Legal Research

To keep or not to keep the Electoral College?

By jlutz99

Is it time to scrap the Electoral College. MIT is having a conference titled To keep or not to keep the Electoral College: New Approaches to Electoral Reform?  Experts in six areas of electoral college studies, including: constitutional law, history, logical foundation, campaign and election strategies, mathematics and politics are attending.  Here's an excerpt from the conference description:

Conference goal: Since its creation in 1787, the Electoral College has remained the most mysterious mechanism for electing a President of a country. There is no consensus among mathematicians, systems scientists, and political scientists studying the Electoral College on whether it can satisfactorily serve the U.S. in the 21st century, especially after two close elections in 2000 and in 2004. Discussions of the Electoral College in the media mostly focus on opinions about this unique election mechanism and are not based either on its established quantitative features or on its true merits and obvious deficiencies, leaving them unknown  or unclear to an overwhelming majority of the electorate.

The conference aspires to inform media representatives of what is really known about key Electoral College features, as well as to spotlight unsolved systems problems associated with analyzing this controversial election mechanism.                

Leading Electoral College experts, along with the authors of recent proposals to reform the Electoral College and to improve its use in presidential elections, will review already known features of the Electoral College, as well as new findings. This will help the media avoid publishing and airing incomplete and sometimes incorrect information about the system of electing a U.S. President, confusing voters and affecting civic participation. Some quantitative features of the Electoral College, especially the way it works in close elections, will be briefly discussed in a simple manner.

Read more about the conference here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Full post as published by FSU College of Law Library Blog on October 21, 2008 (boomark / email).