politicians, news outlets, and users at the national and state levels. We then use these measures to derive support rates for 2016 presidential candidates in all 50 states, to predict the election, and to compare them with state-level polls and actual vote shares. We find that: (1) Assuming that users vote for candidates closer to their own ideological positions, support rates calculated using Facebook predict that Trump will win the electoral college vote while Clinton will win the popular vote. (2) State-level Facebook support rates track state-level polling averages and pass the cointegration test, showing two time series share similar trends. (3) Compared with actual vote shares, polls generally have smaller margin of errors, but polls also often overestimate Clinton's support in right-leaning states. Overall, we provide a method to forecast elections at low cost, in real time, and based on passively revealed preference and little researcher discretion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her Jorde Lecture, Pam Karlan paints a grim picture of American democracy under siege. Together, the malapportioned Senate, the obsolete Electoral College, rampant voter suppression and gerrymandering, and a Supreme Court happy to greenlight these practices threaten the very notion of majority rule. I share Karlan’s bleak assessment. I’m also skeptical that conventional tools—judicial decisions and congressional statutes—will solve our current problems. So in this response, I explore a pair of less familiar but possibly more potent alternatives: the authority of each chamber of Congress to judge its members’ elections, and presidential enforcement of the Guarantee Clause. These powers are explicitly delineated by the Constitution. They can’t be stymied by either the Senate’s filibuster or the Court’s hostility. And they hold enormous democratic potential, especially if channeled through the procedures I outline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using thermometer score data from the ANES, we show that while there may have been no clear-cut Condorcet winner among the 2016 US presidential candidates, there appears to have been a Condorcet loser: Donald Trump. Thus the surprise is that the electorate preferred not only Hillary Clinton, but also the two "minor" candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, to Trump. Another surprise is that Johnson may have been the Condorcet winner. A minimal normative standard for evaluating voting systems is advanced, privileging those systems that select Condorcet winners if one exists, and critiquing systems that allow the selection of Condorcet losers. A variety of voting mechanisms are evaluated using the 2016 thermometer scores: Condorcet voting, plurality, Borda, (single winner) Hare, Coombs, range voting, and approval voting. We conclude that the essential problem with the existing voting procedure—Electoral College runoff of primary winners of two major parties—is that it (demonstrably) allows the selection of a Condorcet loser. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on National Popular Vote Plan and the history of faithless votes in the Electoral College. It mentions Supreme Court decisions that establish the constitutionality of state Elector-binding statutes and their enforcement, McPherson v. Blacker, Ray v. Blair and Chiafalo v. Washington. It also mentions types of state Elector-binding statutes would best allow the National Popular Vote Plan to work for political parties need be included in state Elector appointment.

Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote for president in 2016, but lost to Donald Trump in the Electoral College. Trump's margin of victory in several decisive battleground states was smaller than the combined vote for the two leading minor party candidates: Gary Johnson, of the Libertarian Party, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party. The perception that Johnson and Stein "stole" the 2016 presidential election from Clinton is widespread, and potentially consequential for future minor party candidacies, but it has not yet been rigorously tested. In this article, we extend the analysis of minor party voting in the 1992 election from Lacy, D., and B. C. Burden. 1999. "The Vote-Stealing and Turnout Effects of Ross Perot in the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election." American Journal of Political Science 43 (1): 233–55, by using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to estimate a multinomial probit model of voting behavior—including outcomes for vote choice and abstention—and calculate the predicted probabilities that Johnson and Stein voters would have voted for another candidate or abstained from voting, had one or both of these candidates been excluded from the ballot. We then reallocate Johnson's and Stein's votes accordingly, to estimate Clinton's and Trump's counterfactual vote shares nationally and within key battleground states. Our analysis indicates that Johnson and Stein did not deprive Clinton of an Electoral College majority, nor Trump the legitimacy of winning the national popular vote. We estimate that most Johnson and Stein voters would have abstained from voting if denied the choice to vote for their preferred candidate, and that most of Johnson's remaining voters would have supported Trump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump summoned a mob of angry supporters from across the country to Washington DC, where they were to join the president at a "Save America" rally. The premise for the rally was Trump's oft-repeated and patently false claim that the 2020 presidential election had been "stolen" from him. In a speech given at the Ellipse, Trump incited the crowd, warning "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."1 Provoked by his incendiary rhetoric, the enraged crowd marched to the US Capitol Building, demanding that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress reject Joe Biden's victory. Their intention was to disrupt the Electoral College vote count by Congress that would ratify the election results, and they did so by breaching, vandalizing, and looting both the grounds and the US Capitol Building. Five people died as a result of the storming of the US Capitol and more than 140 people were injured, with the insurrectionists causing upwards of thirty million dollars in damages. In the days following the insurrection, the shock and awe at the televisual and social media spectacle of the riot registered globally. The building stories that follow will consider these events from the vantage point of the architecture that housed them, utilizing architectural representational conventions to consider the roles that the built environment played in the insurrection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]