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Tom Monto

Regarding 270-seat threshold for U.S. presidential election

Updated: Mar 20, 2021


A presidential candidate generally does need to have a majority of the electoral college seats - 270 seats -  to win. But if no one has it, then the one who has support in the House of Representative will be elected.


I have already written about the majority thing in my blog "What if the U.S. pres. election had been held using Alternative Voting."


It seems to me that newscasters on election night (November 4, 2020) were forgetting that electoral college seats could go elsewhere than the two main candidates.


Although obviously all the attention is on the two main parties, those in the electoral college are not forced to vote for either of them. In 2016 seven voted for other people, some not even candidates. U.S. voters can write in their choice in many elections including the electoral college vote.


So it is technically possible for no one candidate to have the majority of the seats - the 270-seat touchstone. 


This has happened just twice - in 1800 and 1824. (1824 turned out to be a wrong-winner election when the House of Representative voted in favour of a candidate with the second most of the popular vote.)


Failure to win a majority of the seats may happen more often in the future if the U.S. gets a third party - perhaps a Labour party or social democratic party or environmental party - that has enough support in a state or two to have plurality there and thus take electoral college seats away from the two main candidates.


Or perhaps if enough states adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact for selection of electoral college seats, then where no candidate receives a majority of the vote, the Compact will only mean that the presidency will be given to a minority candidate, hence minority rule. It would replace wrong-winner elections with minority-winner elections.


Perhaps such a thing happening would make the undemocratic nature of U.S. presidential elections more clear and lead perhaps lead to Alternative Voting for the president.


But that would be generations into the future - if the U.S.even survives that long.


A presidential candidate requires a majority of the electoral college seats to be elected (unless no one else has it either). As most states give all their electoral college seats to the candidate leading in the state, whether that candidate has a majority of the votes in the state or not, a successful candidate just needs to have plurality in states that control a majority of the electoral college seats.


Thus there is strong strategic desire on the part of candidates to avoid vote-splitting in any state and on the part of voters to avoid wasting their vote on "third parties" and also-rans.


This puts an unnatural two-party straitjacket on the election.


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Historical breakouts from the two-party straitjacket have been:

2016 -- 20 percent of the Utah state vote went to an independent in 2016. If this vote had gone to Clinton she would have won the state's six electoral college seats - not enough by itself to give her the presidency.


In 2000 in Florida, George W. Bush won all the state's electoral seats by having more votes than Gore, but his lead was less than 600 -- in a state where a total of 5.8M votes were cast. Ralph Nader ran for the presidency in this election and received 97,000 votes in Florida. If those votes had gone to Gore, Gore would not only have won the state's electoral college seats but also won election to the White House.


1920 -- Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs received almost a million votes in 1920 but this three percent of the vote was spread across the country and never had vote-splitting effect on the selection of any state's electoral college delegates. He was in prison at the time for sedition - but he promised his supporters that if elected he would pardon himself and move into the White House.

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Breakouts like these are likely to be more frequent as support for third parties grows as it becomes evident that neither major party is capable of breaking free from its big-money supporters and bringing in solid people-oriented and environmental policies that are needed to address precarious work lives, poverty and unemployment, and climate change.


Thanks for reading.

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