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Das Wahlsystem in den USA ist anfällig für Anfechtungen. Nicht jede Anfechtung muss jedoch Erfolg haben.
© KENA BETANCUR
By Stefan Vospernik / APA
Houston, Texas – Twenty years after the Florida election thriller, another US presidential election is heading for a legal decision. Incumbent Donald Trump is fighting defeat with lawsuits in several US states As a recent study by the University of Texas shows, these kinds of lawsuits have a lot to do with the controversial electoral system. In this case, narrow electoral results that end up in the courts are 40 times more likely than in a direct election.
Based on their experience published in October, election researchers Michael Geruso and Dean Spears examined the presidential elections from 1988 to 2016, going through 100,000 different scenarios. The probability that the result would change due to the cancellation of 2,000 votes was 0.9 percent. However, with a nationwide count, the result would only have changed in 0.02 percent of the cases. If there are 20,000 votes at stake, the probability of a change in outcome in the current electoral system increases to 6.9 percent, while in a direct election it is only 0.2 percent.
The president of the United States is indirectly elected by voters from all 50 states and the district of Washington DC, and the states of Maine and Nebraska allocate a portion of the electorate at the regional level. In all other places, the candidate with a relative majority of votes receives all the votes of the electors.
Elections at the national level would avoid a controversial outcome
“Our findings show that the risk of a controversial election and the apparent illegitimacy of a very narrow result would be significantly lower in a system of popular elections at the national level,” emphasize Geruso and Spears in the study entitled “How likely is it that the Courts select the President of the United States. “(How likely is the courts to elect the President of the United States)
Particularly explosive is the knowledge of the experts that there is a political-party “asymmetry” in such tight electoral results. Seventy-one percent of the scenarios concerned democratic candidates who achieved a majority at the national level. The current election also falls into this pattern, which would be a clear thing in the case of a national assessment. Democrat Joe Biden got 71.5 million votes Wednesday night (local time), 3.5 million more than his Republican opponent Donald Trump.
Four years ago, Trump was also around three million votes behind his then Democratic rival Hillary Clinton across the country, but had prevailed in the voters’ college due to narrow victories in the states of Pennsylvania (44,000 votes), Wisconsin ( 22,000) and Michigan (11,000). Clinton dropped the complaints at the time.
Republicans preferred by electoral system
The electoral system favors Republican candidates because they have their strongholds in the smaller rural states. These are overrepresented in the electoral college. Each state has at least three electors, which is the minimum number of congressmen and senators. Each of the 50 states has two Senate seats, regardless of size.
Geruso has already established in a previous study that a discrepancy between the results of popular and electoral elections is not unlikely, especially if the result is adjusted. If the two candidates are separated by less than one percentage point at the national level, the probability of an “investment” (different majority in the electoral body) is 45 percent, which is “almost like tossing a coin.” Geruso told the British daily “The Guardian”.
In the 48 presidential elections since 1824, this has happened only four times (1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016). The Republican candidate has benefited from this. In 2000, Republican George W. Bush owed his victory an advantage of a few hundred votes in Florida, while Democrat Al Gore got half a million more votes across the country.
Advocates point to advantages for smaller states
The United States electoral system has been politically controversial for years. In addition to the distortion of the will of the electorate, it is criticized that it leads to a concentration of the electoral campaign in a few “undecided states”. Advocates argue that this will motivate candidates to campaign outside of major population centers.
Democrats in particular are pushing to abolish the electoral system. Because a corresponding constitutional amendment is unlikely due to high hurdles (approval by three-quarters of the states), the system must be overridden by an agreement between the states. The “National Interstate Popular Vote Pact” stipulates that the participating states undertake to elect their electors for the national winner of the presidential elections. So far, 16 states with a total of 196 voters have acceded to this treaty. These are all democratic strongholds like California, New York or Illinois. The contract comes into effect as soon as the states that support it have 270 voters and therefore a majority in the electoral college.
